Embroidery & Solidarity
On Being a Part of Something Bigger
For years, I’ve had the word “embroiderer” stuck into the very first sentence of my official bio, the handful of sentences I send in when event organizers ask me to contextualize myself. “Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, translator and embroiderer.”
I’m not even primarily an embroiderer when it comes to textiles—it’s too hard to do it while reading, so I usually knit (textiling-while-I-read serves the dual purpose of creating sweaters and socks and keeping my hands too busy to pick up my phone). But still, there’s something about identifying myself as an embroiderer—I like the mental image it produces, I like nestling it alongside my literary practices as something else that is at once ornamental and strengthening, that distracts from its own labor with beauty.
A few weeks ago, Tatter Library, a textile archive in Brooklyn, put out a call for volunteers to embroider the names of each of the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire for a memorial banner for the fire’s 114th anniversary, March 25th.
I signed up, and was given the name of Gussie Bierman, a 22-year-old who worked at the factory.
We were given dimensions, and some color ideas (inspired by the colors of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union) and set loose to create our own tributes. I started embroidering Gussie’s name—in a 3-stranded blue chain-stitch, taking up most of my allotted canvas, all the better to stand out—and also started reading. Jason had taken a class that covered the fire back in grad school at NYU, so we had a copy of David von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire that Changed America on our shelves. The book came out over 20 years ago, but I think it’s still one of the most definitive accounts of the fire, based on court testimony and records believed to have been lost in the intervening 90-odd years.
In it, he gives context to the fire—the grueling shirtwaist workers’ strike that had happened the year before, the pogroms and social unrest that many of the Russian Jewish workers had fled, the opportunity a job at the shirtwaist factory might have been for a girl living in a Lower East Side tenement, the factory owners’ greed, the jam-packed, fabric-filled conditions across three floors of a “fire-safe” building with a single available exit.
He gives a minute-by-minute, accounting of the fire, from multiple perspectives—needed because the whole thing lasted no more than a handful of minutes. The fire was started by a careless workers’ cigarette butt in a too-infrequently-emptied scrap bin full of light cotton shirting scraps. Only one door to the outside was unlocked, because the owners wanted to ensure that workers leaving had their bags inspected for stolen product.
He tells about the mounting panic, the dash from one end of the workroom to the other, only to find locked doors. The daring escapes from a rickety ladder on the roof, the crush to get into the elevators, the mad dash down the fire escape, only to have it wrench off the side of the building and send panicked workers into the cellar and the wrought iron fence below. The women trapped against the windows, escaping death by flame with death by free-fall, the women who tried to jump onto the roof of a moving elevator. The sacrifices and the bravery and the sheer, unnecessary horror of it all, compressed into mere minutes of time.
There are so many ways that the stories of the young people that died in this fire fit into the questions we are still facing today—as consumers, as Americans. The Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Bangladesh happened 12 years ago, killing 1,134 garment factory workers—men, women, children. There’s an old Michael Hobbes article I think about all the time about the absolute impossibility of following our clothing manufacture all the way to the end to ensure it’s ethical.
But I think the thing I was most closely thinking about while I was sewing was the work of
. Alice’s latest book, The Life and Death of the American Worker takes on the workers at Tyson poultry processing plants in Arkansas. Many of the workers there are undocumented, people who have fled gang and cartel violence, people who are trying their best to make a living but don’t have many options to speak up, to organize because of the fear inherent in their immigration status. The book essentially opens in 2011 with the kind of horrifying industrial accident that is of a piece with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire but also too modern, too low-key to make the news, to change policy—a worker, not properly trained in a language he could not understand, accidentally mixes two chemicals and creates a cloud of chlorine gas in the factory. Workers pass out, sustain permanent lung damage. The company shrugs it off.Nine years later, during the COVID-19 epidemic, these workers begin to sicken and die. They are dying because of the dangerous conditions imposed on poultry plant workers during the pandemic—the lack of protective equipment, the close quarters, the too-fast speeds, the disincentives to stay home when sick, the precarious employment and immigration status and all of it. However, they are even more susceptible to these issues, faced by all poultry processing plant workers across the U.S., because nine years ago, they survived a chlorine gassing and did not receive adequate medical care in the aftermath. Alice reports all of this—she and her subjects speaking out with incredible bravery against the kind of large, greedy company Sinclair Lewis’ nightmares were made of—and in reporting it, shows that we are facing the same problems now that we were back in the Gilded Age.
One of my favorite podcasts, 5 - 4, has dubbed our dawning administration The Age of Diarrhea thanks to the quickly loosening regulations to benefit corporations. While we are all likely to, uh, experience these deleterious effects, no population will bear the brunt of this deregulation more strongly than those in industries already cutting costs at the expense of their workers.
Even prior to his nomination to the cabinet, Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor under Trump’s first administration (and Large Adult Son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin), was part of a long-term plan to discount repetitive motion injury as a question of worker safety—leaving millions of workers across the country with devastating, disabling injuries spanning from carpal tunnel syndrome to chronic pain and inflammation. Workers—many of whom are immigrants and refugees, fleeing their home countries because of fear of violence—come to the U.S. to face potentially deadly and disabling workplace conditions, all in the name of survival. Very little has changed since the day Gussie Bierman first walked into a shirtwaist factory.
Let me tell you about Gussie Bierman. When she died, at 22 years old, she had been in the United States for 4 years, and was a Russian Jewish emigre, fleeing the pogroms that had shattered her community. She was a union member. Her family identified her body by the watch chain she often wrapped around her neck, and complained that the rings she usually wore were missing. In his book, von Drehle frequently describes her as “matronly in her pince-nez”—a description no 22-year-old would love, I think. In addition to her name and her age, I gave Gussie her signature pince-nez, a needle and thread for her trade and mine, and a sheaf of wheat and a rose—the bread and roses that the striking textile girls of Lawrence, MA would popularize a year after her death. Sustenance and beauty, solidarity and resistance. All of it, all at once.
If you want to support workers’ rights, worker safety, and immigrant rights, there are so many ways and places to do that. Unionize your workplace, and find an organization in your area that does the kind of work towards labor rights that you support—for me, here in Chicago, it’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, for you, it might be someplace else. This is a program that as much as it is federal, is also hugely important on a local level.
Where I’ll Be:
I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know! I have taught this class once before and really loved it, so come through! The first class is on March 29th, and there will be another in April, so sign up now!
What I’ve Written:
For
: a piece on Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping and how it follows a pattern of ICE behavior that we’ve seen up until now.
What I’m Reading:
I’m currently reading for CLMP’s Firecracker Awards in nonfiction so the answer is just…a lot of very cool indie-published nonfiction books that I am not at liberty to talk about, just trust and believe that the media landscape outside of the big five is wider and weirder and cooler than you can even imagine.
Still working on Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser, and (re)reading
’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds like a particularly rich and strange ice cream—in small, savoring bites. Delightful.
In bed reading this kind and thoughtful reading of my work, thank you, Ale!