This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.
How do we enter the archives of the present? Can we identify and hold the documents communities are making now to preserve and recount their histories, or does true understanding only emerge over time? And at what point does an object become an archive?
For the past two years, I have been working with two immigrant-led costureros: circles of women from across Latin America who gather to make textiles together. Based in community centers in Northwestern Queens in New York City, these spaces have offered a refuge for many undocumented, working-class immigrants facing racial profiling and persecution amid the current immigration crackdown. In that atmosphere of fear, the intimacy and secrecy of the costurero create a setting where gossip and generosity sit alongside threads and needles.
The first group, BordeAndo, was established in 2018 as a community engagement initiative of the Queens Museum, though it quickly expanded beyond the institution into an independent collective. Its name draws on several meanings in Spanish: bordar, meaning to embroider; borde, meaning border or frontier; and the suffix -ando, which suggests movement or walking. Most of its members are from the Ecuadorian highlands (la Sierra), while others come from the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Mexico, and they range in age from 30 to 83. They have lived in the United States for between 10 and 50 years.
Las Comadres Bordadoras was founded in 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic by two Mexican immigrants who wanted to help women break out of isolation and build a mutual support network. Their name is also difficult to translate, but it points to camaraderie and kinship. The comadre refers specifically to women who are, in their words, “a midpoint between friend and family.” The comadres come from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina, are between 35 and 75 years old, and have lived in the United States for between two and 30 years. They mainly embroider Mexican cloth napkins, though all forms of needlework are welcomed.
This costurero describes itself as “nomadic” because it has moved among community gardens, public libraries, and schools in the area since its inception. Both circles are intergenerational, international spaces of convergence for transnational, working-class, largely undocumented immigrant women. Last year, BordeAndo and Las Comadres Bordadoras were the protagonists of Thread of Voice / Un hilo de voz at the Queens Museum, an exhibition I curated with photographs by Andrés Altamirano and film by documentarian Eleonora Privitera. The project’s visual narrative and documentation were also created in collaboration with Altamirano.
I regard these costureros as living archives — places where craft traditions meet and where embodied, material practices link geographies of affect and displacement, such as a woman knitting a stitch taught by her grandmother back home or another embroidering a napkin for the altar of a deceased loved one whose grave she cannot visit because of her migratory status. “Text” and “textile” share an etymological root — the Latin verb texere — which shows that texts are woven and textiles are written. Seen this way, textiles are texts we have forgotten how to read, coded with bodily gestures, storytelling practices, and material forms that could, if protected, be called archives.
