We took a nice little ride this afternoon down into Albuquerque's South Valley. The temps have dropped about 15 deg. F from last week, and the 50 mph breeze was quite nice.
On the way home we stopped off at the National Hispanic Cultural Center to take in the current show in the Gallery:
Arpilleras are hand-sewn three dimensional textile pictures, commonly made in Peru and Chile. During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile which lasted from 1973 to 1990, the craft became a symbol of resistance, particularly for the families who had members that were "disappeared" by the regime. The exhibit at the Cultural Center Gallery contains about seventy examples, some from the Pinochet period, and some from the time immediately afterward. The exhibit is extremely well documented, and it does a nice job of telling the story of what the Chilean people endured after the 1973 coup.
A good selection of arpilleras can be seen on the web through a simple Google search.
One of the best treatments of the subject is contained in a blog post by Margaret Snook who researched arpilleras in the course of her studies in the early 1990s. Margaret is an anthropologist currently living in Chile; her blog, Cachando Chile: Reflections on Chilean Culture, is well worth a visit.
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