It started with the killing of 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla, who was murdered and mutilated by her boyfriend in February 2020. The brutality of the murder – and the leaking of explicit images of her body to tabloid newspapers – touched off a national furor.
Escamilla’s murder struck artist María Antonieta De la Rosa with both horror and disgust. Even in a country where more than 10 women on average were being killed every day, it felt especially cruel. “You realize how permeating this violence is,” she said. “It’s normalized in every direction.”
With its mixture of cultural machismo and generalized cartel-fueled violence, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries for women in the region: between January and June this year, 1,420 women were killed across the country, according to government figures.
The high rates of violence have sparked a powerful national feminist movement, with hundreds of thousands of women taking to the streets every year on International Women’s Day in cities all over Mexico, demanding a response from authorities.
At the time of Escamilla’s death, De la Rosa was studying for a master’s degree in fine art and had become interested in embroidery, an art form which, while often overshadowed by the likes of painting or sculpture, has long been used as a tool of protest and resistance by women in Mexico and around the world.
Keen to do something to draw attention to both the murder of Escamilla and the killings of other women in her home state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City, De la Rosa called together two activist friends, Karime Díaz and Xóchitl Guzmán, ahead of International Women’s Day in March of 2020.
Along with their mothers, grandmothers and friends, they gathered in a former women’s shelter in the city of Cuernavaca and held a symbolic funeral for Escamilla. They also began embroidering patches with the names of women murdered in Morelos in previous years.
“It was very contradictory to feel so supported but at the same time to share this uncertainty, this pain, this sadness in embroidering the names of victims of femicide,” said Díaz, referring to murders in which a woman is killed because of her gender. “And you also realize that you yourself are in danger. The next name they embroider might be yours.”
Among the patches that Díaz was tasked with embroidering was that of a three-year-old girl whose body had been found in a field of roses with signs of torture and sexual abuse.
The next day, as hundreds of women took to the streets of Cuernavaca, De la Rosa and her friends joined the march carrying a coffin draped with a quilt embroidered with the names of dozens of women murdered in Morelos. As soon as they appeared, the whole march fell silent.
“[People said,] ‘Stop, let them pass,’ as if we were really carrying [the victims’ bodies],” Díaz recalled. “It was very powerful.”
De la Rosa and her colleagues decided to put out an open call on social media to any women that wanted to participate. Their goal: to embroider all the names of women killed by femicide in Morelos since 2015.
Pandemic restrictions prevented them from gathering in person in 2020, but dozens of women signed up and were assigned names to embroider on patches of fabric and then mail in. The patches were then woven together into a giant quilt.
The next year the women were able to gather in person, but the founders realized that, for many, the process of embroidering a name could be incredibly painful: even if they had no direct relation to the murdered woman, they often found coincidental connections.
“There were people who told us, ‘I was given someone who was found in the town where I was born’ or ‘I had to embroider my sister’s name,’” Díaz explained. “We realized it required a special kind of support.”
They started making the open calls only once a year, holding four sessions over the course of a month with guidance and workshopping from the founders, including Guzmán, who is a trained psychologist.
“Embroidering is an artistic process that takes time,” she said. “It’s a very intimate process.”
In December 2023, the project became even more personal when the brutalized body of a fellow artist and activist, María Fernanda Rejón, was found dumped on the side of a highway not far from Cuernavaca days before Christmas.
“It was a reminder that no one is exempt,” said Díaz. “And a threat to us too, because she was someone very visible and very loved by the entire community.”
With the blessing of Rejón’s mother, the group began another quilt of their friend’s face surrounded by butterflies. Though still unfinished, Rejón’s mother began carrying it at women’s marches in Cuernavaca.
The collective, Las Nombramos Bordando – “We Name Them by Embroidering” – has continued to grow, with women from other states also sending in patches to be added to the quilts, of which there are now three. So far, nearly 100 women have participated, embroidering almost 200 patches.
As well as the more formal annual gatherings, the collective holds informal sessions on Sundays throughout the year, where women gather to learn how to embroider or to make more butterflies for Rejón’s memorial quilt.
On a recent sunny Sunday morning, a group of eight or so women, including De la Rosa, Díaz and Guzmán, gathered in a park in Cuernavaca to stitch together. Two of their quilts were strung up behind them, blowing gently in the breeze. From afar, they looked like beautiful artworks, the names surrounded by flowers, butterflies, hearts.
Only when the viewer is close enough to read the names does their brutal significance became apparent: Elizabeth Renata, eight months old, killed in February 2017. Angelica, 31, killed in January 2016. Petra, 80 years old, killed in September 2016.
That, explained Díaz, is part of the quilts’ power.
“Art allows us to enter people’s lives in a different way, even if it’s a form of protest, even if it’s very subversive,” she said. “People don’t perceive it that way because it’s a pretty quilt embroidered by women.”
“It’s like a Trojan horse,” De la Rosa added.
Embroidering butterflies along with her mother was Ana Vázquez, who joined the collective during the pandemic. Vázquez, who is herself a survivor of rape, said that embroidering was a way of taking action in the face of so much violence.
“We’re not going to change the world with this,” she said. “But at least we’re making noise. At least people are looking at us, at least people are talking about these femicides. They’re not just numbers in a database.”
Still, for Vázquez, there was also a dark side to the process.
“I can’t stop thinking that my name is going to be up there some day,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking that one of the other women is going to be embroidering me.”
