TAPESTRIES OF HOPE, THREADS OF LOVE: The...

TAPESTRIES OF HOPE, THREADS OF LOVE: The Arpillera Movement in Chile 1974-1994 by Marjorie Agosin, translated from the Spanish by Celeste Kostopulous-Cooperman (University of New Mexico Press: $39.95, 142 pp., paperback original). During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, women whose husbands, sons, fathers and brothers had “disappeared” created a unique form of protest: They made tapestries from scraps of cloth and yarn. (Arpillera, “burlap” in Spanish, comes from the old sacks they used for backing.) In Kostopulous-Cooperman’s clunky translation, Agosin’s text rambles awkwardly, but the tapestries eloquently pose the question so many women in Latin American have been forced to ask: Donde estan? Where are they?