de Diario de una costurera proletaria

This translation from Victoria Guerrero’s Diario de una costurera proletaria engages with the touch of globalized, capitalist forces on quotidian life and the body. The original book, handmade and covered in a thread-like combination of reproduced and hand-drawn images, was printed in a first edition of 250 copies by Máquina Purísima (2018). This book of threads begins with the first-person section excerpted here and gives way to a second section in the voices of factory workers participating in the 1909 textile strike in New York. That strike preceded the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The majority of these textile workers were immigrant women; 123 died in the fire, forced to jump from the windows of the burning factory. The speaker’s position as estranged from hand knowledge in the first section is part of the same process of industrialization and globalization of the textile industry, which exports textile knowledge out of the home. 

Throughout the collection are tensile relationships between individual actions or behaviors, and the systems of academic institutionalization, industrial production, and capitalism that govern them. This is exemplified in the textile project—a system composed of repeated actions—and became apparent in the process of translation, itself a negotiation between linguistic instances and systems. As a seamstress, Anastatia Spicer advocated that translation be an act of creating shelter for specific textile words becoming less common. Translating during the spring of 2020, we came to see literary translation as itself a home economy: a process of discerning the conditions under which these words would labor as we brought them home.