Gentleness is cut from the same cloth
because it is not perceptible categorically,
but only existentially.
As sensation and as passage,
or as power of metamorphosis.
—Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness
This article appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
It’s February 2024. In Tapachula, a city on the border with Guatemala, humid heat clings to your clothes without mercy. On a plastic table, we arrange coarse salt from Cuyutlán, Colima—a mineral used not only to preserve food and season cooking, but one that also carries the symbolism of protection, care, and persistence. Next to it sit the small fabric pouches sewn by Doña Juana, a seamstress from my neighborhood. They are little bags in bright colors: red, blue, green, orange, and beige. My project partner Alicia Laguna, a Mexican actress and prominent cultural manager, sets out four pairs of sewing scissors, a packet of needles, spools of thread, and the cords I wove weeks earlier.
When the children come closer, they watch Stiven, a volunteer at the Hospitalidad y Solidaridad shelter, hanging the colorful pouches from the branches of the plaza’s only tree.
“It looks like a little Christmas tree,” they say.
“What are those?” one asks.
“Amulets,” Stiven answers.
“They’re for protection,” I add, “for your journey.”
One of the boys tilts his head back. Curiosity turns into suspicion. I crossed a line, and it’s clear he didn’t like it. Worried, I rush to clarify:
“People in a city farther north embroidered these amulets to accompany whoever needs them. They’re a gift. Do you want to stitch one?”
Curiosity returns to Francisco’s face—that was the name he invented for us that afternoon.
The dynamic is simple: stitch one for someone else, and take another from those hanging on the tree. Francisco points without hesitation:
“I want that one.”
The Textile Turn
In today’s landscape of multiple violences in Mexico, collaborative textile practices—most often driven by women—have gained particular force as a repertoire of public intervention. They open spaces for shared mourning and for the production of memory. In the face of forced disappearance and other forms of sustained cruelty, textiles—through the simplicity of their materials (fabric, thread, weaving)—have operated as insistent interruptions within regimes of visuality. Their materiality holds names and voices demands; it enables images, affects, and forms of collective organization.
We have called this emergence the “textile turn” in collaborative practices: a field of aesthetic-political work linked to activisms and collectives that, at least in Mexico since the early 2000s, can be understood as dispositivos de activación relacional (DAR)—itinerant acts that move between circuits of activism, human rights work, research, academic collaboration and intervention, and the art field. We keep the acronym in Spanish because DAR also evokes the verb dar (to give) and, with it, the logic of the don, the gift. These practices intervene in public space, dispute dominant regimes of visuality, and enable alternative modes of social connection.
The Amulets project emerged in 2023 through the Mobility Cluster’s research-creation and intervention initiatives within the Hemispheric Encounters Network (HEN). The Cluster approaches migration as a contested field of mobility and forced immobility, shaped by the escalation of violence, the militarization of borders, and the tightening of migration regimes imposed throughout the region under pressure from the United States. Within this framework, collaborative projects seek to create situated forms of accompaniment, listening, and public intervention. The Amulets project unfolds through participatory activations centered on making small textile amulets: embroidered pouches charged with personal symbols and materials of care, meant to be worn close to the body and to accompany displacement, harm, and the searches carried out by families of the disappeared.
What follows is a brief ethnographic account of these activations. I do not aim to offer an exhaustive chronicle or a closed explanation, but rather to recover scenes, decisions, gestures, and conversations that show how a minimal object can condense a politics of care: the amulet as an interface between memory and what lies ahead, and as a practice that makes legible—on an intimate scale—a central dimension of the textile turn: the capacity of the collaborative to sustain presence where violence seeks to produce erasure.
Back in Tapachula with Francisco, he selects the amulet with a small white embroidered dog and I tell him the story: a girl made it and said her dog was the most important thing in her life—that it brings good luck. Francisco agrees to the deal. He sits at the table and, surrounded by the materials, asks, overwhelmed:
“What do I do?”
“The idea is to embroider something you like, something you find pretty, something you think another child might also like.”
He thinks for a moment and proposes a soccer ball.
“I’m really good—I score goals.”
His friends laugh.
“That’s not true—you’re terrible.”
Francisco doesn’t mind the teasing. We scrape together whatever patience we can to choose a thread color, thread the needle, and learn the minimal gesture of repeating a stitch to form a figure. Salt sticks to our fingers; knots form in the thread before we even understand how they happened. An experienced hand helps us. After some struggle, Francisco finishes his first amulet. He stands up, walks to the tree, takes the little dog, and proudly hangs it around his neck.
Francisco wasn’t really named that, and he wasn’t from Chiapas. Like the others, he has had to learn to be someone else. Transit forces them to invent lives, change accents, adopt Mexican words: chido, padre, órale, for example. In the mornings, they wash cars, sweep sidewalks, or help their mothers carry baskets of freshly washed clothes. In the afternoons, they go to the Antigua Estación Ferroviaria, a community center recently created in downtown Tapachula, to play. They compete to see who earned more pesos that day. Sometimes they are violent with one another.
That first afternoon, it wasn’t only children who arrived. Neighbors from central Tapachula—people who host migrants in their homes—also approached, along with activists and human rights defenders from different organizations. While people stitched amulets, the kids stretched toward the branches, chose “the prettiest ones,” and wore them like trophies.
Amulets are objects charged with affection that someone gives to another person in order to offer protection. They matter because they accompany whoever wears them. On the one hand, they reveal life’s rawness; on the other, they embody a relationship of care and accompaniment. Understood as dispositivos de activación relacional (DAR), the textile practice of making these amulets has led us to constellate brief stories that conjure against exposure and overwhelming powers beyond our control; they call for listening and closeness.
What forms of relational poetics can a minimal object and a minimal gesture activate when they circulate as gifts in times of brutality? If brutality works through excess—through force, exposure, and the saturation of fear—the amulet moves otherwise. Small, tactile, and handmade, it does not promise safety or redemption. Its force lies precisely in its modest scale: in the intimacy of touch, in the time required to make it, and in the simple gesture of offering it to someone else. In that sense, the amulet operates through a relational poetics of smallness. It does not confront violence with grandeur, but with closeness; not with spectacle, but with the quiet insistence of care.
Catalyst
In March 2023, we met with women in transit from Central and South America at FM4 Paso Libre shelter in Guadalajara, within the broader context of Tamara Cubas’s sound installation Esculpir el silencio (Sculpting Silence) and the Chicano Fest we organized with activists, artists, NGOs, and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), a Jesuit University in Guadalajara. Cubas’s piece invited visitors to walk over a landscape of salt—valleys and mounds that hid audio stories. As you stepped, you heard murmurs; but when you leaned in, you could hear with clarity stories of desire and resistance: women narrating how something—an intimate, stubborn force—sustained their journey toward the United States.
During those days at the shelter, we embroidered our names and told the story of where they came from. “Who named you María Elena?” “My grandmother.” Between stitches, a recurring scene emerged: almost all of them carried small objects with disproportionate power—a medallion, a locket, a photograph, a bracelet. They weren’t keepsakes in a sentimental sense, but anchors: things they hold onto so as not to give up.
That encounter was not simply a precedent; it was the catalyst for the Amuletos Project. Remembering the sage-filled amulets made by Comca’ac (Seri) Indigenous women in Sonora, and moved by the stories shared by migrant and refugee women at FM4, we began to imagine a different kind of protective object: an amulet made of salt. The salt was the same as in the installation—30 tons of mineral donated by the Cuyutlán salt cooperative for the construction of Esculpir el silencio. Out of that scene emerged the project’s founding gesture: each person would stitch an amulet for someone they did not know, close it, let it go, and allow the object to circulate. In that itinerancy—from a patio to a plaza, from one city to another—the amulet began to assemble a cartography of places, bodies, and stories.
At first, we were seduced by a grandiose image: producing thousands of talismans for a country wounded by two decades of militarization, disappearances, femicides, and displacement. But embroidery imposed a different tempo and, with it, another scale of action. Instead of a massive gesture, what emerged was not a diminished response but a micropolitics of care: a slow, repetitive, tactile practice through which small collective actions—threading a needle, filling a pouch, offering it to someone else—could sustain fragile forms of connection in the midst of harm. The amulet, as a dispositivo de activación relacional, takes place within catastrophe without promising invulnerability. With that wager, the amulet found different settings and, in each one, new ways of being activated. The threads that follow are a memory of that cartography.
Activations
Thread 1 — An Amulet for a City (Guadalajara, April–May 2023)
On Sunday mornings, Guadalajara slows down. The Vía Recreativa closes major avenues to traffic and parts of the city move at a different pace. A few steps away, in the courtyard of the Ex Convento del Carmen, we set up two tables with the bare minimum—fabric pouches, thread, needles, scissors—and one rule: stitch an amulet for someone in transit whom you do not know, hang it up, and let it go. The person who stitches does not control its destination; the person who receives it does not know who made it. Between one hand and another, a minimal trust takes hold: “I’m with you,” without biography or paperwork. The courtyard’s orange tree fills with amulets.
The device was a public scene of implication. In a city where violence against migrants is often read at a distance, we wanted to start there: to open a situation in which the city could be touched by a different scale of connection and an economy of care. Passersby arrived out of curiosity. Some asked questions and kept walking; others sat down, threaded the needle, and chose symbols—a hummingbird, a house, a sun—as a wish for good fortune.
One Sunday, a group of older people arrived. One of them opened a basket overflowing with materials and put it in common. The table stopped being “ours”; it became a shared workshop and a transmission of know-how. An unexpected political echo surfaced in conversation: links to the “Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre,” the urban guerrilla organization active in Mexico in the 1970s. The interruption reminded us of something essential: gestures of care are not outside history; they carry memories, risks, defeats, and insistences. Over these sessions, more than 150 amulets were stitched, plus some 34 “seed” amulets from the FM4 gathering. Later they would travel to Tapachula.
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Alina Peña Iguarán is a professor-researcher at ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. Her work explores collaborative aesthetic practices, migration, memory, and forms of care and resistance in contexts marked by violence, disappearance, and displacement in Mexico and Latin America.