Speaking through Cloth
Magnolia Garcia
This week’s reading was interesting, because I’m from the Fresno area, which happens to be home to one of the two largest urban U.S. Hmong communities. I was intrigued to find that it wasn’t until fairly recently that record of Hmong history and culture began to transition from oral methods to print, but it makes sense that, for this reason, historians have been accumulating research on the culture from their textiles. I was impressed (but not too surprised) to find that it is the Hmong women who generally produce these textile arts, ultimately aiding the preservation of the culture itself.
A lover of art myself, I enjoyed learning about how important the creation of Hmong textiles is, extending far beyond aesthetic purposes and proving important for both the people and the culture in its entirety. Story cloths, for example, display the everyday life in Laos; something as simple as the everyday life has the capability of sharing a culture’s most intimate practices. I personally find these story cloths to be priceless, as art is a visual language that is open to interpretation both globally and cross-culturally and is bounded only by working vision. I was impressed, yet again, when I found that younger sisters, daughters and granddaughters are shown how to sew as early as three years old. However, the article also mentioned that most recently, young girls are less interesting in continuing to learn the practice. With that being said, is it probable that, in the distant future, the practice comes to a halt and knowledge of the Hmong culture begins to dissolve more and more?
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