I’m looking forward to presenting at the Latin American Studies Association Congress in Paris as part of the panel “Teaching transformation? Worldmaking in Abya Yala Through Feminist Critical Pedagogies.” My presentation, “Living Images of Democracy through Activist Needlework: Arpilleras, Feminist Pedagogy, and Global Struggles for Justice,” examines how contemporary arpilleristas in Lo Hermida, Santiago, use textile practice to teach, debate, and remake political life in the present.

The visual language of the arpillera—a hand-stitched storytelling textile composed through appliqué, embroidery, and cloth figures—has become widely recognized in Chile for depicting everyday life, political struggle, and state violence during the Pinochet dictatorship. Yet the continued production and circulation of arpilleras after the transition to elected civilian rule raises broader questions about the temporality and aesthetics of democracy today. What forms of democratic practice become visible when arpilleras are approached as material practices of making, teaching, waiting, and being publicly present? Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2025 with a contemporary arpillera workshop in Lo Hermida, Santiago, this presentation examines how arpilleras enact democracy as a present-tense practice: unfinished, relational, and continually remade. During the 2023 fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état, arpilleristas analyzed and remade their social worlds through fabric, highlighting the risky, dirty, and uncertain conditions of political life.

Panel details

1488 // GEN – Panel
Teaching transformation? Worldmaking in Abya Yala Through Feminist Critical Pedagogies
Saturday, May 30, 2026
10:15am–11:45am
FIAP – Fidji

Session organizer: Raquel Pacheco, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant: M. Bianet Castellanos Chavez, University of Minnesota