Sewing Visions of Justice: Margarita Cabrera’s Radical Stitching Practice

A needle punctures fabric to create a seam. A needle pierces textile to render a drawing made from thread. These are the basic principles behind sewing and embroidery. These are also the foundational gestures that make up Margarita Cabrera’s radical stitching practice, one that she has employed to create sculpture and to forge community ties based on relationality and on shared nepantlismo. This presentation is dedicated to Cabrera’s radical stitching practice which I define as an act of decolonial creativity that employs craft as a means of contending with the colonial wounds of border politics and policies. Through the symbolic and physical act of stitching Cabrera engages in a healing project that operates on a collective level. My focus is the stitched sculptures of household objects the Chicana/Mexicana artist created in the 2000s and the Space In Between project she began in 2010. The latter was a community-based initiative that created a large series of sculptures resembling cacti and other desert plants, species that are endemic to the US/Mexico border region including the trails that immigrants use to cross over to the United States. Not only was Cabrera celebrating the often-denigrated craft of sewing with these works, she was availing herself of the metaphorical quality of sewing and embroidering whereby every stitch stands for the actions of repairing, constructing, re-signifying and healing. Cabrera valorizes a gendered and racialized craft to assert an anti-racist and feminist vision of sculpture while at the same time problematizing the abuses perpetrated by the garment and fashion industry.