Heart, Mind, and Body in Quilting Research
By Sonia Arellano, University of Arizona
My mom, Christine Moreno, is a self taught
seamstress. She learned to sew in her teens to make clothes for herself, her
sisters, and even for my grandma. The sound of a sewing machine at medium pace
is the peaceful sound that filled my childhood. I always had the best costumes
at Halloween, and my pants were always just the right length despite my short
height. I learned to sew the way I learned to cook, from just watching my mom,
but I couldn’t tell you exactly how to thread a bobbin or what basting was. As
I entered the dissertation stage of my Ph.D., I sought a tactile action to give
me a break from reading and writing, so my mom gave me a sewing machine for
Christmas and sewing lessons later that summer. What an incredible teacher she
is, although an accountant by profession. She taught me with ease and reassured
me that if I mess up, I can just rip the seam and try again. She made sewing a fun
and low stakes activity.
I never thought I would start quilting in my 30s, and I
surely never thought I would ever be a quilter. My stepmom, Kathryn Arellano,
was not a quilter, but she came from a family of feminist quilters from northeastern
Oklahoma. When Kathy passed three years ago, I inherited a beautiful shadow box
dedicated to my great grandmother and a double wedding ring quilt that my
grandmother made for my stepmom and dad when they married.
Because these
material objects have what Nora Ruth Roberts calls “heirloom-value,” inheriting
them has made me deeply contemplate our relationships to things, especially in
death. Both of these women, my mom and my stepmom, made their ways in the world
as single moms and feminists, and they passed along sewing and quilting which
brings my heart to my current research, quilts.
My research
focuses on textile projects that address social justice issues. My current work
focuses on the Migrant Quilt Project, a project based out of Tucson, Arizona,
and facilitated by the volunteer group Los
Desconocidos. This group
makes quilts that memorialize migrant deaths by naming each migrant found in
the Tucson Border Patrol Sector in a particular year. When the migrant is not
identified, they are listed as "Desconocido/a," meaning unknown in Spanish. When
I tell people about this project, they are intrigued, but they often are most
interested to learn that the quilts are made from clothing left behind at
migrant lay-up sites. The clothing presumable belonged to migrants who were
crossing the Sonoran Desert to enter the US. I decided to focus on this group
for my dissertation work, completing interviews and analyzing the quilts. However,
I quickly got folded into the group as I agreed to complete a quilt.
Starting the
quilt for the year 2002-2003 which has 205 names, took me a while. The pressure
I felt, especially as a rhetorician, was overwhelming because I wanted to
accurately, thoughtfully, and effectively memorialize the migrant lives lost in
this year. As I cataloged the clothes, I realized their details told stories.
For example, one pair of jeans had been worn down at the hem of both pant legs,
and the owner had hand sewn the pants themselves. Another pair of light jeans
had rust colored blood stains splattered on them. How the blood got there is
left up to our imaginations.
These are the
material manifestations of the stories that writers such as Luis Alberto Urrea (The Devil’s Highway) and Jason De León (The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on
the Migrant Trail) chronicle of the crossing journey. I decided to
craft the state of Arizona by piecing denim and then map the deaths onto the
desert using the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased
Migrants. I’m still working
through how and where to include the 205 names. Some days I cry as I sew. Other
days I cry as I cut. My sewing machine has a thin layer of desert dirt on it
from piecing the jeans together. I am acutely aware of my privilege in
completing this quilt as it is starkly juxtaposed with the migrant stories
conveyed through the clothing.
As I quilt, the pressure to respectfully and
thoughtfully represent migrant deaths weighs on me more than writing my
dissertation. The stakes feel different. Quilting has proven to be an
incredibly rigorous and emotional research process. My research and heart is
necessarily connected to the migrants memorialized in the quilt and the women
in my family who have a legacy of producing textiles. My heart, my mind, and my
body are all involved in this research process, which is an incredibly
exhausting, critical, and productive space to work in.
Sonia C. Arellano is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric,
Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her
dissertation tentatively titled “Quilting the Migrant Trail: Crafted Rhetorical
Text(iles) and (Counter) Narratives” explores what lives are deemed grievable
through the rhetorical contributions of quilt projects that memorialize migrant
lives.
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