The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice 9780520384019

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Praise for The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice “A wonderful, motley, no-bullshit collective history of a singular and beautiful mutual-aid project—a collective that, in crafting and distributing masks as an expression of radical solidarity and capacitybuilding, reclaims the politicization of masks from the Right. In valuing care and beauty, embracing individual multiplicity and internal debate, the Aunties have assembled a subversive vision of liberation through accountability.” jia tolentino, author of Trick Mirror “This is far more than the important account of women warriors, armed with sewing needles, who organized organically yet deliberately into a movement for social change in the time of Covid—it’s an inspiring manifesto on building the Beloved Community. Please follow up with the field manual for global distribution!” helen zia, activist, journalist, and author of Asian American Dreams and Last Boat Out of Shanghai “Decades later, these stories will shimmer as individual and collective testimonies of how a multigenerational, grassroots coalition of maskmaking Aunties saved lives and celebrated life during a worldwide pandemic. This book sparks joy! It vivifies ‘creativity as resistance’ and everyday activism in ways that will add depth and breadth to the transdisciplinary study of social movements and social justice.” vickie nam, editor of YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American

“This book reflects a historical moment—the pandemic—yet links the response to the history of anti–Asian American racism, to solidarity instead of charity, and to challenges to the nuclear family. It captures the importance of mutual aid and how mostly Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Queer and Trans people of color respond at the intersection of feminism, racial justice, and gender fluidity.” yvonne yen liu, Co-founder and Research Director of Solidarity Research Center “This indispensable book presents an unseen side of the restructuring of the global economy, which placed feminized Asian labor at the center of both garment production and reproductive and care labor. The Auntie Sewing Squad’s work also critiques the notion that market forces will step in to solve the problem of state failure, as the Aunties realized that even inexpensive masks were inaccessible to the most vulnerable communities. From all this comes an expanded and vital conception of solidarity.” grace hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference “This is the book we need right now! Through prose, poetry, interviews, and memoir, this inspiring collection shares the power of women of color, predominantly Asian American women, forming grassroots, guerilla-style sewing groups to care for racialized and Indigenous communities suffering disproportionally from Covid-19, systemic poverty, and state violence. These badass Asian Aunties offer a model for us all.” judy tzu-chun wu, author of Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity

Named in remembrance of the onetime Antioch Review editor and longtime Bay Area resident,

the Lawrence Grauman, Jr. Fund supports books that address a wide range of human rights, free speech, and social justice issues.

The

Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and

Racial Justice Edited by

Mai-Linh K. Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau, and Preeti Sharma with

Kristina Wong

& Rebecca Solnit

University of California Press

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully ­acknowledge the generous support of the Lawrence Grauman, Jr. Fund. The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also grateful­ ly acknowledge the generous support of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund in ­Social Justice and Human Rights.

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Regents of the University of California Illustration credits not included in captions: Audrey Chan, pp. xvi–xvii, 20–21, 36–37, 56–57, 74–75, 130–31, 166–67. Alina Wong and Heather C. Lou, p. 24 Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005245 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005246 isbn 978-0-520-38399-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38400-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38401-9 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

Acknowledgments

| x

Preface, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord Taxonomy of Auntie Roles, Audrey Chan

| xii

| xvi

Introduction We Go Down Sewing, Mai-Linh K. Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau, Preeti Sharma, and Valerie Soe | 2

Auntie Sewing Squad Map, Audrey Chan

| 20

Auntie Sewing Squad Core Values: Transparency + Passion + Humor + Kindness, Amy Tofte and Kristina Wong | 22 Auntie Sewing Squad Bingo, Alina Wong and Heather C. Lou Ode to the Spreadsheet of Glory, Laura Karlin

| 25

A Mary Poppins Box of Supplies, Laurie Bernadel Finding Fabric, Candice Kim and Sharon McNary Recipe for Vegan Kimchee, Grace J. Yoo

| 24

| 27 | 29

| 30

Moment of Joy, Chey Townsend and Beatrice Townsend

| 33

Labor Sewing as Care Work, Preeti Sharma

| 38

Taxonomy of Auntie Care, Audrey Chan

| 56

The Evolution of Auntie Care, Gayle Isa

| 58

Auntie Sewing Squad Care-Van, Duyen Tran

| 60

How to Sew Masks for Fun and No Profit in the Apocalypse, Dana Leahy | 63

Mask Ties and Earloops and Nose Pieces, Belinda Vong Younis

| 64

Bread, Roses, and Face Masks, Ellen Gavin Home Sweatshop, Laura McSharry

| 67

| 69

Recipe for Ube Halaya, Irene Tayag Laut

| 70

Solidarity Sewing with Intent, Chrissy Yee Lau

| 76

Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile Full of PPE, Badly Licked Bear Badly Licked Bear Relief Van, Badly Licked Bear and Katie Johnson Dreaming of My Ancestors: Sewing a Network of Protection across La Frontera, Jessica Arana | 102 Abuela’s Facultad, Jessica Arana

| 103

Solidarity Praxis, Lauretta Kanahoa Masters Monk Fabric, Melinda Creps

| 105

| 107

It’s in Your Blood: Warrior Alliances in the Time of Coronavirus, Constance Parng | 108

Three Generations, Joni Byun

| 113

Recipe for Tsukemono Pasta Salad, Dave Vindiola

A Day in OUR Virtual Life |

| 114

116

Survival Sewing as Refuge, Mai-Linh K. Hong

| 132

Mending Time: A Movement Score, Rebecca Pappas

| 148

Mask Butterfly and Stencil Rose, Jacqueline Bell Johnson Rebirth, Māhealani Flournoy

| 153

Sewing through a Pan(dem)ic, Hellen Lee

| 155

How to Measure, Selfie, Sanae Robinson Guerin Recipe for Nourishing Salve, Laura Karlin

| 160

| 161

Mutual Aid Sewing the Pieces Back Together, Rebecca Solnit ASS Quilt, Melissa Quilter

| 184

| 168

| 151

|

| 96 99

Science Is the Light on the Sewing Machine, Karl Haro von Mogel My Dad Sewing, Lisa Prostak

| 186

| 188

Querida Abuelita Rafaelita, Lorena Madrigal Sewing Machine, Lorena Madrigal

| 191

Treasuring Mom, Joy Park-Thomas

| 192

| 189

Recipe for Earl’s Girl Pound Cake, Diana Williams

| 194

Posterity Teaching Sewing, Teaching Care, Grace J. Yoo

| 200

The Auntie Sewing Squad Kids Sewing Camp, Gina Rivera To the Rescue, Dominie Apeles and Teena Apeles Technical Assistance Auntie, Vibrina Coronado

| 220

| 222 | 223

Connecting My Family’s One-Hundred-Year Herstory, Jenni “Emiko” Kuida | 225

Sewing with Mom, Winnie Fong

| 227

Sewing for the Next Generation, Sylvia Kwon

| 228

A Day in the Life of Westside Hub, drawn by Gwendolyn kim, written by Leilani Chan, Ova Saopeng, and Nouthak Saopeng | 230

Recipe for Chocolate Shortbread Hearts, Melissa Quilter we (can) do it, Elena Dahl

Coda, Mai-Linh K. Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau, and Preeti Sharma Timeline

| 234

| 236

| 239

| 243

Auntie Sewing Squad Mask Sewing Patterns, Mai-Linh K. Hong and Chey Townsend | 247

Contoured Mask

| 248

Pleated Mask

| 250

Folding Mask

| 252

Contributors Index

| 265

| 254

Acknowledgments

When each of us joined the Auntie Sewing Squad—a cutter in Los Angeles, California, a sewer in Monterey, California, and a sewer in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania—we simply intended to contribute to mutual aid in a time of failed government response. But we ended up writing a book together. Somehow, during the sheltering in place, the rapid shift to working from home, the stress of lost childcare, the loss of loved ones, and the rage of wildfires, we made masks and got words on paper. Much like the masks of the Auntie Sewing Squad, this book was created and supported by the organizing labors and love of a collective of people. What began as a simple plan for a roundtable at an academic confer­ ence turned into a book deal. We thank Kristina Wong and Valerie Soe for their mentorship in the beginning stages of this project, for entrusting us with writing about the Auntie Sewing Squad, and for fiercely supporting our vision for the book. We thank our team at the Univer­ sity of California Press—Erika Bűky, Naja Pulliam Collins, Niels Hooper, Teresa Iafolla, Julie Van Pelt, and Madison Wetzell—for all your enthusiasm throughout this process as well as your careful editing. Thank you to our seasoned essay contributors (and Aunties) Rebecca Solnit and Grace J. Yoo, whose chapters lend additional depth to the complexity of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Special thanks to those interviewed for our chapters, including Monica Bullard, Wei-Ling Chang, Dolores Carlos, Jen Henehan, Van Huynh, Gayle Isa, Candice Kim, Lorena Madrigal, Marissa Nuncio, Constance Parng, Ova Saopeng, Annie Shaw, and Kathleen Smith. Thank you to the students who shared their oral histories in the first summer class on the Auntie Sewing Squad at San Francisco State University. Finally, thank you to our

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generous reviewers (who made their identities known to us) for their insightful feedback: Simeon Man, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Yvonne Yen Liu, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. There would be no book without the creativity and artistry of the Aunties. Seriously, what can’t the Aunties do? A tremendous thank you to all of the Aunties, Uncles, and Unties who contributed to this volume for their goodwill and patience. We also thank Laurie Bernadel and Kairos Marquardt for mapping data. This project was also supported by many talented folks outside the Auntie Sewing Squad. Thank you to our timeline research assistants, Taylor Wong and Megan Maeda, for your important contextual findings. Thank you to photographer Carol Sheridan for safely capturing Kristina’s humor. Thank you to our illustrator, Audrey Chan, for her amazing visual pieces. Thank you to our indexer, Jordan Gonzales. Our gratitude also goes to the Albert LePage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University for the COVID-19 grant. For many of us in the Auntie Sewing Squad, sewing and the commu­ nity of Aunties have been lifesavers during the pandemic. For the co­­ editors, this book, as well as the ethics we built around writing this book together—our commitment to prioritizing our well-being and being accountable to our scholarly and activist communities, and our practice of defaulting to generosity and compassion—has been our lifesaver.

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Preface K r is ti na Wong, Sw eats hop Ove r lord

August 2020 When I first started the Auntie Sewing Squad, the thinking was, When factory-made masks become readily available on the market, we will retire. What I didn’t realize then was that tens of thousands of people in America can’t access even cheap factory-made masks. Communities long forgotten by the federal government before the pandemic were now getting hit extra hard. Never did I imagine that I would pull my mother and her friends out of retirement to order them around in my remote “sweatshop.” Never did I imagine that I would be politicizing the term sweatshop to point to the failure of the federal government in preparing us for this crisis. Never did I imagine how politically polarizing the act of wearing a mask would become. Never did I imagine how political the act of sewing two pieces of fabric together for a total stranger could be. Never did I imagine how many Aunties from all over North America would rage stitch with us. And never did I plan for the group to make a book. Before I became the Factory Overlord of the Auntie Sewing Squad— family, cult, labor camp, amateur medical supply company, shadow government aid agency—I was a performance artist who was scheduled to embark on a national tour of Kristina Wong for Public Office—a show about how I ran for and won a seat on my neighborhood council. In the “before times,” I sewed my set pieces and props. Never did I imagine that I would be using my half-assed home ec skills—previously used to stitch fabric ruffles into giant labia shapes—to make life-saving medical equipment. With used bedsheets and conference lanyards, at that.

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“I’m becoming the overlord of a Chinese sweatshop,” I declared when the first volunteers to step forward were mostly Chinese and Asian American women. It wasn’t hard to see the irony of college-educated Asian American women, whose parents and grandparents did invisible, backbreaking garment labor to pay their debt to the American Dream, now performing that same work, like some kind of ancestral destiny. This time they were doing it for no pay, and with far less appreciation from others of the time and skill that sewing requires as we’ve become a country (Amazon-)primed for instant satisfaction without consideration for the workers who make our things. And even after much American manufacturing moved to China, here we were, diasporic Asians trying to put together an ad hoc assembly line from our home sewing machines. Oh America, the land of opportunity! No craft store, not even (fucking) Joann Fabric and Craft Stores, was prepared for the 2020 trend of sewing cloth face masks to stop the spread of COVID-19. Every vendor in the country ran out of elastic and fabric, and factory-made masks were out of stock for weeks. I was like Robinson Crusoe, and my desert island was my home in Koreatown Los Angeles, waving down every hobbyist seamstress on Facebook for leads on where to find elastic. Aunties were chopping the straps off their bras, sawing the elastic off their fitted bedsheets, knitting I-cord from scraps of yarn. No T-shirt was safe, no half-finished quilt project too precious to sacrifice for DIY personal protective equipment. In the early days of the pandemic (because this shit has gone on long enough for me to separate it into different eras), I was running in and out of my home ten times a day with fistfuls of elastic, meeting masked strangers to whom I had given my address on the internet because they had offered to help sew. I was buying dressmaking shops out of their stores of elastic for cash and immediately mailing spools away to strangers in other cities, even if the postage cost as much as the spools. Some of these strangers became Aunties in our group; others, I had to trust, were going to make good on their promises to sew masks for essential workers out there, not just resell them on Etsy.

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In a moment of desperation, Auntie Karen offered her son’s wellwashed underwear to us for its elastic and cotton fabric. We declined, but we did consider it. As dozens of new Aunties flooded into our group, I shifted away from my sewing machine to become a supervisor, orienting new Aunties to the group. The playwright Amy Tofte, a casual rideshare acquaintance turned pandemic BFF, stepped up to get us more organized. We created a team of “Super Aunties” to identify the communities that were in real need, the ones that couldn’t wave down our help on the internet because they don’t even have internet. A few months in, the world found itself in a quadruple pandemic—health, racial, political, and economic. And the Aunties found ourselves with all the things that big organizations have—a logo, a fiscal sponsor, big donors, major press—but no salaries, no health benefits, no company retreat, and no end in sight. I lean heavily into gallows humor because laughter is how I survive most things. The running joke is that I, the Overlord, will cut off the fingers and eat the babies of Aunties who don’t sew masks. We joke that we’re a cult and that this book you’re reading will be the Dianetics of sewing literature. The humor has preserved our sanity—or at least has helped us find hope in this very strange moment in history. The great irony of this mask-making empire was that before the first Los Angeles lockdown, I refused to wear a mask. As an Asian American, I was already walking around with a mask I couldn’t take off—the mask that said to the world, “Hey, blame me for the coronavirus.” Adding a mask on top of my existing mask would bring attention that, even as a performance artist, I was not looking for. But building ASS (which I didn’t realize was our acronym until a week after I made the Facebook group) has been a radical experiment in generosity, intersectional alliances, and a paradigm outside capitalism. I never set out to lead a remote sweatshop empire during the apocalypse, but that’s where unprecedented times take us. Like finding out

xi v  

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that an old pillowcase can yield five face masks, we discover all sorts of things about ourselves that we didn’t know were possible. If you’ve ever wanted to exploit unpaid manual labor, coerce children to help you, and be lauded as a hero, you have come to the right place . . . or at least, landed in a moment of American history where it’s become clear that we have no leadership, no supply chain, no infrastructure, and definitely no quarter-inch flat braided elastic. If this is the end, we go down sewing.

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Introduction

We Go Down Sewing M a i-Li nh K . Hong, C hrissy Yee Lau, Pr e e ti S h a rma , a nd Val eri e Soe

During the COVID-19 pandemic, after Kristina Wong suddenly found herself overwhelmed with requests for masks from friends, strangers, and hospitals, she realized she could not do the work alone. To whom could she turn who had sewing machines passed down from their immigrant mothers? Who hoards every possible thing just in case of an authoritarian government takeover or a global pandemic, and therefore would be ready with fabric, thread, elastic, scissors, irons, coffee filters, and paper towels? Who could use their ingenuity and scrappiness to assemble life-saving masks out of conference name badges and old cotton bedsheets? Who would be willing to spend all their time sewing for strangers? Who could rally their partners and children into performing unpaid labor? She would need a squad of Aunties. Why Aunties? Because Aunties get the damned thing done! Take Wong’s friend, Valerie Soe. On March 16, 2020, the nation’s first shelter-in-place order of the pandemic was issued by the mayor of San Francisco, a progressive woman of color, ahead of California’s statewide mandate. One day later, Soe pulled out her 1970s Kenmore sewing machine and hunted down 100 percent cotton woven fabric around her house, determined to make her own mask. A filmmaker and professor by day, Auntie by night, Soe believes in fighting on the ground to directly affect and protect people’s lives. While the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) and other US government agencies debated the efficacy of masks, Soe started sewing masks for healthcare professionals. She remembers sewing a mask for one healthcare worker

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who did not have the luxury of arguing whether someone’s freedom was being infringed on when they were asked to wear a mask. Rather, Soe explains, the healthcare worker “was in the trenches fighting the virus and taking precautions to protect herself in any way possible to marginally increase her chances of survival.” Soe did not want to waste time debating; she wanted to take action. Soe became an “OG” Auntie, one of the original group members who helped form the Auntie Sewing Squad. A collective that began with a handful of Asian American women from immigrant families, the Squad later expanded to include other women of color, some white women, and a few Uncles and nonbinary Unties. Some members hailed from migrant families that had crossed oceans and lands for the chance of freedom and better lives, not unlike the people asking for asylum at the US border who, then-President Donald Trump declared, had come from “shithole countries.” Other Aunties had experienced firsthand the devastation of the delay in federal aid for Native communities. Still other Aunties saw the need for personal protection when they took to the streets in their rage and continual grief over police violence against Black people. Whatever their individual stories, whatever had brought each to this point in history, together Aunties would work to protect the people from the criminal negligence of the US government.

The Squad’s Asian American Feminist Beginnings The Auntie Sewing Squad emerged first and foremost from a progressive social critique informed by the life experiences, knowledge, and activism of Asian American people, particularly women. The Squad’s earliest members were deeply aware that the failure of the US government to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to its residents to prevent the spread of COVID-19 had disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities, who were more likely to contract and die from the disease. It was also clear early on that women, who perform the majority of caregiving labor in the United States (paid and unpaid), would also suffer some effects of the

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pandemic more than men, and that women of color would be especially vulnerable.1 Founding members understood the necessity of a cross-racial approach to fighting the pandemic. They were well versed in Asian American studies, a body of knowledge with intellectual and political roots in 1960s and 1970s radical activism. Asian American studies owes much to the global struggles for Black, Indigenous, Chicano, and Third World liberation and decolonization with which it was aligned from its inception. Indeed, the very idea of a pan-ethnic Asian American community was modeled after those movements, in which people who shared history and political concerns, but not necessarily culture (language, religion, etc.), united for common benefit.2 Today Asian Americans, the fastest-growing major racial or ethnic group in the United States, are extremely diverse culturally and socioeconomically. But Asian Americans of all backgrounds experience marginalization, stereotyping, discrimination, and racial violence or threats of violence. This shared experience of racism and exclusion attunes many Asian Americans to racial bias against nonwhite people in US media and political discourses. Such was the case with the US view of other countries’ differing public health responses to the COVID-19 crisis. In the pandemic’s crucial early weeks, American political leaders and news outlets largely failed to consider the social practices and scientific data of Asian countries that had succeeded in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), the CDC recommended sheltering in place, maintaining a six-foot distance between people, and frequent hand washing, but it did not encourage face coverings or masks unless the wearer was sick or caring for a sick person. By contrast, the head of the CDC’s counterpart in China recommended masking to prevent the spread of the disease. Years earlier, Asian countries had employed masking as a measure to combat the H1N1 flu, SARS, and MERS pandemics, and as a result, it was accepted practice in many parts of Asia. Data supported

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the practice: in March, Johns Hopkins University researchers reported that countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which did not encourage masking, had a high rate of spread, whereas several Asian countries and localities, such as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, where masking was commonplace, had been able to slow the spread of the virus.3 Studies released later in the year confirmed that masking was highly effective in preventing wearers from both spreading and contracting the virus.4 The CDC’s initial dismissal of Asian science on masking matched the agency’s regressive internal culture, which included long-standing racism. In July 2020, more than one thousand employees signed a letter criticizing the agency for its “toxic culture of racial aggressions” and for sidelining Black scientists who wanted to study racism as a public health issue.5 Both racism and the denial of racism converged to prevent political leaders and even the nation’s leading public health agency from adopting the lessons of relative successes elsewhere. In the fall, as America and Europe were headed into their third or fourth waves of the pandemic, almost no attention was paid to the fact that many African countries had fared well in quickly containing the virus, in part due to their experience managing other epidemics.6 Any lessons that could have been learned from majority-nonwhite nations were lost on the Trump administration, which was busy deflecting blame for the worsening crisis onto Asian people and countries. This was nothing new. Since the nineteenth century, Asian Americans have been marginalized by popular representations and rhetoric that associate them with contagion, security threats, alienness, and immorality. Trump repeatedly called the coronavirus the “Kung flu” or the “China virus,” conjuring this long history of “yellow peril” racism. Somewhat paradoxically, Trump and his surrogates also downplayed the disease, comparing it to a seasonal flu and insisting it was well under control. Months later, Bob Woodward revealed in a bombshell book, Rage, that Trump had lied to the public about the dangers of the virus. Woodward recorded eighteen interviews with Trump from late 2019 to mid-

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2020. Trump stated as early as February 7 that he knew the virus spread “through the air” and was “more deadly than even your ­strenuous flus.”7 Scapegoating of Asian people may have enabled Trump’s followers to ignore his policy failures even as they encountered (and often dismissed) growing evidence that COVID-19 was serious—not a liberal hoax, as some conservatives claimed—an issue that remains. The scapegoating, unfortunately, was quite successful. Chinatowns across the country lost business because people associated their restau­ rants and shops with COVID-19. According to the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center, which began tracking hate incidents in late March 2020, Asian Americans reported more than 1,500 incidents of racism in the month of April, ranging from verbal harassment and threats to actual violence. These attacks frequently referenced China and the virus, regardless of the victims’ ethnicity.8 Many Asian Americans feared going out in public and worried that wearing a mask might bolster racist stereotypes of Asian Americans as disease carriers. Meanwhile, across the nation, Trump-supporting crowds congregated unmasked in defiance of official mandates and basic public health advice, and staged protests, in some cases armed, against reasonable restrictions on businesses and gatherings. The ten-day annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which took place in South Dakota in August 2020, attracted nearly half a million predominantly white attendees, most of whom did not wear masks or practice physical distancing. When fall arrived, South Dakota had the highest per-capita rate of COVID-19 in the country, and cases surged in regions from which significant numbers of rally attendees had come. As race and racism have shaped the pandemic, gender has played a role as well: women’s experiences of COVID-19 have seemed to diverge from men’s. This has been especially true for women of color, a fact that underscores the importance of understanding the pandemic intersectionally. In the 1980s, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw theorized that Black women’s experiences cannot be understood through a single framework like race or gender: rather, race and gender interact to

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shape Black women’s experiences and are mutually constituted. Though Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, it draws from a long line of women of color feminisms to refer to the idea that multiple identities, including race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability, interact to shape the experiences of women of color as well as the systems that oppress them.9 In the United States, women of all races have paid for poor policy­ making during the pandemic with their economic and emotional wellbeing. With schools and daycare centers closed, many women—who perform the bulk of care labor at home—have dropped out of the workforce or suffered personally as they have attempted to work from home, care for children, and supervise children’s remote education all at once. But women of color have been especially affected for numerous reasons. Incidences and outcomes of the disease vary significantly by race. Women of color are overrepresented in caregiving and other “essential” occupations, such as healthcare, childcare, food service, and agriculture, as well as in some service industries that have come to a near standstill, like nail salons. And women of color are more likely to have lost income during the pandemic and less likely to have wealth to fall back on. Moreover, they have continued to struggle with the same structural inequities as before, including discrimination, unequal pay, and vulnerability to state, racial, and gender-based violence.10 Even as Asian Americans were the targets of racist attacks, and even as women of color strained under multiple dimensions of the COVID19 crisis, Asian American and other BIPOC women united through the Auntie Sewing Squad to provide a critical resource and to shift attitudes toward mask wearing in the United States. Before they became members of the Squad, Aunties sewed masks for friends, neighbors, and loved ones. Some dusted off or purchased sewing machines; others sewed by hand. They shared YouTube mask-making videos and advice on fabric selection. Some Aunties scavenged fabric, cutting up cotton bedsheets and old clothes. Some donated large volumes of masks to hospitals and retirement centers. Others freely offered masks on their

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front porches and found hundreds of takers. Then, when these women could no longer handle the volume of mask requests they received ­individually, they began to organize online. In doing so, they found the community they craved to remedy the social isolation of the pandemic.

Mask Making and Mutual Aid On March 23, 2020, the performance artist Kristina Wong, who had just canceled a national tour of her one-woman show Kristina Wong for Public Office because of the pandemic, created a Facebook group of friends who knew how to sew masks or wanted to learn. They shared materials, taught others how to sew, and collaborated to fulfill large requests for masks. The Auntie Sewing Squad is one of many sewing collectives that formed across the United States during the spring of 2020, but it is distinctive in its overt, progressive politics. The Squad saw in the pandemic not only a health crisis but also a set of deeply entrenched social injustices. After hearing that hospitals desperately needed PPE, sewing groups organized to supply mask for healthcare workers. For many who joined these groups, sewing was patriotic labor in the tradition of Rosie the Riveter, the World War II icon they frequently invoked. Making masks meant pitching in to serve the national interest, akin to the industrial labor performed by Rosie and other women while men were away at war. Working in this vein, Homemade Medical Masks for the California Central Coast, created on March 22, attracted nine hundred members. The group educated the public about the benefits of wearing masks and served as a clearinghouse for mask donations from Big Sur to Santa Cruz. They organized meetups to exchange materials and collect completed masks for distribution. Other mask-sewing groups were regional, such as Sewing Masks for Area Hospitals, which served hospitals in the Atlanta area and later across the Southeast. Originally formed by three sewists (a term preferred by many sewing hobbyists over sewers) in late March, the group attracted two thousand members within

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a few days and grew to eight thousand by April. They built a complete supply chain by distributing raw materials to sewists and delivering completed masks to healthcare facilities that requested them. National groups developed even larger and more elaborate operations. Stitched Together, which formed on March 19 and eventually boasted twelve thousand members, split into subgroups, the largest consisting of over two thousand members in Long Island, New York. The group matched volunteer sewists with recipient healthcare workers, first responders, and other essential workers. By early April, sewing collectives had helped bring conversations about masking to the forefront by normalizing mask wearing in many communities. Emerging data about the high prevalence of asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus suggested the value of mask wearing by everyone, not just those obviously at risk of exposure, since many contagious people did not know they were contagious. In most groups, implicitly or explicitly, little space was given to discussions of the social and policy conditions that had created the crisis. However, volunteer mask makers helped solidify public support of mask wearing, which spurred the CDC to reconsider its mask recommendation. On April 3, 2020, the CDC officially endorsed universal masking. The agency recommended that all Americans wear homemade cloth face coverings, leaving manufactured masks (such as the highly effective N95 masks, which were still in short supply) available for use by medical professionals. This change speeded up the making of a new American commodity. Masks and mask making created a market of consumers, mostly women, for fabric, elastic, thread, and sewing machines. The Singer sewing machine company could not keep up with orders, and sewing machines were one of the top ten most common purchases during the beginning of the pandemic. Companies caught on to the marketing potential. The Joann Fabric and Craft Store chain began to offer free mask-sewing kits in late March, though many customers found that Joann’s did not have the free materials they advertised and did not properly equip their own workers with PPE. Crafters

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on Etsy, the online market for handmade goods, began to sell masks in early April and saw sales rise rapidly. By May, chain clothing stores such as the Gap and Old Navy began to sell their own branded masks. At the same time, suppliers of surgical and other medical-grade masks were catching up with demand, so the need for home-sewn masks in healthcare facilities was no longer so dire. As more masks became available, the Auntie Sewing Squad did not slow its labor. This distinguished the Squad from many other sewing groups. For instance, the volunteer sewing collective in Monterey County, California, ceased operating by June 14 because the local government was finally able to provide PPE to healthcare workers, and others could now purchase commercially made masks. Other groups that had focused exclusively on supplying masks to hospitals or healthcare workers—the pandemic’s lionized frontline workers, “battling” in the pandemic “war,” in the militarized rhetoric of the public health crisis— stopped as well. By contrast, the Auntie Sewing Squad shifted to serving disenfranchised communities, including workers who were inadequately protected by the companies that employed or housed them and lacked the resources to purchase masks. The Squad’s work was just beginning. Unlike many other mask-making groups, ASS was never a charity or a temporary supplier but instead operated in a mode of noncapitalistic labor known as mutual aid. Mutual aid involves people providing care and sharing resources in a coordinated way “to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” It often arises from the understanding that existing systems “created the crisis, or are making things worse.”11 For this reason, mutual aid is often associated with structurally oppressed communities. The free breakfast programs and liberation schools for children run by the Black Panthers in the 1960s are prominent examples: the Panthers combined community service, resource sharing, education, and grassroots political organizing in response to conditions imposed by white supremacy.

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As a mutual-aid project, the Auntie Sewing Squad served communities that were in dire need but had been overlooked by other mask makers. The Squad did not shy away from discussing politics, which was discouraged in some sewing groups, or from supplying masks to those who lived and worked outside the mainstream, like sex workers, the unhoused, and the undocumented. ASS worked primarily through community-based nonprofit organizations that already had the infrastructure and contacts to distribute the masks efficiently to those who needed them. In vetting mask requests, it chose partners in mask distribution that treated the populations they served neither as heroes nor as objects of charity, but as equal members of the community who deserved to be protected. Whereas charity leaves undisturbed the unjust social and political structures that create need, mutual aid works to reveal how inequity works and to change the conditions that cause it, while at the same time meeting people’s needs. As the pandemic wore on, the Auntie Sewing Squad nimbly supplied masks to asylum seekers, Indigenous communities on reservations, people newly released on parole, transgender immigrants, urban farming coop members, trafficking victims, and low-income BIPOC communities. As the Navajo Nation in the Southwest was ravaged by COVID19, Aunties worked with Navajo partners to send masks and a relief van filled with sewing and medical supplies. Another van followed, and another, and eventually there were six. As the nation erupted in long-overdue rebellion over police violence against Black Americans, the Aunties swiftly supplied masks to Black Lives Matter protesters, sometimes on just a few hours’ notice, and advocacy organizations serving Black communities. As wildfires raged in Oregon and California, Aunties sewed for the people most affected by the unbreathable air and least able to protect themselves from it—immigrant farm workers who continued to labor outdoors while others evacuated the area. The gulf between haves and have-nots in America grew amid the dangers of the pandemic, political violence that included racist attacks, and the worsening climate crisis. Masks became a way not only to meet a ­public

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health need but also to express cross-racial solidarity and political protest in a moment of social upheaval, all framed by the threat of the deadly novel coronavirus. Because of its political commitment to making masks as a public good, the Auntie Sewing Squad never sought to sell masks (even for fundraising) or to register as a nonprofit organization. ASS intended to serve only as a temporary resource, with the idea that the government would eventually step up with coordinated aid and rational public health policies. However, as months passed and no comprehensive federal response to the pandemic emerged, tired but determined Squad members settled in for the long haul. Their belief that their work was in the interest of social justice and inseparable from long-running movements for racial and gender equity kept them going on the toughest days.

Radical Care: Our Lineage of Revolutionary Aunties The Auntie Sewing Squad enacts a vision of mutual aid that is specifically feminist and intersectional. The Squad’s insistence on “solidarity, not charity”—the rallying cry of mutual aid—arises directly from histories of migration, labor exploitation, and racialized gender op­ pression. Women of color, poor women, immigrant women, nonbinary and transgender people, and others who inhabit multiply marginalized identities are central to these histories. So it was that the Auntie—a female cultural figure often associated with minority communities— emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic as an icon of progressive activism who embodies the principles of radical care and mutual aid. In the United States, a country without guaranteed healthcare, childcare, employment, or welfare, ordinary families are largely on their own to get by in an economy sharply tilted against them—a world in which “carelessness reigns.”12 Many of these families rely on women to provide care labor for little or no pay. It is in this private but deeply political social space—a crevasse where a social safety net should be— that Aunties operate.

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An auntie is not necessarily a biological aunt but can be an honorary member of a family by virtue of a caretaking relationship (that is, she is someone’s auntie). She is adopted into a nuclear family’s orbit by virtue of her proximity and availability. Aunties’ contributions are often informal and unrecorded, their labor underappreciated and unpaid. The Auntie steps in where society does not provide. She is not only an object of familial affection in her private circle but also a crucial source of support in a faulty economic infrastructure, and in times of crisis her unpaid labor may be what keeps the whole system going. We would like to be able to say that the Auntie is a folk hero of our times, but the truth is, Aunties are unsung heroes at best—and indeed, the figure of the Auntie may prompt us to rethink our impulse to lionize individuals altogether. Just as grocery and retail workers—many of whom live paycheck to paycheck—are now being called “heroes” for their largely involuntary assumption of disease risk, Aunties are a product and casualty of the times we live in and the structure of our society. Nevertheless, aunties also embody intriguing social possibilities. Outside the traditional family circle but activated by the family’s fissures and inadequacies, aunties operate through a noncapitalistic exchange of goods and services. They strive to keep a community whole in the face of destructive social forces. Aunties may escape the confines of heteropatriarchy and demonstrate that there are other, better ways for people to live together. Even while performing gendered work through a gendered cultural archetype—the Auntie is, after all, a woman doing women’s work—aunties also create space for queer and differently bounded social units, chosen rather than biologically determined families. During a time of social distancing in which families are urged to “pod” at home, we may value even more the Auntie’s capacity to move between households, crossing literal and metaphorical thresholds, providing aid and reassurance to those for whom she is not obligated to care but does anyway. The Auntie Sewing Squad takes this aspirational idea of the Auntie and places it in conversation with current discourses on race, gender,

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labor, and care. Outside the Squad, the Auntie is not unequivocally a progressive figure: in many cultures and subcultures, an auntie can also be a meddlesome figure, a gossipmonger, a judge of social mores, and in particular a policer of young women’s sexuality. The Auntie history we wish to highlight, though—the one we’ve taken as our inspiration—is the long line of revolutionary Aunties who have been understated caregivers serving the people. When we think of social movement leaders, Auntie figures are hardly the first to be recognized. Because popular conceptions of civil rights movements center on dramatic protests and major, hard-fought policy changes, we tend to highlight powerful male leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. But the revolutionary Auntie promotes radical ideologies not just through public policy and on the streets, but in the home and through her social values. If we focus on the acts of care and solidarity that enable social movements, then revolutionary Aunties become central to the story of progressive change. The revolutionary Auntie enacts care as “an organizing principle on each and every scale of life.” As the Care Collective urges in The Care Manifesto, she “cares promiscuously”—that is, her work of nurturing the well-being of others crosses lines of difference and conventional boundaries of kinship.13 In the 1960s, the civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama organized alongside Malcolm X. By then, she was a mother of six children and was known to open her home to people in need of housing, such as recently released political prisoners. Kochiyama’s home in Harlem was nicknamed “Grand Central Station” because it served as a hub for community service and social justice mobilization. She focused on activism that brought together the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Asian American Movement, political prisoners, and the redress movement that sought reparations for the Japanese American incarceration. Kochiyama emphasized cross-racial coalition building, a way of organizing that recognized commonalities without erasing differences. In the 1990s, the Detroit-based social activist Grace Lee Boggs reimagined revolution through youth programs and urban community

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gardens. After a lifetime of organizing with the radical Black Left, labor rights, and civil rights, in her message to the Occupy movement she said, “There’s a long road ahead, because you’ll have the opportunity to create something new that’s based on completely different values, but you’re going to have to be thinking about values and not just about abuses.”14 Boggs founded Detroit Summer, a Black intergenerational urban agricultural movement that aimed to empower youth to rebuild Detroit after deindustrialization. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the transit rights activist Grandma Kim joined the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union to organize for the rights of bus riders, immigrants, and workers. Grandma Kim’s family members were part of the Korean independence movement during the Japanese occupation; as a child, she observed her uncle transmitting messages to independence fighters. After Grandma Kim migrated to the United States in the 1990s, she noticed the large number of elderly Korean people taking the bus to buy groceries, attend English classes, and get to their medical appointments. In her eighties, she joined the Bus Riders Union alongside Black, Brown, and young activists to demand improved public transit. Since the Radical Sixties, these revolutionary Aunties in America have engaged in activism and mutual-aid work on behalf of Asian Americans and other BIPOC communities. All three recognized the crucial role of cross-racial solidarity and knew they stood on the shoulders of previous generations of civil rights activists. In the pandemic of 2020, new revolutionary Aunties are legion, organized, and laboring in collectives like the Auntie Sewing Squad. Many ASS members are also inspired by role models closer to home: they learned to sew from mothers, grandmothers, and relatives who worked in the garment industry. The Auntie Sewing Squad descended from and openly engages with a history of exploited immigrant labor. This engagement is most obvious in Kristina Wong’s satir­ ical use of the term sweatshop, which refers to garment factories that exploit and endanger workers for profit. Wong’s persona within ASS,

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the Sweatshop Overlord, threatens to cut off fingers of Aunties who don’t sew fast enough and urges Aunties who are parents to (metaphor­ ically) harness their young children as additional sources of unpaid labor. Her use of the term sweatshop is not uncontroversial; some Aunties and observers bristle at it, pointing out that Squad members are privileged to be able to stay home and sew by choice. To compare this voluntary labor to the conditions of those who are trapped into exploitative work may detract from important calls to action by labor activists. Nevertheless, Wong’s dark humor highlights the group’s politics, which are both brash and compassionate, like Wong herself. Indeed, although she rages in all caps in the Aunties’ working group on Facebook—“BACK TO WORK!!!”—Wong’s sincere concern for mask makers and recipients is obvious. Her own frenetic pace of work and commitment to community care subvert the authoritarian role she performs. She packs and mails hundreds of boxes of sewing supplies and care items—cookies, hand salve, CBD, and more—along with handwritten notes that threaten bodily harm and are signed “XO, Overlord.” Reflecting progressive views on care, labor, and activism, and speaking back to an economy that all too frequently exploits women who look like her, Wong captures the essence of pandemic mutual aid. She does so in a way that is specific to the women of color feminism from which her art springs. Each part of the group’s name is meaningful, too. It is no coincidence that ASS has organized around the figure of the Auntie, which looms large culturally for communities of color, and around sewing, a long-undervalued craft and skill that is associated with women of color and immigrant women. The third element of the name, Squad, nods toward recent, hard-fought political gains by women of color. The 2018 midterm election saw the rise of a group of young, unapologetically progressive women of color who were elected to the House of Representatives—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, known as the Squad. Representing the interests of BIPOC communities, the four were unafraid to criticize the Trump

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administration’s racism and sexism, despite repeated verbal attacks and threats from Trump and his followers. Like the other Squad, the Auntie Sewing Squad operates as a collective, pooling their talents and protecting each other, in contrast to the modus operandi of greed and narcissism of some political leaders.

A Community Memoir and Manifesto This collection of essays, creative work, and ephemera is a community document of the labor and care of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Created and edited by Aunties themselves, the book contains essays, interviews, creative writing, photographs, and art that capture the Squad’s quirky, fast-moving, adaptive aesthetic. But the book is more than a document: it distills and examines the Squad’s activities and culture to offer a crit­ ical race and feminist critique of pandemic mask making. We see this book as continuing traditions of Asian American and women of color feminist thought, literature, and art. Decades ago, Black and other feminist writers and scholars of color like Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga, Frances Beale, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Kimberlé Crenshaw called out the white radical feminist movement for failing to confront its own racism. Today, mainstream white feminists still struggle to address all the ways white womanhood and white women have contributed to oppressing nonwhite women. A majority of white women voters supported Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections despite his consistent hostility to women of color and (to put it mildly) discriminatory policies. Moreover, white women often fail to provide or advocate for fair working conditions for women of color colleagues and employees on whom they rely; and they continue to support racist policing that centers white women’s vulnerability while targeting Black and Brown people with unjustified violence. The work of the Auntie Sewing Squad is not only a labor of care; it is a quest for justice. The need to provide masks to vulnerable communities brought many different Aunties to the Squad, but membership in it has come to

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mean many things. We built our community and maintained our vision while the world was on fire. Our book is organized around what sewing and being an Auntie have meant to individual members. In “Labor: Sewing as Care Work,” Cutter Auntie Preeti Sharma explores how sewing has not only provided alternative formations of labor and care for others, in contrast to capitalist modes of sweatshops that usually place garment workers in positions of precarity, but it also has offered ways for Aunties to care for and sustain one another. In “Solidarity: Sewing with Intent,” Sewing Auntie Chrissy Lau examines how sewing became an expression of solidarity with communities differentially vulnerable to and affected by the pandemic, including Indigenous communities, asylum seekers, refugees, and the movement for Black Lives. In “Survival: Sewing as Refuge,” Sewing Auntie Mai-Linh Hong engages with sewing as a survival skill passed down and shared by refugees and as a meditative practice for coping with and responding to traumas such as sexual violence. In “Mutual Aid: Sewing the Pieces Back Together,” Shakedown Auntie Rebecca Solnit journeys through Auntiehood as a form of resistance against patriarchy and the nuclear family and explores what is mutual about mutual aid. In “Posterity: Teaching Sewing, Teaching Care,” Sewing Auntie Grace Yoo reflects on sewing as a means of teaching the next generation to protect and care for their communities. In many ways, sewing and its multiple meanings have provided a guide for building a kind of community that we hope will persist in a post-COVID world. The Aunties’ labor may center on sewing, but their sewing is social practice and political protest as much as it is skill or craft. As a chorus of distinct voices, this book seeks to recreate the Auntie Sewing Squad’s ethic of inclusive, collaborative care work and community building. While creating and donating over 250,000 masks in 2020, the Squad also wove a social web of individuals, nonprofit and advocacy organizations, and diverse recipient communities. This book is not a complete story by any means: largely missing are the voices of partner organizations and individual recipients of our masks. To protect their time and

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privacy, and to respect their autonomy in telling their own stories, we focus here on what we know, and we do not presume to walk in their shoes. They are currently busy surviving and helping others survive. But we are listening, and when they are ready, we will be as well, to lift and amplify their voices in any way we can. For the Aunties, aid is not charity. It is doing what must be done, practically and ethically. It is a better way to be in community with others. In that larger endeavor of remaking and reprioritizing our world into a place where diverse needs are met and abilities honored, we invite you to join us. Notes 1. Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (New York: Verso, 2020), 3, 11. 2. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, “Coming Together: The Asian American Movement,” in Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 25, 31. 3. Kathrin Hill and Edward White, “Containing Coronavirus: Lessons from Asia,” Financial Times, March 15, 2020. 4. “Scientific Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 20, 2020, www.cdc.gov/coronavirus /2019-ncov/more/masking-science-sars-cov2.html. 5. Jacey Fortin, “CDC Employees Accuse Agency of ‘Toxic Culture of Racial Aggressions,’” New York Times, July 14, 2020. 6. Munyaradzi Makoni, “COVID-19 in Africa: Half a Year Later,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20, no. 10 (October 1, 2020): 1127, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30708-8. 7. Bob Woodward, Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020). 8. Russell Jeung, Tara Popovic, Richard Lim, and Nelson Lin, “Anti-Chinese Rhetoric Employed by Perpetrators of Anti-Asian Hate,” Stop AAPI Hate, Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, October 8, 2020, www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wp-content /uploads/REPORT_ANTI-CHINESE-RHETORIC_EMPLOYED_10_08_20.pdf. 9. Grace Kyungwon Hong, Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 10. Preeti Sharma, “Irresponsible State Care and the Virality of Nail Salons: Asian American Women’s Service Work, Vulnerability, and Mutuality,” Journal of Asian American Studies 23, no. 3 (2020): 491–509; Prince, “Six Months Into the COVID-19 Pandemic, Women of Color Face Serious Challenges,” National Organization for Women Foundation, September 18, 2020, https:// now.org/blog/six-months-into-the-covid-19-pandemic-women-of-color-face-serious-challenges; Lucy Erickson, “The Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Women of Color,” Society for Women’s Health Research blog, April 30, 2020, https://swhr.org/the-disproportionateimpact-of-covid-19-on-women-of-color. 11. Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next) (New York: Verso, 2020), 16. 12. Chatzidakis et al., The Care Manifesto, 1. 13. Chatzidakis et al., The Care Manifesto, 22, 40. 14. Grace Lee, Grace Lee Boggs’ Message to Occupy Wall Street, YouTube, 2011, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LvO9ooZ0vks.

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Auntie Sewing Squad Core Values Transparency + Passion + Humor + Kindness Amy Tof t e a nd K ris ti na Wong

1. We seek to be obsolete, not profitable. We have no aspirations of becoming a nonprofit organization, because we don’t want to need to exist. We have stepped in because the United States government has failed to protect the most vulnerable. 2. We prioritize vulnerable communities over money. For example, we don’t make masks for one community instead of another because one holds the potential for a bigger donation. In fact, if a community can’t afford to donate toward their masks, it is probably that community we should be sewing for. 3. We work collectively and encourage our Aunties to sew for communities for which they have passion and even to helm the “ask” for communities they care about most. We are a team of leaders and empower anyone to step up and help where they feel most engaged. 4. We prefer having a direct and vetted connection with our recipient. We won’t mail masks to an address we have found online without making a connection to the recipient. We are not a labor farm that makes masks that get sent to an outside distribution hub. We are both the makers and the distributors. We want a mask to connect the person who made it and the person who wears it. 5. We are not here for capitalism. Because sewing these masks is about making safety and health a human right, we reject capitalist language like buy, order, and sell with respect to masks. Our currency is the time we spend making these masks to protect and show solidarity with vulnerable communities.

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6. We value our Auntie community as people first. We value the creative lives and personal connections within this group over “more efficient” ways of working. This is why we aren’t organized regionally and why we will not break into chapters. This is why we sometimes mail elastic across the country to an Auntie who is the only Squad member in their state. 7. We believe in Auntie Community Care. For Aunties who have made masks for our large group efforts, we offer appreciative care, primarily in the form of food and creature comforts suitable for life under a stay-at-home order. 8. We lead with love and fierce, sometimes twisted humor. People will screw up. People will make mistakes. We will joke and have fun. We will be kind and forgiving. But we will also hold each other accountable. It’s all in good fun as we work together to cope with this difficult time. We realize this tone will not be for everyone, but it’s who we are.

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Ode to the Spreadsheet of Glory Laur a K a rlin Super Aunties are like captains managing specific populations’ mask requests. They help field requests, connect with community organizers, and coordinate the sewists who want to sew for each campaign. Auntie HQ, Facebook post, April 23, 2020 The Spreadsheet of Glory was created by Uncle Nathan Stubley, and for this we both bless and curse his name. But mostly bless.

A thing of beauty, crafted to connect, copy paste   drop down   enter value   double-check   move on You hold in your tabs a constellation: pledges, locations, notes, ever-shifting, ever-expanding stories. Dear Spreadsheet, unsung hero, I sing your praise, even while my eyes glaze over, transferring names from campaigns, row upon row    column upon column, ashes to ashes    ASSes to ASSes, assessing the goal, the pledged, the delivered, the remaining, the outstanding, outstanding in our field which is not the field any of us thought we would be standing in, because no one saw this particular apocalypse coming, and no one thought it would be Aunties holding up the sky when it falls again and again.

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Spreadsheet of Glory, holder of our data points, embedded in which are stories— Each name is an Auntie, each Auntie a vessel of rage, love, defiance, generosity, a tangle of motivations and perspectives uniting under one banner: ASS. Each column of numbers speaks of masks pledged, hands raised to say, “This shit is fucked up and I refuse to relent,” and these acts of defiance add up to millions of stitches, thousands of trips to the post office, infinite connections to our humanity. Each address is a place, a community, that has masks now, that has been told, We see you. We respect you. We care about you. Sweet Spreadsheet of Glory, I have spent more time with you than my husband would care for, but he is an understanding man, and besides, these are unusual times. Dear Spreadsheet of Glory, I have hovered over you like I do with my newborn baby, and I hope one day she knows her Mama went down—not sewing, but, well, recording the names of those who did, dammit, and I hope one day she knows her Mama won’t go down without a fight.

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A Mary Poppins Box of Supplies Laur ie Be r na del

How do you ship sewing supplies, including fabric, elastic, and thread, to hundreds of volunteers around the country without spending all of the Auntie Sewing Squad’s monetary donations on the United States Postal Service? As much as the Squad loves and supports the USPS, I doubt we ever desired to use our funds as the bailout it never received from the federal government. Members who live near the Los Angeles headquarters or other hubs, most of which sprouted up in California, could easily get fabric via curbside, porch, or physically distanced pickups or drop-offs. However, for other people, like me, who live way outside these areas, possibly as the sole Squad member for miles and miles, Kristina’s brilliant mind came up with a plan I dubbed the “Mary Poppins” method. A popular online marketplace—a buying and selling platform— became our way to funnel and ship supplies to active sewers in fabric deserts across the United States.1 A Squad member who had fabric or other supplies to distribute created a marked listing for another Squad member to buy, in line with the marketplace’s rules. Generally included in the package were bonus “Auntie Care” items—varying forms of appreciation such as food or little gifts, some of which could be specially requested. Afterwards, members could request reimbursement from the Squad’s funds for the cost of shipping a supply box. At first, seven to twelve dollars a package seemed like a trivial amount for which to request reimbursement, but trust me, as months went by, shipping costs added up as fast as our elastic supply dwindled. Requests for masks kept coming and completed masks kept going out by the

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t­ housands, like a revolving door. By the time someone sent out a third shipment of masks, asking for reimbursement was part of the process. I called supply packages Mary Poppins boxes because it never ceased to amaze me how much was inside each box. Squad members would excitedly post photos upon receipt, strengthening my nickname for the process. Here is what came in my first box: • About fifty fat quarters,2 with seven to ten cuts per stack, enough to make seventy to one hundred masks

• Six cones of thread, a few thousand yards each



• Twelve cuts of fabric, one to three yards each



• A large embroidered Auntie Sewing Squad pincushion



• A small mason jar of homemade corn peach salsa

Since my box took seven days to travel from California to North Carolina, thanks to the postal service’s slowdown, I didn’t chance my life on the salsa that had been marinating in hot shipping trucks.3 If ever we stretched the marketplace’s intended uses for its prepaid shipping label, I hope our resourcefulness can be forgiven as what the great John Lewis, a civil rights icon who passed in July 2020, would consider “good trouble.” The Mary Poppins method ties the Auntie Sewing Squad network together, enabling the labor of love that has provided hand-sewn masks to over two hundred thousand strangers in need—strangers forgotten by all levels of government, but distantly embraced by the Squad. Notes 1. A fabric desert is an area where fabric for making masks is hard to obtain; it is usually also devoid of elastic for making ear loops. 2. A fat quarter is a piece of fabric measuring eighteen inches (a quarter yard) by twenty-two inches, traditionally used by quilters but also convenient for sewing masks. 3. The slowdown was mostly due to unjustified restructuring by the new postmaster general at a time when reliance on the postal service grew, including the need to vote by mail.

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Candace Kim, photo by Sharon McNary US supply and distribution chains fell apart in the early days of the pandemic. Ordering sewing supplies and fabric for masks online became a gamble as manufacturers delayed shipments or were unable to send them at all. We received a tip that a local nonprofit focused on creative reuse had received a massive donation of quilting cotton from a collector who had to move. We were able to buy quality fabric at a clearance price. The group trusted me with thousands of dollars of donations so that I could rush over and buy out the store. I crawled among the piles looking for fabrics to send to Indigenous communities and farm workers. I filled my car multiple times, and volunteer drivers took the fabric up and down the West Coast.

Vegan Kimchee Gr ac e J. Yo o

Many Aunties grew tired of eating the same-flavored foods day after day. To empower Aunties to change up their meals (and lives) with kimchee, I led a Zoom teach-in on making kimchee (vegan) with Aunties, Uncles, and Unties in July 2020. Here is the recipe I shared.

Supplies Knife Cutting board Bowl Wide-mouthed 1-quart jar or two 1-pint jars

Ingredients

1 h  ead napa cabbage, cut lengthwise into approximately 2-inch slices

4 tablespoons salt

4 to 5 garlic cloves, peeled and minced

2 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and minced

¼ cup gochugaru



¼ cup thinly sliced green onions

Instructions Place sliced napa cabbage in a large bowl and massage salt through it. Leave to wilt at room temperature for six hours. Combine minced garlic and ginger with ground chili pepper (or gochugaru) and green onions to create a paste.

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Rinse the wilted cabbage and squeeze out the water. Using your hands, mix the paste into the cabbage. Press down the kimchee. Leave about 1 inch of headroom. Keep jar at room temperature on the countertop overnight, then refrigerate. The kimchee is ready to eat when it has fermented; it will taste sour, tangy, and spicy.

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⊲ Chey Townsend and Beatrice Townsend, Moment of Joy In March 2020, I started sewing masks—with determination, intention, love, and care (and sometimes rage) against a heavy backdrop of uncertainty and a world gone wrong. In June, my twelve-year-old daughter Beatrice joined me, resulting in this much-needed moment of joy. Working together, we sewed these child-sized masks for vulnerable Black and Brown communities, both local and out of state. We’d like to believe our playful display imbued the masks with hope for a brighter day.

Labor

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Sewing as Care Work Pr e e ti S h a rm a

When the Auntie Sewing Squad began in March 2020, led by Asian American women and women of color, its volunteer members imagined it as a short-term project in which Aunties offered their labor as a form of immediate care and support for workers and communities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the government proved ineffective at procuring and producing personal protective equipment (PPE), Aunties scrambled together a national network to make cloth masks, in the tradition of mutual aid or rapid response. These Aunties—young, old, of any gender, and with any level of sewing experience—heeded an online call to join the Squad. They dusted off old or inherited sewing machines, or were given them, alongside a stash of never-ending fabrics to sew masks with care, love, and anger. The Squad’s volunteer members use the familial moniker Auntie to highlight how care with and for others is a necessary part of a relationship based in mutual aid. An Auntie may be known for her unpaid reproductive caretaking role in extended family relationships, but the term often applies to anyone in an intergenerational, gendered relationship who offers support. During the pandemic, Aunties in the Squad embraced the role and the broader caring relationship. But even in the midst of this at-home sewing effort to benefit workers and others frequently exposed to the virus, the Aunties also managed to care for each other. Therein lay a distinguishing feature of their mutual-aid labor and their politics. Cognizant of the physical and emotional tolls that mask making exacted, the Squad established a robust Community Care team that sent meals, baked goods, handmade mementos, and notes of appre-

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ciation to working Aunties. Although the Squad operates under noncapitalist labor relations, this dimension of its operation offers an alternative to labor practices and relationships that dehumanize immigrants and women of color. By creating a mechanism to safeguard one another’s well-being, the Aunties voiced but also enacted a critique of the harms wrought by a wildly negligent state and the crushing structures of exploitative work long reliant on immigrants and women of color. The Squad expands conversations about forms of nonexploited labor under different sets of conditions, as much as it demonstrates the mutuality in mutual aid.

Acts of Radical Care (and Acts That Aren’t) During a pandemic that requires government public health intervention, one might expect the language of care to be spectacularly politicized—and so it was in 2020, sometimes in ironic and troubling ways. On March 27, 2020, the US federal government signed into law the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, signaling an attempt to aid the country in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, local shelter-in-place laws, and the growing economic crisis. Under the jovial acronym of CARES, the act offered an economic stimulus to seven different categories of groups, including individuals and hospitals. Belying its name, however, the CARES Act failed to provide material protection to the most vulnerable communities, particularly Indige­ nous, Black, and other communities of color, as well as undocumented communities. Its well-documented deficiencies include the inaccessibility of the one-time $1,200 stipend to undocumented people as well as to students who were listed as dependents. Moreover, the amount was laughably small in comparison to the economic pain of anyone who had lost a job because of the pandemic. Although the CARES Act enhanced unemployment benefits with $600 a week from the federal government, that program expired at the end of July 2020. Such inadequate benefits for working families seemed further diminished when news emerged in late spring 2020 of major corporations claiming millions in

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CARES aid that had been earmarked for small businesses. At the same time, billionaires added $10.2 trillion to their wealth while the companies they owned laid off workers or refused to properly protect workers against COVID-19; Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, for example, made an estimated $90 billion during the pandemic as of December 2020, while Amazon workers did not receive sustained hazard pay or adequate protection at work.1 Those who were regularly exposed to COVID-19 at their workplaces because of lack of protection were sacrificed to “keep the economy running” and labeled as “heroes.” In the beginning of the pandemic in the US, shelter-in-place laws made exceptions for “essential workers,” a euphemistic label for those who met vital needs or safeguarded human life or property. Essential workers picked crops, rang up groceries, cooked meals, and treated medical patients. They scrambled to find supplies of masks and gloves in order to keep their jobs and survive. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles County struck deals with the garment industry—whose workers were initially omitted from the essentialworker designation—to make masks.2 Despite the importance of this deal for public health, garment workers labored in sweatshop operations that paid exploitatively low piece rates. Additionally, workers sewing protective gear for others in factories ironically faced a lack of protection themselves. The term care is often associated with women’s invisible and unpaid work to raise and nurture children and others in need. Two commonly used definitions of care are, first, a “mental disposition of concern”; and, second, the “practices that we engage in as a result of these concerns.”3 Care is also about caring relationships, or “the sustained and/ or intense personal attention that enhances the welfare of its recipients.”4 Care work has always had gendered and racialized dimensions on every scale, from local to global. Care as “service work” comprises a wide range of occupations, from manicurist to nanny; each of these positions has its own dynamics of race, migration, and relationships to empire. For example, today many women of Vietnamese descent work

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in the nail industry in the United States, and Caribbean and Central American women are overrepresented as nannies or as caregivers for the elderly. Feminist labor historians have offered trenchant accounts of how such work evolved from slavery and servitude—for example, from work done by enslaved African and Indigenous women and their descendants prior to Emancipation and then as home help performed by Asian, Black, and Latina women across the United States.5 The Auntie Sewing Squad understands its efforts of care and concern as a form of radical care, mutual aid, and social justice. In times of urgent need or disaster, like a pandemic, radical care offers rapid assistance without placing any expectations or requirements on the recipient.6 The Auntie Sewing Squad also defines radical care as a project affirming a person’s inherent worth through protection. In August 2020, Auntie Valerie Soe collaborated with the Kronos Quartet to produce a short film, Radical Care, that documented the Squad’s work and thinking. Close-up shots focused on the tracing, cutting, sewing, and ironing of masks, with a soundtrack interspersed with Auntie quotes and the quartet’s fast-paced, eclectic contemporary string music. In the film, Auntie Sally Nemeth explains how she sees her mask-making contributions as radical care: “Each mask that goes out there will hopefully tell that one person who receives it that they are worthy of being protected, and that there are people out there who care enough about their well-being to do the work.”7 That is, Nemeth’s care and work affirm the worth of mask recipients, whom society (or at least capitalism) has deemed unworthy of protection—essential yet expendable workers. During a pandemic that made social inequities glaringly obvious, the Squad saw itself as a collective force to challenge certain communities’ devalued status and disproportionate vulnerability. The Squad imagines radical care as a way to challenge the societal inequalities that COVID-19 laid bare and worsened, and which stemmed from systemic failures in government and in the workplace. Radical care through mutual aid is different from charity, which often has strings attached and whose agencies may take a long time to

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evaluate whether a recipient is worthy of receiving assistance.8 Instead, mutual aid functions as an immediate response to systemic harm with the goal of making space for continued political change. As its national group of volunteers grows, the Squad has refused to incorporate as a nonprofit organization not only because a nonprofit structure would limit its horizontal leadership (with requirements for an executive board, for example), but also because nonprofits often adopt a charity orientation that evaluates a recipient’s behavior or morals.9 In a mission statement drafted by Auntie Sewing Squad founder Kristina Wong and other Aunties, the Squad states: Our Aunties, Uncles, and non-binary volunteers give time and labor to make masks to stop the spread of Covid-19, specifically in the most vulnerable of communities with no access to masks. We believe in a system of community care and having a direct connection to our recipients. We share resources on patterns, fabric, and elastic. We pride our origins as a mostly WOC and QTNB group that celebrates the ability of all our Aunties to rise up and become the real leaders in this crisis.

The Squad’s system of Community Care, which operates both externally and internally, is an important aspect of its practice of mutual aid. Externally, the Squad has dispatched masks to the communities made most vulnerable by constant exposure to COVID-19. These have included workers’ organizations, abolitionist organizations, community-based organizations, resource centers, refugee support shelters, and Indige­ nous nations and communities. The requirements for receiving aid are minimal: mainly, the Squad needs to have direct contact with members of the receiving community in order to quickly assess a group’s need for masks and its readiness and ability to distribute donated masks. Internally, Aunties have sustained each other by sharing resources as well as offering care gifts (such as food items and hand salve) and mutual emotional support.

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Who Works at the Overlord’s Factory? Prior to the pandemic, the Auntie Sewing Squad’s founder and “Factory Overlord” Kristina Wong was a full-time touring artist and comedian. From shows like the Wong Street Journal to standalone performances in roles like Fannie Wong, Former Miss Chinatown 2nd Runner-Up, and even the Radical Cram School series on YouTube, Wong has not only shaped the Los Angeles theater landscape, but she has created a body of art that uses humor and satire to address the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Most recently, she became a representative on the Los Angeles Koreatown Neighborhood Council addressing housing and gentrification concerns. Like other artists at the start of the pandemic, Wong found that her theater work and income evaporated when college campuses, theater venues, and travel shut down. Concerned about the impact of the pandemic on immunocompromised friends, Wong pulled out the sewing machine she often used to sew her own stage props and offered to make masks from cloth scraps lying around her home. Once word spread, Wong was bombarded with requests, and a friend jokingly told her, “Oh, you need a Squad of Aunties.” Through the Auntie Sewing Squad, Wong hustled to do work that she asserts should have been “the government’s work.”10 Wong immediately took on another ironic persona, that of the Factory Overlord supervising the work of over eight hundred Aunties across the US, who have since made and donated over 250,000 masks. The Overlord persona and Wong’s approach brought humor, questions, and relief to the work. Wong has cheekily informed news outlets that she is a performance artist who now runs an amateur supply company. She made her own first set of rough masks on her Janome special edition Hello Kitty sewing machine and said, “I did not realize I would be getting messages from nurses, from grocery store workers, from homeless shelter workers. Basically in a matter of forty-eight hours, I was like, What have I signed myself on to?”11 For Wong, making masks was a way to deal with the horror of seeing essential workers being sacrificially placed at risk to support everyone else’s needs. Aunties who cared

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about those workers felt compelled to protect them through a different, noncapitalist set of labor relations. Like Wong, the Aunties grappled with changes to their work, income, and routines, many of which they described on the Auntie Sewing Squad’s Facebook page. Many Aunties joined the Squad because they were friends or fellow artists of Wong or someone else in the Squad and saw a call for support in their Facebook feeds. Some others were already members of local sewing or knitting circles. Strikingly, many were second- or third-generation Asian or Latinx immigrants, whose mothers and grandmothers had performed garment work in factories or at home, but who had never sewn anything before joining. In part because the Auntie Sewing Squad community was forged online, its internal Facebook “working group” page was extremely active, with a constant flow of photos, videos, short updates, and links; the notifications kept pinging all day. The working group page also countered the physical and social isolation caused by the pandemic. Aunties regularly put out requests for anywhere from 100 to 2,500 masks, shared their mask handiwork, and posted questions and answers about patterns and sewing. The page was also full of the humor and satire emblematic of Wong’s comedic style. Wong herself, playing the Overlord, peppered the page with over-the-top warnings to Aunties to keep sewing or she would chop their fingers off. She implored Aunties to extract more labor from their school-age children and scolded babies as “lazy,” all as a performative critique of labor exploitation. About a month into the pandemic, Aunties reflected on Facebook about how the call and urgent need to make masks had taken over their daily routine and lives. In one popular post in April 2020, an Auntie asked for a roll call to learn about other Aunties’ work identities outside the group and to get to know each other virtually. Aunties responded that they were mothers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, journalists, nurses, costume designers, seamstresses, teachers, college professors, scientists, nonprofit workers, and organizers. Others noted that they identified as disabled, were on disability leave, or were between jobs. With 156 comments,

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it was by far one of the most commented on and vigorously discussed posts at the time. Aunties consoled each other on the grief evoked by the complete shift in life, work, and work life wrought by the pandemic and the difficulties of balancing mask making with care of children and elderly parents. Aunties also debated the meaning of their professional identities, as some thought they were all “overqualified to work in Kristina’s virtual sweatshop,” given their own work histories. Wong’s allcaps contribution to the thread reminded folks in jest that their only identity was to sew and that they should get back to sewing. Meant to reveal Aunties’ prepandemic work identities, the discussion instead challenged the notion of skill and the undervaluing of stitching, making, and garment production work. Aunties speculated about how many immigrant women of color, displaced and forced into garment sweatshop work through global capitalism, are also “overqual­ ified” for their low-wage work. One Auntie found the discussion jarring because, as she pointed out, sewing is not a low-skill or nontechnical job for which women holding multiple degrees might be overqualified. A different Auntie layered the conversation by saying that sewing is a complex task requiring dexterity, accuracy, and mechanical aptitude. Both Aunties found that the sewing done by the Squad did not leave much room for originality or creativity, since it focused on mass producing a single item to protect others’ lives, though not all Aunties felt the same about the lack of creativity. The discussion in the post guided members of the Squad to parse their own relationships to sewing as volunteers in a mutual-aid project. While volunteers are not the same as garment workers, the labor of sewing is looked down on in either case. All Aunties agreed that sewing and garment production are largely devalued and taken for granted as women’s work.12 So what work do the Aunties do now? The Squad has also humorously created a job title for virtually any task that is part of the process of making and delivering masks. All members of the Squad are called Aunties for their role in producing masks as a project of care, evoking the role of aunties in various kinship, queer, and chosen-family roles.

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The term itself signals a relationship between individuals forged in acts of care, caretaking, and interdependence. In the Squad, those performing specialized tasks within the group have their own titles: Fabric Aunties scrounge in fabric shops across their cities to find fabric; Elastic Aunties do the same in search of elastic for mask straps; Discount or Haggle Aunties look for low-priced materials, as well as discounts on tools like sewing machines and rotary cutters; Cutter Aunties cut out mask pieces from fabric for distribution to a local hub or another region; and Sewing Aunties sew the cloth masks together using their preferred mask pattern. Super Aunties help the Squad process mask requests and ensure that masks move from the Sewing Aunties to the recipients. They even arrange for local mask pickups from a hub once a week. They are also Super because they coordinate the larger mask requests, of five hundred or more, for which they ask Sewing Aunties to make “pledges” or commit to sewing a specific number of masks in a week. The numbers of masks requested vary from week to week, and Super Aunties spread out the large requests so as to not overburden each other. In all this work, importantly, the Squad also fundamentally understands that what sustains sewing must be not only rage but also care. It therefore has a Care Auntie, who supports and sustains the group by coordinating distribution of gifts and affirmations. To complete their mask-making pledges, Aunties have transformed their homes. Kitchens, dining areas, and bedrooms have been converted into workstations, with sewing machines occupying tables, and other furniture covered with yards of haphazardly folded fabric. They have asked each other, Where are you storing all your fabric? Others have responded, You mean your fabric doesn’t just live on your couch? They also joke about perfectionist Ironing Aunties who iron their fabric before and after sewing their masks. As the mission statement suggests, in jest and critique, Aunties have “turned our living rooms into ‘sweatshops’ because of the failure of the federal government to provide proper PPE to essential workers and vulnerable communities.”

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What Is a Sweatshop, and Why Do Aunties Use the Word? In another post in early April 2020, Aunties questioned the use of the term sweatshop and debated what terminology best described the Squad’s work. Contributors to the discussion came up with terms like volunteers, helpers, and rebel stitchers. Aunties noted the power and importance of language and went back and forth on the origins of the term sweatshop and its problematic connotations for a group of volunteers with the privilege of time and resources to provide aid. Others noted that the term aptly described the physical sweat of their contributions and the heat of the sewing machine. One, a nurse, commented on the reality of stress and sweating as she sewed in physical isolation in order to protect herself and fellow nurses. Aunties noted ironically that the Squad’s work is not low-paid but completely unpaid, placing the blame on the federal government’s ineptitude and lack of preparedness for the pandemic. As Wong observed, using sweatshop to describe the Aunties’ contribution of time and labor ironically is a political critique of the government.13 Originating from the role of a “sweater,” or a tailor who works overtime at home, and for “sweating,” or subcontracted work performed at home, today the word sweatshop remains, as Laura Hapke observes, “synonymous with the lowest and most degrading kind of American employment.”14 Garment factories around the world often operate under conditions that violate labor laws, from low wages to poor working conditions. Such violations include occupational safety hazards, like the lack of access to exits and exposure to moving machine parts and live electrical wires, as well as lack of workers’ compensation and inaccurate recordkeeping.15 In the early 1990s, 50 percent of the clothing sold in the US was produced domestically. Due to neoliberal policies, including the deregulation of manufacturing and removal of trade barriers, most garment production has shifted abroad. Today, that figure is down to 2 percent. US garment production is now concentrated in Los Angeles, New York,

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and the Carolinas. In Los Angeles, the largest center of garment production, workers are predominantly immigrant and women of color: immigrant workers make up 83 percent of the industry workforce.16 Neoliberal policies and labor market conditions have also made it easy for overseas garment factories to operate under conditions that violate labor standards set in the global North—from the maquiladoras in US-Mexico border cities to the thousands of factories in Bangladesh. The garment industry has also profited from “fast fashion”—the rapid production and sale of cheap clothes using low-cost materials and lowwage labor, with consumer demand stoked by online marketing and influencers. In Los Angeles, for example, the company Fashion Nova markets clothing on Instagram and produces garments in under two weeks. This model of production relies on exploitative conditions to be profitable: Fashion Nova was found to owe $3.8 million in back wages to hundreds of workers from 2016 to 2019.17 But the sudden drop in demand for clothing as a result of the pandemic has also hurt workers. Initial reports show that garment workers in Bangladesh bore the brunt of COVID-19 fast-fashion order cancellations, with over one thousand factories affected and an estimated loss of $2 billion in sales.18 Exploitation of garment workers in the United States has been accompanied by a long history of activism and resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Asian and Latinx “sweatshop warriors” pushed back against their deteriorating workplace conditions. Protesting from “behind the label,” they challenged falling wages, longer working hours, speedups, and layoffs indicative of the industry’s restructuring. Across the country, Asian and Latinx workers took on big designers like Jessica McClintock and DKNY, for example.19 This continues a longer history of activism from immigrant women garment workers a century earlier leading charges for unionization, safer working conditions, and better wages in places like New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. That the Auntie Sewing Squad includes so many women who are daughters and granddaughters of garment workers speaks to the nuanced history of race, gender, and migration in the industry.

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The density of the local garment industry in Los Angeles prompted the County to partner with garment factories in a mask-making initiative, the only one of its kind in the United States. (In a related initiative in New York City, four companies were tasked with sewing four hundred thousand surgical gowns by the end of May, with fabric from textile mills in North Carolina.) As a part of the L.A. Protects program, the County collaborated with apparel companies to produce five million masks for nonmedical essential workers. With more than four hundred companies on board, the program worked with manufacturers like Reformation, Buck Mason, and Los Angeles Apparel.20 Producing the masks in Los Angeles promised completion of large numbers of masks faster than overseas sources could supply them, given global needs and shutdowns. Yet the initiative raised concerns that the program was reinstating sweatshop production and collaborating with known sweatshops. Despite Los Angeles’s efforts to protect other essential workers, garment workers were left behind. Given the crowded workspaces and the need for multiple workers to handle the same materials, COVID19 exacerbated the violations of labor, health, and safety regulations endemic to the garment industry. Los Angeles Apparel recorded an outbreak of nearly four hundred COVID-19 cases, four deaths, and repeated violations of physical distancing requirements. The Garment Worker Center (GWC), a worker’s organization in Los Angeles, has noted the ongoing impact of the piece-rate system on garment workers: those who made five cents on a shirt before the pandemic now made twenty cents per mask, which still amounted to an hourly wage grossly under the minimum wage in Los Angeles. The Auntie Sewing Squad, some of whose members have connections with the GWC, has sought ways to collaborate with and support garment workers. For example, Auntie Candice Kim, who runs a Squad hub supplying fabric and other materials in northeast Los Angeles, is also a former GWC board member. In the early days of the pandemic, the Squad informally coordinated with the GWC to share fabric, elastic, and other resources.

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The GWC had created its own mask-making program, Homework for Help, as part of its three-pronged approach to the pandemic crisis— emergency relief, worker protections, and income replacement—to address the 70 percent unemployment rate in the garment industry as a result of the pandemic.21 Through the program, GWC reclaimed the term homework through the efforts of members who fulfilled mask requests for pay while working at home because their factories were either closed, or open but unsafe. Garment workers had to transition and adjust to using home sewing machines instead of industrial machines, create their own sample pieces, and access fabric while caring for their kids at home. According to Marissa Nuncio, executive director of the GWC, members ironically found GWC-supported homework rewarding: members said, “I can take my time, and actually sew well, because I am a good sewer, but that is not what I am asked to do in these sweatshops. I am asked to make something as cheaply and as fast as I can, and it is not good quality.”22 Importantly, garment workers sewing masks were able to take their time and also be compensated fairly. When individuals and organizations contacted the Auntie Sewing Squad seeking to buy masks, the Squad directed them to the GWC as an ethical source, in contrast to the factories exploiting garment workers and exposing them to the risk of disease. Aunties also advocated for changes to the piece-rate system that perpetuates low wages in California. In mid-May, in a Facebook post to the Squad’s working group, Kim urged Aunties in California to contact their elected officials to ask them to support S.B. 1399, a bill that would secure and enforce protections for garment workers’ health and wage rights in factories producing PPE, as well as challenging the piecerate system in garment manufacturing by creating accountability from the factory floor to the fashion brand.23 Kim reflects on her engagement in the Squad and with GWC: “We are doing this thing because we are being called to meet the need in this moment to provide masks for communities that are at higher risk, but we also understand that there are workers who are exploited, and could use the solidarity of people

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that have influence with decision-makers like constituents.”24 While there was no formal relationship between the GWC and the Squad, Aunties tracked S.B. 1399 through shared Facebook posts. And, when the bill failed in August 2020 because it was not brought to the floor, the Squad mourned the loss in the struggle for fair working conditions for garment workers. Some Aunties commented that they see their radical care and mutual-aid work as intimately connected to GWC’s fight for human dignity and an end to labor exploitation.

Community Care, or What Makes the Auntie Sewing Squad Different The Auntie Sewing Squad runs on pizza, baked goods, and honey. Or so it seems, based on the Community Care spreadsheet, managed by Aunties Gayle Isa and Duyen Tran, and supported by Shira Teflebaum. In the early stages of the Squad, Kristina Wong was receiving regular offers from her friends and fans to feed Wong and others who were working on masks all day. To share that generosity, Wong reached out to Isa to be the Auntie Care coordinator. Wong knew of Isa’s organizational skills from her background as executive director of a nonprofit organization, as an advocate of the arts, and in her current work as a consultant on inclusion and equity projects. Isa had time available due to a slowdown in her projects. “The universe had aligned,” and Isa ended up fostering an intricate and necessary system for distributing gifts of food and affirmations as a part of an organizational culture of support. By intentionally creating Community Care, the Squad signaled that it chose to operate differently, with internal politics and practices of mutuality and care. With the shelter-in-place mandates that took effect in many areas in mid-March, most Aunties were experiencing isolation and the fears of the pandemic. Community Care enabled Aunties to offer and receive emotional support and maintain connections to the outside world. Isa saw herself as a “matchmaker” because she created a system by which Aunties could exchange small comforts according to their interests and

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preferences: home bakers and professional chefs offered cookies and meals, yoga instructors offered virtual yoga sessions, and urban garden­ ers shared seedlings. One Auntie asked for letters or artwork from the care team because she was exhausted from her sewing, the troubling news cycle on TV, and having only her partner to speak to all day. The letters she received gave her a sense of encouragement and connection. Isa insists that “the act of the offering [of care] was even more import­ ant than the physical food [or item] itself in terms of being a reminder” of an Auntie’s value.25 She notes that initially it was not easy for many Aunties to adapt to a practice of requesting and accepting as well as offering support. Since Community Care started, Isa has logged nearly one thousand formal offers and requests in the spreadsheet. At first, offerings of care were provided primarily through nocontact deliveries by Aunties or food-delivery service workers. Requests for companionship were met through Zoom gatherings for collective sewing or stretching. Later, Aunties figured out a way to engage in safely distanced physical deliveries of care by dropping off and collecting items at hubs. During these encounters, people often lingered to talk awhile (at a safe distance). Those who did not live near a hub noted that the digital space of the Squad’s working group also enabled them to partake of care and emotional support. Community Care demonstrates the Auntie Sewing Squad’s way to care for themselves and others differently. The modern garment industry, a product of global and racial capitalism, relies on exploiting the labor and lives of immigrant women and women of color for little to no pay. Because of its commitment to caring for those made vulnerable by the pandemic, the Squad operates under noncapitalist relations and so does not engage in the buying or selling of masks. Nor does the Squad imagine itself as a long-term nonprofit organization: it intends to become obsolete. Summarizing the role of care in the Squad, Isa reflects on how her work in the Squad is different from her role in a nonprofit organization. As an executive director, she found herself having to decline projects because of a lack of time, resources, and capacity. In

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the Squad, Isa asserts, “It’s such a powerful thing for all of us, in the face of so much injustice in this world, and in the structure of capitalism that we live in, to be able to say yes, that there is enough for us to be able to share, for us to be able to be the support that we all need.”26 Isa’s vision and assertion that “there is enough” not only highlights the incapacity of a capitalist economy to provide protection for its essential workers and vulnerable communities but also challenges the structural injustices inherent in capitalism that produce the sense of scarcity and the motivation for individualism.

Conclusion: Sewing for Radical Care in the Time of Coronavirus The Auntie Sewing Squad sought to create radical care by providing free cloth masks. A group of over eight hundred women nationwide, led by Asian American women and women of color, came together to support communities whose structural vulnerabilities were exacerbat­ ed by the pandemic. Aunties offered their labor and care in the form of mutual aid. Evoking scenes of mid-twentieth-century or even post1960s homework and sweated labor, Aunties transformed their homes into makeshift workstations for producing masks. In doing so, they revisited and expanded conversations on the notions of skill, devalued work, and sweatshops. The Squad also challenged nonprofit and activism models by creating structures for mutual aid and care. Through the Community Care team, Aunties regularly offered and received care to counter the physical and social isolation of the pandemic. Auntie Care also countered the isolation inherent in nuclear and heteronormative family care structures and for some, the lack of proximity to other Asian American and women of color feminist communities. The Auntie Facebook posts and Zoom gatherings fostered an online community offering humor, mutual support, and emotional connection. Reflecting on what the Squad’s culture of care offers a postpandemic world, Care Auntie Gayle Isa hopes that “for many people who haven’t been a part of mutual care or

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support work, that we are all just able to remember this little seed of what is possible and that we are able to carry it forward beyond the pandemic in terms of how we take time to connect with other people, and how we take time to care for other people and for ourselves as well.”27 The Auntie Sewing Squad offers alternative possibilities for rapid response and sustained care in the future. Notes The author would like to thank Jolie Chea, Do Jun Lee, Keith Miyake, Stephanie Santos, Laurel Mei-Singh, Lina Stepick, Vivian Truong, and Wendi Yamashita, as well as the reviewers and editors, for generative feedback and comments that have shaped and improved this essay. 1. Samuel Stebbins and Grant Suneson, “Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk among US Billionaires Getting Richer during Coronavirus Pandemic,” USA Today, December 1, 2020, www.usatoday.com /story/money/2020/12/01/american-billionaires-that-got-richer-during-covid/43205617/. 2. Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles, “Mayor Garcetti Forms ‘L.A. Protects’ to Spur New Production of Urgently Needed Supplies in Fight against COVID-19,” LA Mayor, March 27, 2020, www.lamayor.org/mayor-garcetti-forms-%E2%80%98la-protects%E2%80%99-spur-new -production-urgently-needed-supplies-fight-against-covid. 3. Joan Tronto, “An Ethic of Care,” Generations 22, no. 3 (1998): 16. 4. Viviana Zelizer, “Caring Everywhere,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel S. Parrenas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 269. 5. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43. 6. Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1.142 (2020): 3, 10; Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity,” Social Text 38, no. 1.142 (2020): 136. 7. Radical Care, directed by Valerie Soe (2020). 8. Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity,” 140–41. In this vein, mutual aid is a radical, noncharity response to the state’s cuts to social welfare and its punitive politics of welfare that portray women of color as undeserving; see Christine Anh, “Democratizing American Philanthropy,” in Incite, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2007), 63–64. 9. Incite, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. 10. Madeleine Brand, “Comedian Kristina Wong Sews Masks for People in Poverty: It’s about Government Negligence,” KCRW, June 3, 2020, www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with -madeleine-brand/lapd-protests-looting-mental-health/kristina-wong-masks. 11. “Aunties Form Ultimate Sewing Squad to Save Lives,” USA Today, August 19, 2020, www .usatoday.com/videos/life/womankind/2020/08/19/aunties-form-ultimate-sewing-squad -save-lives/3385617001. 12. www.facebook.com/groups/2764362993676831/?post_id=2847600955353034. 13. www.facebook.com/groups/2764362993676831/?post_id=2795056703940793. 14. Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Laura Hapke, Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 1, 17–18; Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2001). 15. Nicole Archer, Ana Luz Gonzalez, Kimi Lee, et al., “The Garment Worker Center and the ‘Forever 21’ Campaign,” in Working for Justice: The LA Model of Organizing and Advocacy, ed. Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2010); Edna Bonacich, “Asian and

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Latino Immigrants in the Los Angeles Garment Industry,” in Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks, ed. Ivan Light and Parminder Bhachu (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993); Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (New York: Verso, 1997). 16. Archer, Gonzalez, Lee, et al., “The Garment Worker Center.” 17. Natalie Kitroeff, “Fashion Nova’s Secret: Underpaid Workers in Los Angeles Factories,” New York Times, December 16, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/business/fashion-nova -underpaid-workers.html. 18. Rachel Tashjian, “‘It’s Collapsing Violently’: Coronavirus Is Creating a Fast Fashion Nightmare,” GQ, April 2, 2020, www.gq.com/story/coronavirus-fast-fashion-dana-thomas. 19. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors. 20. Sam Dean, “The Sweatshops Are Still Open: Now They Make Masks,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2020, www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-21/making-masks-and-making-lessthan-minimum-wage; Laurence Darmiento, “How the L.A. Apparel Industry Became Mask Makers,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2020, www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-06-22 /los-angeles-apparel-industry-masks-fast-fashion-supply-chain. 21. Marissa Nuncio, interview with author, November 19, 2020. The GWC also sponsored and helped obtain materials for a similar program in the Bay Area, called Masks for the Movement, which supported Chinese immigrants formerly employed in the garment industry to sew and provide masks for essential workers, specifically essential workers who were part of social justice movements. 22. Marissa Nuncio, interview with author, November 19, 2020. 23. www.facebook.com/groups/2764362993676831/?post_id=2880515192061610. 24. Candice Kim, interview with author, August 26, 2020. 25. Gayle Isa, interview with author, August 12, 2020. 26. Isa, interview with author, August 12, 2020. 27. Isa, interview with author, August 12, 2020.

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The Evolution of Auntie Care Gay le Isa Our Community Care includes gifts of food and services and small material objects for active volunteers within the Auntie Sewing Squad . . . not intended as “payment” or “rewards,” but really as a symbolic reminder for committed Aunties to know that they and their labor are valued and appreciated, and to encourage them to take breaks and make time for self-care. Auntie Care guidelines, July 2020

Community Care for the Auntie Sewing Squad started as a “pizza fund” in late March 2020, when Kristina Wong transferred thirty-five dollars to my Venmo account and anointed me as the Community Care coordinator. I was charged with matching donors to Auntie recipients and coordinating food delivery, a luxury for people who were feeling isolated at home and facing grocery shortages. As generous donations poured in during the first few weeks, the funds grew to over one thousand dollars. In those early days it was sometimes difficult to convince Aunties to accept offers of food or care, as many of them believed they were more fortunate than others facing food insecurity and shortages of other essentials. Since then, one of the most important values that the Squad has tried to instill is that, regardless of our economic circumstances or how many masks we make, all of us need and deserve care. As the weeks wore on, I began doing pickups and deliveries for Aunties throughout Los Angeles. I researched small businesses owned by people of color and supported them by purchasing cake jars and bubble tea kits. My eight-year-old daughter and I worked together to bake

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cookies and brownies with labels that declared, “I love Aunties.” We received offers of gourmet porridge, freshly baked bread, and homecooked meals from friends and supporters. While trying to distribute offerings equitably, we also realized that sometimes care given to one or a handful of Aunties offers emotional sustenance for many. Individual Aunties have provided many forms of care and support for each other, and organic systems of delivering care have evolved as well. Early on, the handful of Aunties in the Bay Area posted wistfully about wanting snacks and treats like their LA peers. As their numbers grew, the Bay Area Aunties opened a pop-up “store” and scheduled a weekly rotation to distribute care items along with sewing supplies. From the Squad’s headquarters in LA, we organized special shipments of care to hubs in the San Gabriel Valley to the east; San Diego; Red Lodge, Montana; and other parts of the country. Most recently, a team of East Coast Aunties launched the Auntie Care Exchange, described as “a Secret Santa in September,” offering Aunties everywhere a chance to receive and send care packages. Auntie Care also includes nonmaterial forms of support and encouragement. From an Auntie’s appeal for artwork or letters to break up the monotony of staring at a sewing machine to the Southern California swap meet where Aunties can stop by to pick up or drop off treats and have a rare chance to connect with each other in real life, these have been critical opportunities for individuals to connect and feel mutual support—the essence of the Squad’s project. Below are examples of care items exchanged within the Auntie Sewing Squad: Food  Pizza, restaurant, and local bakery delivery • Home-cooked meals, soup, rice porridge, bread • Cake jars • Lemon bars, brownies, cookies, pound cake, cheesecake, ice cream, granola, jam • Bubble tea • Citrus fruit, figs, and other produce from Aunties’ gardens • Plants, seeds, and seedlings • Tea • Honey • Chicken sandwiches • Lao meals • Champagne • CBD

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Affirmations of Shared Values  Juneteenth celebration supporting Black-owned businesses • BLM buttons, stickers, and signs • Handprinted “Justice for Breonna” protest banners (in memory of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman fatally shot by police while asleep in her own bedroom in March) • “Good Trouble,” “We Go Down Sewing,” and “Auntie Fa” buttons • Handmade Donald Trump pendejo doll with pine casket and pins for jabbing • Crocheted lace collars commemorating Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Crafts and Creative Offerings  Pincushions, pillows, pouches, and other items made from fabric scraps • Embossed cards • Handcarved zipper pulls and keychains • Professional head shots offered by a photographer Auntie • Books, films, and performances by artist Aunties • Social justice astrology readings that interpret the stars to offer guidance for healing in the current social and political context ASS Swag  T-shirts and tote bags • Mugs • Buttons • Stickers • Notepads • Cat and dog calendars • Masks Additional Nourishment  Handwritten notes, poems, and artwork • Homemade soap, bath bombs, hand salve, and lip balm • Fresh lavender and aloe plant cuttings • Long-distance reiki and energy healing • Self-care tips and suggestions • Listening and venting sessions • Mental health resources and hotline numbers • Online yoga and stretching classes • Zoom workshop on making kimchee

⊳ Duyen Tran, Auntie Sewing Squad Care-Van Auntie Care is an antidote to the separation, loneliness, and disconnection people feel during the pandemic. Aunties offer small gifts to one another as spiritual nourishment. This tapestry uses felt and scrap fabric from my mask making to depict the “care-vans” I supported in Southern California to deliver care items to Aunties. Routes are in white (lemons and cookies), pink (pumpkins and bread), and red (sandwiches). Vehicles represent starting points, and stars represent end points, with the care items depicted along the route. Duyen Tran is a Los Angeles–based seamstress and public health practitioner. E. M. Chen and Kristina Wong provided materials support, and Belinda Younis assisted in the artwork presentation.

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How to Sew Masks for Fun and No Profit in the Apocalypse Da na L ea h y

So you’ve found yourself in the apocalypse. Bummer! But what if I told you that a global pandemic could afford you the opportunity to work a second job for absolutely no pay and no health insurance from the comfort of your own home? You might be asking, What is this amazing opportunity to become a pandemic nonprofiteer? Why, it’s mask making for vulnerable ­communities! Listen, I know what you’re thinking: Capitalism is perfect. Our government is great. We do not need to sew masks during a global pandemic because someone will swoop in and save us. Oops! Capitalism crumbled. Our government failed us. Who’s left to try and patch together PPE for folks in need? Why, regular people! Just like you! Consider this: Every news headline you read will drive you deeper into an unfathomable cavern of sorrow. You can use that despair to fuel your sewing productivity! Funnel that boundless rage into cutting. Stitch your way to some version of sanity between virtual therapy sessions. You’d be ridiculous not to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn your dining room into a sweatshop. When else will you be called on to manufacture hundreds of masks? I hope never again! This may seem like a huge disruption to your daily life. (And it will be!) But do not fret. There are plenty of other places to eat dinner with your family, like the roof of a parked car, a nest cobbled together from thread ends and fabric scraps, the empty grocery store shelves where the toilet paper and hand sanitizer used to be, or the last patch of open floor space under the ironing board.

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Don’t forget to set aside some time to turn your sweatshop into a sweathome. Hang up some inspirational posters with motivational quotes like “2020 is a garbage heap,” “None of this should be happening,” and “Why is my bobbin making that noise?” Or how about a throw pillow that says “Live, laugh, long for pre-COVID days. Get back to sewing now!”? Incorporate some red into your home decor, so that when you inevitably cut yourself, the blood splatter will add a unique textural element to your space! Create a sense of warmth, inclusion, and family togetherness by pressuring your loved ones into helping you. Remember, it’s not child labor when it’s your child! You might ask, Sure, sewing masks will help people and save lives, but what’s in it for me? There are so many benefits, including but not limited to: • You will not be bored! • People think sewing is magic and will believe you are a wizard. • If you’re sewing, you’re not in another Zoom meeting. • While everyone else is worried about the potential death of American democracy and the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives, you can worry about that and whether you have enough pins! Become a plague #bossbabe by getting in on the ground floor of this exciting new nonbusiness venture. Just because the world is collapsing around you, there’s no excuse not to start an at-home business that will cost you money! Soon you’ll be reinforcing seams and living the American pandemic dream!

⊳ Belinda Younis, Mask Ties and Ear Loops and Nose Pieces To create nose pieces, ear loops, and ties for masks, the Auntie Sewing Squad has made creative use of various materials, including shoelaces, twill tape, festival lanyards, pipe cleaners, tin coffee-bag ties, twist ties for produce bags, and electrical wire.

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Bread, Roses, and Face Masks Elle n Gavin

“Next pandemic, I’ll binge-watch Netflix and bake sourdough bread, while the rest of you sew masks!” Kristina Wong’s semi-abusive post propelled me to Amazon to buy an inexpensive Singer sewing machine in honor of my loving grandmother Blanche, whose push-pedal (treadle) Singer rat-a-tatted through my childhood. I hadn’t sewed since the seventh grade, but Kristina had performed in a voting public service announcement I produced (she rescued a line about a dildo by making the dildo sing), so she had major cred with me. Before my grandmother married into an Irish community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, she was Branislava Indyke from Galicia, a land that flipped between Polish and Austrian rule for centuries. My ­babcia Sophia, her mother, had eight kids; she ran a boarding house despite not being able to read or write. She pulled Blanche out of the sixth grade to sew in the textile mills sixty hours a week for five cents an hour. It must have been spirit-crushing for a twelve-year-old, but Blanche made good out of it by swapping her pay envelope for a smaller one to buy stockings or snacks. Most children of Lawrence lived in extreme poverty, riddled with rickets and tuberculosis. But when fifty thousand workers went on strike in 1912 for a fifty-four-hour work week and an end to child labor, they were met with international solidarity. Their slogan was “Yes, we fight for bread, but we fight for roses too!” and the strikers won all of their demands. Blanche progressed upward through factory floors stratified by skin color. Greeks and Syrians handled dirty wool in the basement; Italians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Poles worked on the looms; French and Irish workers, along with a girl named Blanche, made it to the top

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as “expert spares”—fine sewers. Blanche spent sixty years in factories, eventually shifting to building circuit boards for the military at Honeywell. I make my masks in Blanche’s honor. I used to brag that the Bread and Roses strike ended child labor in the United States, until I realized that some children put food on our tables today the way kids put clothes on backs a century ago. Living in crowded and unsafe conditions, migrant farmworker families today are in peril in the time of COVID-19. So I sew for those who can’t afford a mask, for those in fields and nursing homes, in prisons and shelters, on Native reservations. Looking down at my sixtysomething’s hands, I see my grandmother’s hands. Inspired by her, I sew even when I really don’t feel up to it. I select, buy, and wash the fabric, and Auntie Preeti Sharma cuts nearly every piece (close to twelve thousand precut pieces to date). I steam and sew three pairs of two matching left and right pieces together, insert a nose wire cut by Uncle Randy Bermudez, and then package and mail them, noting whose hands have touched each mask. In her eighties, my grandmother might have been found repairing her roof or tending her beautiful roses. At her funeral, each of her eight grandchildren received a stamped bank book with $1,800 that she had deposited in $5 increments, a fortune for us. The true value wasn’t the money—it was the time, the thoughtfulness. Blanche’s regular journey to the bank, eight bank books in hand, for decades was made with love and intention for each grandchild’s health and happiness. The Auntie Sewing Squad has reminded me that each mask is a simple, pure act of love and solidarity. Our government has failed us, but we haven’t failed each other.

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Laura McSharry, Home Sweatshop My late mother taught me how to sew my own clothes as a teenager, but for thirty years the sewing machine gathered dust as art took over my life. When COVID-19 hit, I felt compelled to do something to help others, and the Auntie Sewing Squad was the perfect avenue for service. I know my mom would approve. She passed away in 2018, but she is supervising as I sew, watching from the unfinished painting above my machine. When we Aunties finally get to retire, I will get back to business and finish Mom up.

Ube Halaya I r e ne Tayag Laut

I grew up cooking and crocheting with my mom. If you learned to cook from your mom, you know very few recipes are written down. Cooking is about your senses: seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing. When asked to share my recipe for ube halaya, a jam I eat for special occasions, I had a Mom moment of thinking, “Wait, I don’t really have one.” Here it is, written down for the first time.

Supplies Paring knife Baking sheet Foil for lining baking sheet (optional) 6- to 8-quart nonstick pot Hand blender Large bamboo or wooden spoon for stirring

Ingredients

1 pound fresh ube (purple Okinawan sweet potato is a good substitute)

One 13.5-ounce can coconut milk One 12-ounce can evaporated milk One 14-ounce can condensed milk

1 stick (4 ounces) butter

½ cup to 1 cup sugar, to taste

1 teaspoon ube extract or vanilla extract (optional)

Salt (optional)

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Instructions Preheat oven to 400°F. Wash the ube and pierce the skin several times with a knife or fork, as you would if baking potatoes. Put ube on a baking sheet, lined with foil if you prefer. Roast for up to 1 hour, or until you can cut it easily with a knife; I recommend you check on it after 30 minutes. Allow to cool, then peel and mash. I often roast up to 5 pounds of ube and freeze them for later use. Open all the cans and combine the contents in a large nonstick pot on the stovetop. Do not use a small pot, because the mixture will start to splatter when it boils. Bring the liquids to a gentle boil, then add butter and sugar, stirring until the butter is melted and the sugar is dissolved. Now add the ube. I use a hand blender to puree the mixture and make sure no chunks of ube remain. If the mixture starts to boil too fast, turn the temperature down, because it will start to splatter like lava. This next step is important. It could take a while, so put your music on or get your streaming binge ready. If you skipped your cardio or weight training for the day, you will get your workout here. Using a big spoon, stir the ube mixture continually until it thickens. I use a bamboo spoon because the handle doesn’t get too hot. This is where your senses come into play. You will feel the ube thicken. If you smell burning, stir harder to stop the mixture from sticking to the bottom and sides of the pot. The oil in the coconut milk will start to separate from the ube. Once this happens, you are almost done. When the ube starts to pull away from the sides of the pot without leaving any residue, it is done. This may take 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the quantity you are cooking. Taste and add a pinch of salt or a tablespoon of lemon juice if it seems too sweet. I usually add a teaspoon or so of ube extract, more to give it a richer purple color than for taste. You can substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Pour the ube into a dish. Allow to cool completely before covering the dish. Serve the ube from the dish like pudding, or put it in jars to store or share. It will keep for up to 5 days in a cool place. You can also freeze it, and it will be good in the freezer for a couple of months. I eat it just plain by itself, or put it in halo halo or on pan de sal. I also churn ube halaya into ice cream or add it to my batter when I make cheesecake. Enjoy!

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Solidarity

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Sewing with Intent Ch r issy Y e e Lau

Five days after police suffocated George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis in broad daylight, Auntie Sewing Squad Headquarters (HQ) declared that May 30, 2020, was the Auntie Sewing Squad Day of Solidarity with the Black community and the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the group was founded by Asian American and Pacific Islander women, it grew to include Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). HQ recognized the urgency for non-Black members to stand in solidarity with the Black community and support the Black Aunties in the Squad. HQ asked non-Black Aunties to “sew with intent” for Black communities affected by state-sponsored violence, or to participate in antiracist work, and reminded Aunties the communities for whom they were sewing have long been harmed by structural violence and racism. Aunties shared readings, videos, and podcasts about ways to support Black communities. And HQ reminded Aunties that if they decided to participate in protests, they must wear masks. The Squad’s call for “sewing with intent” was a continuation of the effort to build solidarity between Asian Americans and other BIPOC communities. Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been mythologized in popular US culture as the “model minority”—law-abiding, self-sufficient, and not Black—in order to erode the civil rights demands of Black activists and absolve the US government from responsibility for addressing institutional racism against African Americans.1 Some Asian American leaders, after years of exclusion laws, segregation, and incarceration, endorsed this portrayal in order to acquire resources long denied them. Still, in 1968, a new generation of Asian American student activists rejected the model-minority stereo-

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type and provided a different model. At San Francisco State University, they stood for six months alongside Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students as part of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) to demand a redefinition of education. They called on the administration to establish a school of ethnic studies and an admissions process that equitably enrolled more students of color. The Auntie Sewing Squad inherits its understanding of solidarity from the TWLF student strike and is a beneficiary of the establishment of ethnic studies. The Auntie Sewing Squad also draws lessons from women writers of color who offered critiques of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. To “sew with intent” builds on what the Black writer and feminist bell hooks once called doing “the dirty work” of solidarity: embracing the struggle and confrontation necessary to build political awareness.2 When women of color criticized white feminists for unaddressed racism, white feminists responded by excusing racist policies or actions because they were well-meaning. For non-Black members of the Auntie Sewing Squad, sewing with intent meant examining their own complicity and their positioning in a racially stratified society that devalued Black lives. By understanding how the disenfranchisement of BIPOC communities in the United States led to the disproportionate negative impact of COVID-19 on those communities, Aunties could resituate pandemic mask making—what some other sewing cir­ cles considered an act of charity—as an expression of solidarity. By doing the “dirty work” of addressing racism, the Auntie Sewing Squad acknowledges its debt to earlier social movements and writers and centers solidarity as its basis for Asian American feminist mutual aid. The Squad’s approach to mask making reminds us that solidarity is an ethic passed down from generations of BIPOC critique and organizing. The Super Aunties of the Squad redirected their professional research and outreach skills to establish contacts in vulnerable communities and get masks to the places where they were most needed. Sewing and Caring Aunties, like me, joined the Squad and embraced our sewing skills because we had also made a commitment to serve BIPOC

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communities through our own education, or developed a commitment as a result of participation in the Auntie Sewing Squad. This essay combines oral histories, archival sources, and personal reflection to record the solidarity praxis of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Solidarity is hard work. Solidarity demands that organizers carefully listen to and coordinate with those most vulnerable. Solidarity leads to intentional collaboration with community-led organizations already doing the work on the ground. Solidarity requires people and institutions to commit to self-education, reflection, and political reckoning. It reframes mutual aid as “solidarity, not charity”: a distribution of resources in recognition of systematic injustice. Along the way, the Auntie Sewing Squad did its best to show up for all BIPOC communities.

Listening to Indigenous Communities In mid-April 2020, members of the Auntie Sewing Squad had been sewing masks mostly for healthcare workers in nearby hospitals, friends, and family members, but they shifted focus in order to meet the needs of the BIPOC communities hit hardest by COVID-19. Indigenous communities were especially badly affected because the federal government withheld congressionally allocated relief for several months. Congress had set aside $8 billion for tribes when it passed the CARES Act in late March. By late May, Indigenous communities had received only about half this amount. In mid-June, a federal judge had to force the Treasury to disburse the final half of the federal relief to the tribal lands. The delay in pandemic relief was part of a long history of obfuscation and incompetence by the Treasury in working with tribes. Both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service were created as a result of treaties between Indigenous populations and the US government, by which tribes gave up land in exchange for the promise of social services, including housing, education, and healthcare. Indigenous communities are the only people in the United States with the

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legal right to health services.3 However, such services have been chron­ ically underfunded. The most recent delays in providing relief caused irreparable damage. By May, the Navajo Nation had more confirmed COVID-19 cases per capita than any state, with over three thousand cases and at least one hundred deaths. The spread of COVID-19 particularly affected women, who were the main caregivers for the sick. For instance, Valentina Blackhorse, a twenty-eight-year-old mother who dreamed of leading her people as the future president of the Navajo Nation, died while caring for her boyfriend, who had COVID-19. Cognizant of this history, the Auntie Sewing Squad worked with Indigenous organizers at the grassroots level. Constance Parng, the Super Auntie in charge of Indigenous mask campaigns, partnered with the Bear Soldier COVID-19 response team, formed by members of a volunteer fire department on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to Indigenous communities. Although not a mask maker herself, Parng had years of experience working in nonprofit organizations. At a time when PPE was severely limited, she was able to secure donations of hand sanitizer as well as 3D-printed masks. While Parng gathered supplies, the Bear Soldier team made plans to distribute food and masks to Indigenous communities. Parng’s grassroots approach had begun years earlier, when she participated in the Teach for America program on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She saw firsthand how badly reservations were underresourced. The protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2016 were another turning point for Parng. Activists at the Standing Rock Reservation protested the construction of the oil pipeline that threatened to contaminate their water supply. They also argued that the pipeline, funded by private developers, risked destroying Indigenous cultural landmarks and ignored consultation on its environmental impact. As Parng put it, “It was difficult to witness the blatant disregard for Indigenous rights, treaties, and the environment.”4 Asian American writers and activists called for solidarity with

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the #NoDAPL movement through petitions, divesting from private companies that funded the pipeline, and sending much-needed supplies to Standing Rock. Parng’s experience with #NoDAPL shaped the Auntie Sewing Squad’s mutual-aid efforts. Because the threat of COVID-19 exacerbated the serious shortage of medical care and supplies on Native lands, Parng led the first coordinated mask drive with the Auntie Sewing Squad for Indigenous COVID-19 patients. She identified the gaps between charitable donations and hospital policies. Like many other hospitals, the Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico lacked the capacity to care for the influx of new patients, who instead stayed at nearby motels. Donors and sewing groups sent some PPE directly to the Gallup Indian Medical Center, but the medical center’s policies did not allow the PPE to leave the hospital. The Auntie Sewing Squad was able to send 189 cloth masks with minimal efficiency reporting value (MERV)-rated filters, as well as five hundred surgical masks, to the patients in motels. In mid-May, Parng launched a campaign to source and send five thousand masks to a network of Indigenous COVID-19 testing sites. The campaign rallied at least fifty members, including me, to pledge to make masks. Until then, I had hand-sewn masks from fabric scraps for friends and colleagues. I had joined the Auntie Sewing Squad to find camaraderie with a collective of mask makers when the prevailing official attitude was that wearing a mask was not proved to be effective. I wrestled with the question of purchasing a sewing machine, restrained by my immigrant, working-class frugality and many years of living on a graduate student budget or holding precarious short-term lecturer positions. My indecision led to missed opportunities, since sewing machines were selling out online. But when Parng posted the call for masks for Indigenous communities, and my now-steady income as a tenure-track faculty member signaled my entrance into the middle class, I purchased a sewing machine from a colleague.

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Jonathan Edwards (Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo) and Constance Parng coordinating supplies for Standing Rock. Photo by Melinda Creps.

Asian American solidarity with Indigenous organizers can be traced back to the 1960s Indigenous occupation of the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, long used as a prison. A group called Indians of All Tribes organized an eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz, during which they offered to buy the island back for the exact amount that white settlers had paid three hundred years earlier: twenty-four dollars, glass beads, and red cloth. Activists set up a school, organized an

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election council, and aimed to build a nation. To support the occupation, a delegation of Asian American activists from Los Angeles traveled to Alcatraz to deliver food and medical supplies. They drew from Indigenous political ideologies and acknowledged their shared but distinct relations to white supremacy, which shaped their own protests during the Asian American Movement.5 Asian displacement and migration, which resulted from US imperialism and military expansion abroad, occurred in conjunction with white settler colonialism and Native dispossession. I live and work on land taken from Ohlone tribes that was made into a military base during WWI and is now a state university. What is my responsibility for addressing Indigenous land dispossession and erasure? Some of my colleagues have added a land acknowledgment statement to their syllabi in order to disrupt Indigenous erasure. Others have criticized this gesture as performative. I see the practice of mutual aid as offering a redistribution of resources that recognizes the interlocking history of Indigenous land dispossession and non-Indigenous land acquisition. To put it into practice, I watched sewing machine tutorial videos and, using fabric donated by a colleague, completed my pledge of sewing twenty-five masks for the campaign for Indigenous communities. When sewing these masks, Aunties were instructed to avoid fabric prints and colors incorporating or evoking cultural appropriation or colonialism, such as tribal headdress prints. These instructions sparked conversations about what was considered cultural appropriation. Unsure of whether to use fabric donated from Disney, Jennifer Lynn Brown, a costume designer, posted a question to the Squad on whether the “Totem” fabric might offend Indigenous recipients. Aunties chimed in with their suggestions: Could she ask Indigenous commu­ nities directly? If unsure about the fabric, could she save the fabric for non-Indigenous mask campaigns? Brown mentioned that Disney had used the fabric for African-themed costumes and sets. Was the fabric culturally insensitive to the Navajo Nation? Was the fabric politically insensitive? There were more questions than answers we could agree

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on. But one thing was clear: considering fabric choices for Indigenous communities was about observing community dignity and respect. Listening to the instructions from Indigenous organizers, however, was altogether different from heeding special requests that some Aunties had begun to receive from families, friends, and strangers. Some friends—and strangers—began to ask for masks in a preferred style, or with some form of tailoring, which took time and effort to supply. Some of these personalized mask requests seemed to treat members of the Auntie Sewing Squad as if we were personal seamstresses or customer service staff. Once, when a friend jokingly inquired if Wong might tailor a mask to go with a wedding gown, Wong responded, “BITCH I DO NOT DO CUSTOM WORK. I STOP GENOCIDES.” The Auntie Sewing Squad did not set out to be anyone’s personalized Etsy shop. The same consideration of dignity and respect applied to the delivery of supplies by van to the Navajo Nation. The Auntie Sewing Squad believed in supplying the equipment necessary to enable the Navajo Nation to make their own masks and safely practice physical distancing. When Wong put out a call for donations, she declared, “We are firm believers in supporting communities by giving them WHAT THEY ASK FOR not what WE THINK they need.” Wong called for cotton fabric, sewing machines, face shields, surgical gowns, hand sanitizer, wet wipes, tampons and pads, detergent, and soap. She emphatically instructed that no unwanted materials be donated. Aunties dropped off supplies to the “Fortress of Gratitude”—the home of Badly Licked Bear, the Auntie who drove the van from the Squad headquarters in Los Angeles, California, to the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico. The Squad coordinated four vanloads of supplies during May and June. In June, the Auntie Sewing Squad received news from Jonathan Edwards (Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo), an Indigenous organizer of the Bear Soldier COVID-19 response team, that our masks had made a difference. The homemade cloth masks and face shields had changed the conversation and culture around COVID-19 at Standing Rock. Because not everyone on the reservation had a phone, radio, TV,

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or access to the internet, instructions on preventing the spread of the virus traveled slowly. To encourage everyone to stay at home, the Bear Soldier COVID-19 response team made weekly food deliveries, which included flyers containing the CDC’s prevention guidelines, for the first two months of the pandemic. In the first week of deliveries, many recipients had asked for masks or gloves, which could not be supplied. When the Auntie Sewing Squad’s masks arrived, not only did the masks keep the Bear Soldier team and other community members healthy, but the increase in people wearing masks in public generated conversations about taking more serious precautions. Ultimately, Edwards and the Bear Soldier team were able to distribute a much-needed resource because of the solidarity labor of Parng and the Auntie Sewing Squad.

Intentional Collaboration and Asylum Seekers As cases increased among Indigenous populations within the United States, widespread concern also grew over encampments along the US-Mexico border. From January 2019 until the start of the pandemic, more than sixty thousand asylum seekers were deported from the United States to Mexico when the Trump administration introduced its Migrant Protection Protocols. Those awaiting a decision by US immigration authorities on their status were held in makeshift “processing centers” on both sides of the border. This procedure is part of a longer history of recruitment and arbitrary deportation of Mexican labor by the US government, including the bracero program in the 1940s and 1950s.6 But Trump’s policy was particularly cruel because deportees were held in unhygienic conditions that increased the risk of contracting COVID-19, and because many children were separated from their parents. By March 2020, two thousand people were living in tents at the border between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. Camps were overcrowded and lacked necessities for basic hygiene. Some observers warned of a future mass grave along the border. In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19, mutual-aid organizers began placing the tents three feet apart, leaving space for ventilation, and encouraged people

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to sleep head to toe. With COVID-19 cases increasing in both the United States and Mexico, it was very difficult to move medical equipment and supplies across the border. Jessica Arana spearheaded many mask campaigns for asylum seekers. Arana descends from a literary tradition of women of color writers who have embraced a “Borderlands” identity and community since the 1980s, inspired by writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. This transnational identity motivates Arana’s service to disenfranchised Latinx communities hard hit by COVID-19. In her first interaction with the Auntie Sewing Squad, she put in a request for masks for local farm workers, who were considered essential workers during the pandemic but were often not provided with PPE by their employers. Arana became a Super Auntie to help expand the Squad’s reach to farm workers nationwide, as well as asylum-seeking communities and those recently released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention near the border. Finding contacts at the border who worked directly with shelters was tricky, as was complying with export restrictions. Arana had to organize deliveries with seven different contacts. Shipments of more than ten pieces of PPE from the US into Mexico caused major complications. Arana was mindful to avoid burdening her contacts with requests for too many border crossings. Still, she was determined to get PPE to the border encampments. An important ethic in women of color feminism is to recognize the work that communities are already doing to address their needs. Rather than imposing ideas or solutions onto a vulnerable community, which too often creates more problems than it resolves, women of color feminism values the knowledge and the organizing of communities experiencing the vulnerabilities and asks how best to support them.7 Arana builds intentional partnerships with community-led organizations that are already working on the ground to assist vulnerable communities. The knowledge and experience of these organizations far outweighs our own. In our working group, when Arana introduces ­campaigns in collaboration with community organizations, she posts

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news articles or videos so that Aunties can learn about these organizations, their work, and where their masks are going. These intentional collaborations draw in sewing and caring Aunties who have histories of working with the same organizations. For instance, when Arana announced a partnership with Border Angels, a community organization that promotes advocacy, education, and direct action for the rights of migrants and refugees, some Aunties vouched for them immediately. In 2015, Dolores Carlos, Lorena Madrigal, and Kathleen Smith in Los Angeles formed a knitting group called Peaceweavers. Carlos and Madrigal are professors at East Los Angeles College, and Smith is a retired health professional. Motivated to support unhoused refugees from Syria in their desperate flight from a repressive government and forced resettlement in Turkey, members of Peaceweavers knitted hats and blankets and worked with community organizations to send them directly to Syrian refugees in Turkey. They, too, had a difficult time moving sewn items across borders, but a partnership with Border Angels was crucial to getting these materials where they were most needed. When the Trump administration failed to provide PPE to residents in the US during COVID-19, the members of Peaceweavers joined the Auntie Sewing Squad, attracted by Wong’s overtly political approach. As Madrigal put it, “When you do not see major leaders take action, you have to do something, especially if you have the capacity to donate your time. It’s the ethical thing to do.”8 When Arana announced a campaign, in collaboration with the South Texas Human Rights Center, for six hundred masks to be sent to the asylum-seeker encampment located at the US-Mexico border, I immediately made my second pledge. This was a region I once called home and an organization with which I had a history of collaboration. Since 2013, the South Texas Human Rights Center has organized to meet the needs of asylum seekers, who flee terrible conditions in their homelands in search of safety and a better life. They often go thirsty and become sick from traveling in the intense heat of the borderlands. Some resort to calling the police to ask for help but die waiting for

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Peaceweavers’ socially distanced meetup. Photo by Kathleen Smith.

police to show up. To prevent these deaths, the South Texas Human Rights Center maintains water stations along the border. Now, however, asylum seekers are also vulnerable to the virus. In 2016, I moved to Corpus Christi for my first tenure-track position. As one of the few Asian Americans in Corpus, I felt isolated by the city’s conservative politics and deregulated infrastructure. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, my colleagues and I organized the Corpus Christi Immigration Coalition, a coalition of professors, teachers, students, and community members who stood in solidarity with undocumented immigrants. When the Trump ­administration promised to deport undocumented immigrants, we were part of a

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nationwide movement in which professors and students tried to persuade university administrators to designate their campuses as sanctuaries. Our strategy was to turn to local, educational, and religious entities to appeal for jurisdiction and protection against the federal government’s cruel policies targeting the undocumented. Off campus, we worked closely with the South Texas Human Rights Center, which had a longer history of working with migrants in the community. We organized a town hall meeting with the sheriff and asked him to swear on the Bible to not do harm to the Latinx community and to pledge that police would work within their local municipal jurisdiction and not collaborate with the federal agency ICE to enforce immigration policies. (Afterwards, the sheriff backtracked on his pledge and applied for a grant for his department to work with ICE on detaining undocumented immigrants.) Despite discouraging outcomes, the South Texas Human Rights Center continues its work. At a different moment in history, my family could have been the ones stuck in an encampment. My grandparents fled the communist regime in China during the 1960s and migrated to the United States under the family reunification clause of the 1965 Immigration Act. Although they were considered legal immigrants, sometime before that, my great-grandfather had migrated as a “paper son.” After the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers, the destruction of public birth documents during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake provided an opportunity: hundreds of Chinese immigrants could claim US citizenship. Some claimed to have sons born in China, also eligible for US citizenship, who were not in fact biologically related to them. Between 1910 and 1940, suspected paper sons were detained and interrogated at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.9 As a descendant of formerly excluded and detained Chinese immigrants, I stand in solidarity with those who are currently experiencing inhumane treatment at the border. For my second pledge, I sewed masks for the South Texas Human Rights Center, who delivered the masks to asylum seekers at border encampments.

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While Aunties have created intentional collaborations with BIPOCled community organizations, the Squad has also received requests from community organizations with whom we have no history of collaboration. For these, Aunties have instituted a vetting process. When community organizations request donations for masks, Aunties examine the organizations’ mission and service. If an organization has a history of racist practices that have gone unaddressed, the Aunties turn down the request. Ova Saopeng, whose main role in the group was cutting fabric, vetted the Lao Family Community Development Center before agreeing to deliver masks. The main goal of the center, founded by Laotian refugees in 1980, was to help war refugees rebuild their lives. Over the years, it expanded its outreach to support other refugees, immigrant, and low-income communities, including recently arrived refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and the former Soviet Union. The center provides refugees with essential needs and helps them find housing. Because of its inclusive approach toward refugee aid and immigrant rights, it passed the Auntie Sewing Squad vetting process. As a result of this connection, the Auntie Sewing Squad received donations of material from the Laotian Buddhist community. When Saopeng asked a friend about the center’s practices and impact, the friend in turn asked him about the Auntie Sewing Squad. The friend, who was affiliated with the Wat Lao Rattanaram Temple, mentioned that the temple had a surplus of fabric donated by the Laotian community to the monks for making robes.10 The fabric was offered to Bay Area Aunties, who drooled over its gorgeous saffron color. The “monk fabric” went a long way toward sustaining the solidarity between the Auntie Sewing Squad and several BIPOC communities in need of masks.

Protest and the Movement for Black Lives During the pandemic, many Black people continued to encounter neighborhood or police violence and failures of the criminal justice

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system. On February 2, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old man jogging around his southern Georgia neighborhood, was chased and gunned down by three white supremacists in militia-style garb. The three men, one a former police officer, were not charged with his murder until May 7. On March 23, Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-yearold medical technician, was shot eight times in her own home by three Metro Police Department officers in Louisville, Kentucky. Police broke into Taylor’s home, and when her partner used a gun in self-defense against the unidentified intruders, Taylor was fatally shot in the crossfire. By September, only one of three officers had been charged and dismissed from the force. On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, causing his death by asphyxiation. After the video of Floyd’s death went viral, protesters once again took to the streets and called for the defunding of police. Monica Bullard, a Sewing Auntie, split her time between protesting and sewing. Bullard, a former nurse-midwife and legal clerk, had been sewing masks for hospitals at the start of the pandemic. As a Black Auntie aware of the ways Black communities had been disproportionately negatively affected by the carceral system, she also sewed for organizations serving Black communities. She had sewn two hundred masks for The Place For Grace, an organization that provides services and programs aimed at restoring families and advocating for children affected by incarceration. Bullard turned her home into the materials hub for the Auntie Sewing Squad in the Bay Area. She cut fabric and distributed it to other Aunties. Bullard was the person who picked up the fabric donated by the Wat Lao Rattanaram Temple, and she decided to use it in a drive she spearheaded to supply masks for use in youthled Black Lives Matter protests. Often, when Bullard brought masks to give away at the protests, the organizers of the protests had already prepared protesters to come masked or had arranged for mask distribution. That summer, Bullard attended between twelve and fifteen protests for the BLM movement around the Bay Area.11

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To support Black Aunties and build solidarity with the BLM movement, non-Black Aunties shared antiracist toolkits, films, and podcasts to amplify Black perspectives, histories, and politics and educate each other while continuing to sew. Non-Black Aunties took the lead in sharing resources to acknowledge that Black scholars and activists have too often borne the burden of antiracist education. Moreover, Aunties shared resources directly from the intellectual work of Black scholars, artists, and activists. The Day of Solidarity with BLM organizations motivated some non-Black Aunties to attend a BLM protest for the first time. WeiLing Chang became politically active when Trump took office, and she attended the Women’s March at his inauguration and the March for Science in April 2017. But she had never attended a BLM march until she joined the Auntie Sewing Squad as a Caring Auntie in May 2020. Moved by the Squad’s sharing of resources and the way Aunties rallied to send masks to low-income BIPOC communities, Chang took her daughter to attend a BLM protest in Culver City that included kidfriendly activities. Chang and her daughter began sewing masks for community organizations serving Black communities.12 My own education took years of unlearning anti-Blackness and my investment in the carceral system. As a child, I watched my parents struggle to make a living selling alcohol and candy in low-income neighborhoods. My father had immigrated to the US to study chemistry, but he ended up working as a temporary laborer at Chinese restaurants in California and Georgia and had long periods of unemployment. When he finally owned his own store, he showed me the red button underneath the cash register that would alert the police if we needed help. My father had to press that button a few times. Every day after school, I joined my dad at his store and passed the time watching TV. When I watched the sitcom Family Matters, which centered on a Black family, my dad asked disapprovingly, “You like that show?” In contrast, when I watched Full House, featuring a white family, he reinforced

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Monica Bullard passing out masks at a Black Lives Matter Protest in Oakland. Photo by Stephanie Pepitone.

the lesson of the episode with “Do you hear that?” I was taught from a young age to devalue Black representation and to trust the police. Only later, after listening to the experiences of Black friends and taking Asian American studies courses, did I confront my own investment in the prison-industrial complex. In college, I learned about police harassment of Black students from the song leader of my former church. He was one of a small number of Black students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was frequently stopped by police. Years later, in a graduate course, my professor asked the class, “What

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would it take for you to not call the police?” I did not understand the question. In fact, I had just called the police a few nights earlier when someone had thrown a potted plant through my window late at night. Years later, I came to realize that my reliance on the police complied with and enabled police harassment of and violence against Black and Brown communities. For my third mask-making pledge, I sewed with intent for Black communities. I contributed to a campaign in partnership with Alma Backyard Farms, a community-based, Black-led urban farming organization that grows food for donation to food-insecure individuals and communities. Thanks to Arana’s leadership, I learned that Alma Backyard Farms aims to help the formerly incarcerated individuals to transition back into the community by offering hands-on technical education in urban food production, such as repurposing urban land into farm plots. Alma Backyard Farms arranged for the masks made by the Auntie Sewing Squad to be included in the grocery kits they were giving away for Father’s Day. By July, the Squad had pivoted toward sending masks to the incarcerated, which include disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown people due to racist policing and prosecution. Coronavirus cases had increased exponentially in prisons, where physical distancing was difficult. At San Quentin State Prison in the Bay Area, more than two thousand prisoners had tested positive. Organizers demanded prisoner releases. Aunties rallied to deliver masks to prisoners. Grace Yoo, an Auntie in the Bay Area, led the official appeal to the warden at San Quentin. After making a number of calls and submitting the proper paperwork, Yoo came into contact with a recently retired San Quentin employee who was working to gather donations for inmates and staff with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a prison guards’ union, and received permission from the warden. Aunties sewed 1,200 masks for San Quentin prison inmates. Meanwhile, Monica Bullard checked in with her group, the Transformative In-Prison Workgroup, to see how to get masks to recently

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released detainees. Because of public advocacy, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had just announced that they planned to release up to eight thousand incarcerated persons to max­ imize available space for physical distancing. One of Bullard’s contacts worked for an organization, Choices for Freedom, that assists individuals recently released from incarceration, picking them up and driving them where they need to go. As part of their mission, they supply individuals with backpacks that contain basic toiletries and Target gift cards with which to buy essentials. Bullard spearheaded a campaign in the Auntie Sewing Squad to include cloth masks in the backpacks. Between July and August, the Squad sewed 1,300 masks for women recently released from the California Women’s Prison.

Crossing Borders The Auntie Sewing Squad has crossed both figurative, racial borders and physical, national borders in building connections with BIPOC communities. The Squad makes masks as an expression of solidarity and of the shared understanding that BIPOC communities have suffered from historical patterns of government failures and racial injustice, including the failure to provide adequate resources to protect these communities from COVID-19. In the spirit of “solidarity, not charity,” the Auntie Sewing Squad listens to people from disenfranchised communities to recognize their assessment of their own needs rather than imposing our perception. The Squad also identifies and collaborates with community-based organizations. The Squad supports all of its members, especially when its efforts require personal reflection and education of other members. This is the hard work of solidarity when putting the health of the most vulnerable first.

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Notes 1. Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2. bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women,” Feminist Review 23 (1986): 125–38. 3. American Medical Association, “AMA Covid-19 Update, April 30, 2020,” video, www.ama -assn.org /delivering-care/population-care/ama-covid-19-daily-video-update-pandemic-s-impact -native-american. 4. Constance Parng, interview with author, October 30, 2020. 5. Catherine Fung, “‘This Isn’t Your Battle or Your Land’: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz in the Asian American Political Imagination,” College Literature 41, no. 1 (2014): 149–73, www.jstor.org/stable/24544625. See also Quynh Nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Americas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019). 6. Laura Gutierrez, “A Constant Threat: Deportation and Return Migration from the U.S. to Northern Mexico, 1918–1965” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2016). 7. Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). 8. Lorena Madrigal, interview with author, August 13, 2020; Kathleen Smith, interview with author, August 10, 2020; Dolores Carlos, interview with author, August 11, 2020. 9. See Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 10. Ova Saopeng, interview with author, September 16, 2020. 11. Monica Bullard, interview with author, February 28, 2021. 12. Wei-Ling Chang, interview with author, August 11, 2020.

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Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile Full of PPE Ba dly Lic k e d Bear

Getting a relief van ready is a big hustle. Emails arrive from total strangers. The next day, a thousand medical masks emerge from the trunk of a Mercedes sedan driven by someone you may never see again. Sewing machines appear on the porch between lunch and dinner. You go out to feed the chickens and discover a bag of N95 masks hanging on your gate. You never learn how they got there. This was my life as the Auntie Sewing Squad’s primary relief van driver, organizing supplies and shuttling them to the Navajo Nation once a month. I was with my students when the announcement came out that we were going on a two-week break and moving to online teaching. We had fifteen final, nervous minutes together. I was quickly swallowed up by the demands of remote teaching triage and community maintenance. Just as the school year ended in May, Kristina Wong put out a feeler on Facebook: “We might drive some fabric to Navajo Nation. Is anyone available?” Previously, my only involvement with the Auntie Sewing Squad had been digging through decades’ worth of hoarded fabric and sewing supplies and dropping them off with Kristina or another Auntie. That was as much as I felt I could do. But when Kristina put out that feeler, I couldn’t not say, “I have a cargo van. It might be too big for what you need, but I know Navajo Nation and can drive if you need me.” Kristina agreed that the van might be a bit much. Two days later I got a message: “We need the van.” Since then, I’ve been a Logistics Auntie, driving a packed 1998 Ford Econoline between Los Angeles and Apache Junction, Arizona, just east of Phoenix. There

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my partner, Katie, and I hand off PPE and other essential materials to our Navajo contact, Theresa Hatathlie-Delmar. Theresa heads the Western Navajo Seamstresses COVID-19 Dooda, an organization that leads mask-making efforts for Navajo communities on the reservation and elsewhere. From there much of the material rides on a flatbed trailer to Flagstaff to be loaded into a forty-foot trailer of supplies for distribution throughout the Navajo Nation. As of this writing, the Aunties have sewn over one hundred thousand masks, and our Navajo partners, whose community at times has had the highest rates of infection and death from COVID-19 in the United States, have sewn at least sixty-five thousand more. We have driven the van to Apache Junction about once a month. It takes one to two weeks to gather materials and fill the van, and a day—or three, if your radiator explodes in Yucca Valley—to transport the materials. Each load transports five to ten thousand dollars’ worth of materials: thousands of yards of fabric; dozens of sewing machines; boxes and boxes of thread and elastic; hundreds of bars of soap and gallons of hand sanitizer; tents for individuals self-isolating in the hot desert; cases and bundles of N95 masks, surgical scrubs, adult diapers, and Ziploc bags; 3D printers and filament for printing face shields; furniture dollies; fifty-pound sacks of rice and beans. This long list of pandemic necessities was compiled through listening to the needs of our Navajo partners. We fill the van with neatly organized boxes, buckets, and bins until the load scrapes the ceiling and the doors barely shut, and then we drive. We leave early, crossing from California into Arizona, where no one except our contacts seems to wear a mask. Every stop to use the bathroom or get gas feels like suiting up for a space walk, following a checklist of applying latex gloves, hand sanitizer, and masks. We bring our own food and water. My favorite part of the drive is about an hour from LA, when the van feels like it’s running solid. Katie hands me the breakfast sandwich I made before we left, and I finish my morning coffee, settling in for another six or more hours of driving. We always get

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gas at the Morongo Casino, operated by the Morongo Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians. The tallest building in the Inland Empire, standing alone amid wind and windmills at the San Gorgonio pass, it’s a bittersweet reminder of how complicated it is to be Native American in these United States. The van is old, and it makes a variety of squealing noises. It’s just a big rattling steel box strapped to a V8 engine, after all, with two people in a steel cockpit who never quite figure out what is wobbling, creaking, screeching, or why it only happens at certain speeds. It’s the kind of vehicle in which you feel a little better every time you’re on a downhill. We take every precaution against COVID and limit our contact with strangers, but then a desert thunderstorm greets us in Phoenix, all red skies and purple lightning, forcing us into a shady motel in Mesa, Arizona, for the night. We wipe down every hard surface and keep an eye on the van, hoping its contents—and the van itself—will still be there in the morning. We hope the leaky room hasn’t been used in a while. It’s Arizona, and COVID-19 is invisible. The dice are always rolling. Even if something really goes wrong, though, a thousand Aunties have our back. When the van’s radiator exploded in Yucca Valley and we sent out a call for assistance, within thirty minutes they had raised enough money to cover the entire repair and all costs related to the delay. Two trips later, a tire blew out in the middle of nowhere. But no sweat, we had a thousand Aunties and supporters with us in spirit, and it didn’t hurt to have AAA coverage. Sometimes it feels like half the job is making sure we thank all the people who make our journeys possible. This sounds like a lot of effort, and it is. But I worry that I’m not doing enough, that I’ve missed something. We never know the whole story of every object we send into the supply chain. We hope it gets where it needs to go. We rely on bonds built between organizations, both those that give to us—like Mask Crusaders, 3D PPE Artist Network, Supply and Protect Healthcare Workers, and Med Neighbors— and our partners in the Navajo Nation. After all the gathering and distribution are done, if we’ve saved a life, we will never know whose.

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Badly Licked Bear and Katie Johnson, Badly Licked Bear Relief Van Badly Licked Bear detoured through Joshua Tree to pick up three sewing machines on their way to Apache Junction. These sewing machines were the tools of Jeff Colson’s late wife, the mixed-media artist Miyoshi Barosh, who passed away far too young. Colson donated them to the relief van because he wanted these sewing machines to be put to meaningful use.

Mutual aid is all about finding a position where you’re reliable, and playing that position. When the van leaves for Arizona, it carries thousands of objects. It’s overwhelming to think about all of it. I’d like to talk about two of these objects, two that I’ll never forget. On our second trip out, one of our partners in Southern California made arrangements to provide medical-grade masks and face shields

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to a doctor who has a clinic inside the Navajo Nation. All I had was the doctor’s name and a plan to take them to Apache Junction, where they would be picked up by someone from the clinic. Among the masks and shields were two plastic bags, each one containing a long, transparent plastic box, folded down flat for transport. These boxes were child-size intubation boxes, which allow medical professionals to intubate a child to put them on a ventilator or otherwise assist their breathing in the safest way possible. Like I said, you never know the full story. It’s somewhat comforting to think that COVID-19 doesn’t affect many children seriously, so these boxes were being sent as a precaution. I like to imagine that they sit in a closet in the clinic, ready but unused. I like to think those boxes will never be used, but I know that I will never know. It is equally haunting and reassuring to know that they are at the ready should a child need them. I think about them all the time. Among the thousands and thousands of objects donated, any one of them could be the one that makes the difference. I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad because I can’t sit by and do nothing. COVID-19 is as much a political crisis as it is a public health one. If we were living during the rise of an authoritarian regime, how would we resist? In my circles, it’s often said, “What you are doing now is what you would be doing as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.” For many of us, this situation is neither unprecedented nor unexpected. I’m a Native American by blood and a Jew by adoption. Before this pandemic, I routinely discovered parallels between my Jewish upbringing and my Native heritage. In both cultures we believe that one’s relationships and obligations are as joyful as they are serious. Both cultures also understand how inaction contributes as much to suffering as action does, and it is at the intersection of the two cultures that I find my guiding voices. In facing a disease that kills our elders en masse and takes the youth sparingly, but seemingly at random, I learned that a community that does not do everything in its power to

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protect the most vulnerable, its elders, is not a community I can be a part of. I am obligated to act. As of this writing, the Navajo Nation has experienced at least one day with no new COVID-19 infections. Our sense of obligation, manifest in mutual aid and carried along in a rusting cargo van, played some part in creating the joy of that day. Even though the next day brought thirteen new cases, for that one day the momentum was in our favor. Soon, I hope, there will be another such day, and another, and another . . .

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Dreaming of My Ancestors Sewing a Network of Protection across La Frontera J e ssica A ra na

My prima Ceci asks me if I ever dream of our grandparents. We have been checking in on each other during the pandemic, I in California and she in Mexico. When we were children and my family made the long trip from the East Coast of the United States to central Mexico, she and I played in our grandparents’ courtyard and spoke a madeup English-Spanish, half-gesturing language to each other. When I was about seven years old, my mother taught me how to wash clothes by hand in this courtyard, using my grandmother’s outdoor lavadero, where we rubbed clothes against its concrete ridges and rinsed with a coffee can filled with water. It was hard work. This is where I learned about my grandmother’s life working as a maid for wealthy families. My grandmother was paid very little, and the job was hard on her body. I remember how I felt after experiencing the blunt reality of her labor. Recently, Ceci sent me a collection of worn family photographs she discovered while visiting her mother, my tia Adela. In the images, I see my abuela’s long, dark braid and her small but tough hands pressing into ingredients as she prepares a meal in her kitchen. In another

⊲ Jessica Arana, Abuela’s Facultad Media: Embroidered text and pre-Hispanic pattern from Guanajuato, Mexico, the artist’s home state. Watercolor, embroidery floss, linen, flowers. I use la facultad, or an inner knowing, to guide my artwork and connect to my ancestors. The concept of la facultad, created by the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, is a shift in perception that enables awareness of deeper realities, inner knowing, and survival of oppression. Both of my grandmothers have been significant influences in my life. I combine text, color, and textile patterns to illustrate the blend of my European American and Mexican American heritages. And I use the memories of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers to embed women’s ways of knowing and domestic tools to speak about them. This work sacralizes and preserves their knowledges like an ofrenda, or an offering, that honors their lives and the technologies and knowledges they shared with me.

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­ hotograph, my great-grandmother’s wrinkled skin glows a warm car­ p amel color. Her loving hands hold me on her knee. In this photo, we are surrounded by plants stuffed into tin cans—the careful work of my abuelo. He was a jardinero, a gardener who labored for low pay for affluent homeowners on the other side of town. The two places I call home are neighboring countries whose relationship is interdependent but contentious, separated by a militarized border. This makes me a nepantlera, a Xhicanx American Mexican woman whose identity is ruptured into two halves but who welcomes fluid movement between cultures and borders.1 As a nepantlera rooted in love for my family’s culture and respect for Mexican people’s humanity and their labor, I felt an urgent need to mobilize Auntie Sewing Squad efforts to assist low-income Mexican laborers and their families. From my Borderland position, I developed pathways from the fabric-covered dining-room tables of our sewing squad to communities throughout the United States and across the Mexican border. Like a needle with thread, I stitched together the purposeful sewing efforts of Aunties and the work of grassroots community organizations. Our masks traveled on threads of collective action across cultural, class, and national borders and into the hands of farm workers, laundry and warehouse workers, nannies, street vendors, day laborers, and asylum-seeking migrants, creating a network of protection. I do dream of my Mexican grandparents and our Mesoamerican Indigenous ancestors. It happens while I am awake, in my memory. I remember the brown, resilient, and resourceful working hands that held me with love. The dreams push me to dismantle structures of oppression and manifest bridges across borders. Note 1. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Preface: (Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002). Nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between space,” is a concept from Chicana feminist theory. It supports the idea that the Borderland is a physical or metaphorical place of constant transition, where opposites and contradictions merge, and most significantly it is a place of transformation and liminality, a passage between worlds.

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Solidarity Praxis Laur e t ta K a na hoa M ast er s

In 1958, when I was four years old, my mother told me I could not play with my friend next door anymore because she was Black. I ignored my mother’s orders and continued to play with her until one day the little girl’s mother answered the door and said, “Your mother does not want you over here anymore, and you cannot come back here.” I was devastated. Even though my parents remained racists, glimpses of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s made me aware of the continued racial disparities in the United States and the world. As a young adult, I participated in Vietnam War protests, anti-apartheid boycotts, and civil rights demonstrations. I guess you can call me an old, outspoken hippie. It came as a shock in the 1990s, when I was grocery shopping with my eldest son, then fourteen years old, and a security guard kept following us around. It was impossible to ignore, so I turned to him and asked, “May I help you?” He denied following us and walked away. My son said, “See, Mom, I told you that people treated me like that.” My son looks like his father, who is Black and Japanese. Before this incident, he had reported similar scenarios to me, and I had told him, “You are wrong, it is not because you do not look white. People aren’t like that anymore.” From that grocery store incident, I understood the meaning of white privilege. I never felt I was privileged, because I had never experienced favoritism. I had to work hard for everything I earned. What I never realized was that my privilege comes from simply being born white—a gift from our society. I have never had to feel daily overt discrimination or even subtle discrimination, as my son had.

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Unlike the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) within my system, which I conceal, his skin color is something he cannot hide. Together we have learned to live with those who view us with prejudice without even knowing us. He struggles with the police and I with my coworkers in the medical field. He has learned to be compliant and respectful to police officers, and I have learned to be very discreet and careful for fear of losing my job. In our household, we practice compassion, empathy, kindness for all of humanity, and standing in solidarity. Our household is multigenerational, including two grandchildren, ages ten and twelve. The grandchildren are told that some people do not respect certain disenfranchised groups. Before the pandemic, they participated in marches, carried signs, and voiced their concerns. They rallied to protect the sacred lands of Mauna Kea from the construction of the proposed Thirty-Meter Telescope and to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. They marched daily with the striking teachers of the Los Angeles Unified School District. During the pandemic, we express our solidarity by sewing masks for the Auntie Sewing Squad. I sew and embroider masks for Black Lives Matter protesters while my grandkids insert the elastic straps and pack the masks for mailing out.

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Melinda Creps, Monk Fabric Honey Creps seeking to find his inner Zen. “Monk fabric” donated to the Aunties by Wat Lao Rattanaram Temple in Richmond, California.

It’s in Your Blood Warrior Alliances in the Time of Coronavirus C ons ta nc e Parng

I have clocked over ten thousand miles of driving to deliver masks and medical supplies. My little Honda Fit is layered with dirt and dust from eight states and many tribal lands. I have destroyed four tires in the process, and at the moment I have another flat. Within the Auntie Sewing Squad, I’m known as the Super Auntie for Native Nations. After some five months of being a driver, coordinator, and spreadsheet warrior for the Squad, I went on the road to work alongside my Native counterparts in an effort to distribute more masks to people in remote areas and to establish routes for deploying medical equipment in what promised to be a deadly winter. I’m an artist—a writer, actress, director. I don’t normally organize relief efforts or obsess over fabric saws and sergers, nor do I normally truck medical supplies halfway across the country. But a battle for health and safety was at hand, and I felt called to jump in. I am a Hakka after all. An ethnic minority in China, the Hakka often endured brutal attacks and became accustomed to warfare. My ancestors led many rebellions and revolutions. It’s not in me to sit on my hands or on the sidelines. My Hakka ancestors were known for their warriors, particularly women warriors—tough, unruly women who scandalized and corrupted society by showing their ankles, wearing pants, and being, god forbid, leaders of a clan. An all-female army of Hakka warriors once saved an emperor from capture. So perhaps it’s fitting that in this pandemic I, an “ungovernable Hakka,” should find myself a member of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a group that is predominantly women, queer, and of color (all of which apply to me). And perhaps taking up such a

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task requires a certain propensity for bucking convention and a certain disregard for authority. These are all qualities I noticed in many of my fellow Aunties. Committed to “rage sewing,” a term coined by an Auntie, Lisa Mummy-Wallig, the Aunties launched a flurry of masks as the world around us burned. “It’s in your blood,” my friend and co-organizer Jonathan Edwards would say as we drove over stretches of prairie at Standing Rock Reservation, carrying a load of IV poles, pulse oximeters, and glucometers. It’s funny that fate connected me directly with Jonathan, a Lakota firefighter and retired paramedic and one of the original Water Protectors in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Working with him brought my journey full circle, as I had thought of the Water Protectors often when I was first working to get masks to Indigenous communities. Ruminating about our histories and what we inherit, we spoke about our respective cultures and the shared sense of duty that was passed down through our families. Named Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo, Jonathan is a Hunkpapa Lakota. Known for fighting valiantly and victoriously in the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Hunkpapa have led a powerful centuries-long resistance, drawing inspiration from the Hunkpapa Lakota leaders Running Antelope (Thahˇóka Íŋyaŋke), Sitting Bull (Thˇathˇáŋka Íyotake), Rain-in-the-Face (Ité Omágˇažu), and others. For Jonathan, service to one’s community and defending Grandmother Earth are a way of life. It is the Lakota Way, the way of their ancestors, the way they are meant to live. Lakota warriors help and protect the most vulnerable. Aunties, community organizers, and allies are a band of strangers who have come together during the pandemic for one purpose: to protect lives. In response to the lack of personal protective equipment provided by the US government at the start of the pandemic, on March 19, 2020, I started sourcing materials and working with a tailoring shop owned by a Vietnamese refugee family to make masks. I picked up whatever fabric remnants I could get my hands on, and to my surprise,

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in a matter of days we were able to send out some two hundred masks (old-school Asian ladies sew quickly). On March 25, I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad in search of others who might want to nerd out on how effectively different types of fabric filter out viruses 0.3 microns in size. Over time, what started as a way to share tips and patterns became for me something of a refuge. Each mask was like a letter of hope, a little poem of solidarity for a recipient we may never meet but who honors us each time they put it on. As a Super Auntie, in charge of fielding requests from Indigenous communities and coordinating with members of the Auntie Sewing Squad to fulfill them, I watched the COVID-19 map religiously in order to send our masks to the worst-hit places first. For my tracking of the disease, Kristina Wong, the Squad’s “Overlord,” started calling me after the chief medical adviser to the president, “Auntienie Fauci.” I talked at length with Native organizers to try to really understand their needs. A conversation with Auntie Bettina Castagno, of Mohawk descent, who lives in the Navajo Nation, changed everything. She told me she knew of seamstresses who wanted to sew but didn’t have a sewing machine. I decided to buy one for them. What started as one sewing machine soon became a deluge. Aunties had so many sewing machines to send that we ended up organizing a whole vanload of supplies to send to the Navajo Nation—as it turned out, the first of many. Since nearly 40 percent of the Navajo Nation is without running water, we sent handwashing stations. It’s disparities like these that made our work all the more urgent. At Standing Rock, we distributed masks, face shields, and sanitizer. Jonathan opened my eyes painfully to the gross inadequacies of the healthcare and emergency services that the federal government has created for “Indians.” As a retired paramedic, Jonathan has seen too many senseless deaths that were the direct result of these inadequacies. Currently, Standing Rock Reservation doesn’t have a hospital that can provide critical care for COVID-19 patients, nor for those who experience heart attacks, strokes, or trauma. And there are only effectively three ambulances to cover an area roughly the size of Connecticut.

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This level of underresourcing is unfortunately the norm for almost all Native American reservations. Perhaps when we look back at this period in history, we’ll see that it took a new virus to reveal the virus that’s been here all along—the scourge of systemic racism, oppression, and injustices both historical and all too present. Perhaps we’ll see that it took a pandemic to lay bare the disparities: that we have neglected communities trapped inside our nation that have neither true sovereignty nor true equality, and peoples who have been denied basic services and fundamental rights by design. Specific laws and policies, massacres, and broken treaties created this reality, and people are dying as a result. What I can’t understand though, is how, after millions of dollars were raised in the name of Standing Rock, after thousands of peo­ ple had flocked to the #NoDAPL camps, and celebrities showed up and went away again, the people of Standing Rock were still left without access to basic health and emergency services, and children were still dying for lack of an ambulance. If you care about clean water, then you should also care about the health and lives of the people who defend that water for us. The people of Standing Rock, the original Water Protectors, are the heart and soul of the #NoDAPL movement. There is no movement without them. And we all certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the Lakota. They started a movement that’s ignited so many others, bringing significant environmental wins to many places in the world. Too often we think problems are too large or too distant for us to make any significant changes, and so we look away, but we shouldn’t. There is often something simple we can do to help. In this pandemic, it was mask making. Another is working to provide better healthcare for Native nations. Access to doctors, automatic defibrillators, and an adequate number of ambulances are all practical and achievable initiatives that would make a difference. While driving dirt roads to homes with addresses that don’t show up on Google Maps, we spoke about these initiatives at length. At one

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stop, at the Running Antelope community, on the Grand River a couple of miles east of where Sitting Bull had his camp, we came upon a band of beautiful, majestic horses. Then the most peculiar thing happened. Without any invitation, eight horses walked up to us. They sniffed and nuzzled me with a degree of trust that surprised me. The horses lined up next to my car, and when I tried to leave, a few even tried to keep me from closing my car door. Eight horses have profound cultural meaning for me. Eight is also the number of points on a Hunkpapa Lakota Star. We took it as a good omen. What started as a mask crusade evolved into an alliance to raise the standard of care for the Lakota people: the Lakota Well-Being Project. We are now acquiring ambulances for the people of Standing Rock. Honestly, I would never have imagined this, especially when I think back to the early days of the pandemic, when I doubted whether I was the right person to take on the work of delivering supplies to Indigenous communities. The saying “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which Alice Walker attributes to the poet June Jordan, has a different resonance for me now. So if you’ve been sitting on the sidelines wondering what you can do, my answer to you is, a lot. You can probably do more than you’d ever imagined you could. And now is as good a time as any to get started.

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Joni Byun, Three Generations Like many Aunties, my immigrant grandmother and mother both sewed, working as seamstresses to support our family. They passed on some basic skills to me, and I always think of them with gratitude when I am sewing masks. Here we are in 1991, when I was twenty years old—three generations of Korean American women who got things done.

Tsukemono Pasta Salad Dave Vindiola

Tsukemono are Japanese preserved vegetables—pickles! The San Diego Aunties had a physically distanced get-together in a parking lot in September 2020 so that we could meet in person. It was a potluck, and since pasta salads are always a staple at potlucks, I came up with this recipe, which blends a classic potluck dish with some not-so-common ingredients.

Ingredients

1 pound ditalini or other short pasta (elbows or shells)

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 medium red bell pepper, seeded, membranes removed, and minced ¼ red onion, minced 1½ cups minced tsukemono (kyuri asazuke and shibazuke)



¼ cup mayonnaise



¾ cup Kewpie mayonnaise

Kosher salt Freshly ground black pepper Togarashi (optional)

Instructions Cook the pasta in boiling salted water according to the package directions. Drain in a colander and rinse under cold water until cooled. Shake the colander and allow to drain an additional 2 minutes, tossing occasionally to get the last drops of water out.

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Put the drained pasta into a large bowl, add the vinegar, and toss to coat the pasta thoroughly (this helps keep the pasta from absorbing the mayonnaise). Add a little more vinegar if you like. Add the red bell pepper, red onion, and tsukemono, and toss to distribute all the ingredients evenly. Add the mayonnaise and Kewpie to the pasta mix and toss again gently to coat the pasta evenly. Season with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Refrigerate for about 1 hour and up to 4 hours before serving. Before serving, taste to make sure the salad is creamy, add a bit more vinegar and Kewpie if desired, and adjust seasoning, adding togarashi to produce the desired level of spiciness.

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A Day in Our

 Virtual Life These pages offer a glimpse into the conversations and organizing that took place on the Auntie Sewing Squad’s private Facebook “working group” page. Facebook enabled the Aunties to organize locally as well as nationally, since many members did not know each other before joining the Squad. Aunties used the virtual space to ask questions, share resources, make pledges to mask campaigns, and cheer each other on. They even created neighborhood-based messenger group chats to share supplies and goodies through masked, outdoor drop-offs and pickups. While most Aunties had Facebook accounts, a few did not, and these Aunties stayed in the loop through friends in the virtual group. The Squad used the platform not only for work, but also for building community to counter the social isolation engendered by the pandemic. These posts are based on real moments and posts, but are condensed into one day. No Auntie was harmed in the making of this feed (right, Kristina?)!

Amy Tofte shared a link. Admin. HQ REQUEST: 1200 Adult/500 Kids Masks to help cover the URGENT NEED RIGHT NOW to the Apache Nation. We will be shipping directly to fellow Auntie and Mutual Aid Leader Bettina Castagno so she can hand deliver. **Please pledge what you can complete within the week so we can meet this urgent need QUICKLY.** I am standing by to DM you the shipping address. 22 likes, 66 comments, Tag: Requests for Finished Masks!!! Comments: C. T.: I pledge 100. Half adults, half kids. E. C.: I have some kids ones let me check M. C.: I’ll pledge 100 adult. Half green, half pink polka dots. I’ll be done by Friday. H. T. B.: I pledge 15 kids. This is my first pledge! H. O.: I’ve got 40. They are almost done so I can send them on Friday. 20 petite, 20 adult. A. F. J.: This is my first pledge. Is it normal to feel emotional about this? I can ship 20 adult, 10 XL-adult, and 20 kids by tomorrow.

Jennifer Henehan 150 ready to go tomorrow to LGBTQ Resource Center in Tarzana. Photo stylized by dear daughter.

77 likes, 12 comments, Tag: Show off your work! Comments: E. D.: These masks are lovely W. W. S.: 150! Wow! D. L.: They look so good

Monica Bullard The forklift is about to put the 1000 yards/800 lbs of fabric that Kristina bought for the Bay Area Aunties onto my truck.

143 likes, 123 comments, Tag: Get Materials/Give Materials Comments: D. L.: That is a lot of masks! E. B.: Sexy J. B.: Holy Sheet—I mean fabric A. I.: How did you unload it? Omg! Is it all in your house?

Dora Quach My masks are far from perfect and not pretty. But I ask myself two things: 1) Does this preserve the health of the community? 2) Does this preserve the dignity of the wearer? Generally there’s a lot of room for “yes” on those two questions.

87 likes, 7 comments, Tag: Stitching and Bitching Comments: J. A.: Beautiful!

Alina Wong I don’t know which makes me happier: sending masks or receiving Auntie care. Thanks, Gayle!

15 likes, 6 comments, Tag: Caring Aunties Want to Send You Stuff Comments: G. I.: You deserve to be happy and enjoy it all!! W. W. S.: Ha, are those sushi stickers?? L. M. W.: So cool! Enjoy! And I am with you, Alina Wong, on both!

Meloney Quady Mom making mask ties out of old t-shirts!

15 likes, 4 comments, Tag: Show off your work! Comments: J. A.: Love the bracelet and the shirt!

Em Chen To NAACP MN: 40 small, 20 large, 78 ear savers; buttons from Cheryl Farrel and Kristina Wong, fabric provided by Duyen Tran, elastic cut by Jo Jo Siu. Fish pillow gifts for so many Aunties. The fish pillows can be used as voodoo dolls for pins or used to hit people. *All injuries sustained by use of fish are not the responsibility of the maker.

23 likes, 24 Comments, Tag: Show off your work! Comments: D. B.: So creative and generous! R. T.: You are a living doll!! Thank you V. S.: Wait, what! I get a pillow? Adriana Camarena On behalf of Auntie Sewing Squad, and with my Mayan pals, Tíos José Góngora Pat and Carlos Poot Pat of justice4luis.org, we packed a U-Haul with and delivered 34,560 fl. oz. (2,253 lbs) of bottled water to the Petaluma People’s Resource Center for essential farm workers evacuated to Petaluma due to NORCAL fires. We then also made a

second run and delivered 427 expertly Auntie-made masks to Corazón Healdsburg, serving essential farm workers in the fire zone further north. The Aunties also sent by mail an additional 500+ handmade masks plus a load of N95 masks.

3 likes, 1 comments, Tags: Show off your work!, Gratitude Comments: R. T.: You are all awesome! Miky Han “The important thing is that we all stick together.”—Buzz Lightyear. These cuties below are awaiting their next pledge. And, thank you Aunties for setting the example to show that our acts of love unite us!

39 likes, 9 comments, Tag: Gratitude Comments: R. T.: You have the cutest fabrics! L. M. W.: I was just thinking the same thing!! G. W.: Super cute E. M.: Amazing!!

Debbie Luong 100 masks made by my mom and pledged to Los Angeles and Long Beach temples. She has been a volunteer at both Temples for the past decade. The masks are perfect for the monks and volunteers! So proud of my mom!

91 likes, 18 comments, Tag: Show off your work! Comments: J. E.: #ProudDaughter P. S.: Debbie, your mom’s prayer in action C. B.: Awesome . . . thank you Auntie Mom K. W.: Three generations!! Awesome!!

Survival

Sewing as Refuge M ai-Linh K . Hong

1 My family arrived in Virginia after spending six months in a refugee camp in California. We landed at what was then called National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. It was winter, and trees were leafless and gray. Seeing the bleak landscape, my parents wondered for a moment if someone had burned the vegetation. Had there been a bombing? Had we migrated from one war to another? There was a lot to learn. That deciduous trees drop their leaves in autumn. English. The utility of scarves, hats, and gloves—items about which my parents knew little, that February day on the tarmac. All kinds of knowledge that smoothed the texture of everyday life, without which the simplest acts were burdened with suffering. When I was a child, I didn’t know coats needed to be zipped all the way up and supplemented with knit accessories. Puffy, donated coats, always too big, were meant to protect us but let in cold from every angle. At school, I remember the searing cold of recess and the hot red welts that grew on the backs of my hands. Later I learned that these were an immunological response to cold: an allergy, the body’s way of rejecting, sometimes irrationally, what the world offers. The philosopher Hannah Arendt famously defines refugees as “nothing but human,” and another philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, talks about society’s forsaken as embodiments of “bare life,” the human stripped to bone and hunger.1 In an individualist society like that of the United States, it makes sense to believe that refugees—those who have been displaced by geopolitical calamity and cannot return home—have nothing left but their own lives. We perceive their desperate acts as arising from a survival instinct, the organism’s hardwired impulse to

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preserve itself. Since I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family, however, this view always seemed incomplete to me. One’s own survival is no prize without the survival of others, and in fact many refugees are driven not by saving themselves, but rather by ensuring the survival of family and friends. How many times have I heard someone say, “About myself, I didn’t care—I was only worried for my relative”? I am quite sure many more refugees would have killed themselves in despair if it hadn’t been for the desire to protect their children, spouses, or elders. That I survived can be credited to the fact that my parents were driven to protect their family. How might we understand refugees in a way that honors this impulse to save another—and to survive not only for oneself, but together? What is the social equivalent of “nothing but human beings”? What is human sociality when stripped to its barest? Love. Sacrifice. Solidarity. For all the stories we hear of helpless refugees rescued or

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abandoned by others, I know of many more that demonstrate the resilience, resourcefulness, and generosity of refugees themselves. I have always known refugees to see and save each other.

19 I first came to know of Van Huynh through the Auntie Sewing Squad Facebook group: the UVH mask pattern is named for Uncle Van Huynh, whom another Auntie called an expert tailor. The mask he designed is a contoured style that fits over the face without pleats, and because of its close fit, it comes in several sizes (unlike pleated styles, which are generally one-size-fits-most-adults). Early in the pandemic, a similar mask pattern that had gained popularity worldwide was known as the “Fu mask.” The Fu pattern was used in the group until it came to light that its white male designer had used the name because Fu “sounded Asian”—identifying mask wearing, and perhaps the pandemic itself, with a white-imagined “Asia.” Intentionally or not, the name also heark­ened back to the 1932 yellowface film The Mask of Fu Manchu, whose iconic villain personified “yellow peril” in the imaginations of racist white people. Once these associations of the Fu mask surfaced, the Aunties renamed our version of the mask for Huynh. Knowing no more than this, I imagined Huynh to be a Vietnamese tailor of my parents’ generation, not unlike the elderly gentleman who owned the fabric shop my mother frequented in Virginia. Thin, dignified, and somewhat frail, that man has repaired my mother’s vintage sewing machines for the last four decades. To my surprise I learned that Van Huynh was in his early forties—just two years older than me—and held a position of honor in our group partly because of his advocacy on behalf of formerly incarcerated people. Huynh knew Kristina Wong from their joint work with API Rise, a nonprofit organization that advocates for former incarcerees and their communities and provides a home base for mutual-aid-based organizing and activism. I learned that Huynh was raised in California and imprisoned at age sixteen. He remained incarcerated for the next twenty-

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five years and was released only a year before the pandemic began, after juvenile justice reforms made it possible for him to earn parole. Because of the conviction, he is currently under a deportation order. Given these facts, I recognized Huynh as a fellow refugee, with a shared history despite the stark differences in our lives and circumstances. I began to think of the Aunties’ work in relation to refugee experience and refugee survival—mine and others’. I saw our resourcefulness, our rage, our grief as entwined with the same social forces that compel migration and shape resettlement. I wanted to learn more of Huynh’s story, and in time I would.

342 At the start of the pandemic, I was recovering from spine surgery. A nurse said I was lucky my surgery hadn’t been scheduled a week later, because it would have been canceled. My six-week period of medical­ ly mandated immobility after the surgery coincided with a statewide lockdown in which we could not leave the house except for food and medical care. Only “life-sustaining” businesses were allowed to open in Pennsylvania, where I lived; everyone else had to work remotely or cease working. My son’s daycare center closed. My spouse and I did our best to keep him occupied while we attempted to “work from home.” It was nearly futile. Each day we relaxed our policy on screen time a little more, and soon our three-year-old was spending hours at a time entranced by games and cartoons we didn’t have the energy to prescreen. Prior to the pandemic, we had allowed screen time only on weekend mornings while we stayed in bed an extra hour or two. During the lockdown, all rules went out the window. But even with the help of our digital nanny, I could not effectively read, write, or reason—the core of what I do for a living as a college professor. Forget thinking: I could hardly feel beyond anxiety caused by the virus and its many unknowns, which compounded the state of alert that comes from having my son anywhere in my vicinity. This alertness was heightened into hypervigilance by past traumas the pandemic had

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activated. Tower smoke. A sniper. One man’s entitlement and another’s rage. New York was a disaster zone (again). I shared the horror of many when images of refrigerated trailers full of bodies and then mass graves appeared in the media. That spring, sequestered in a small, rural college town from which students had been sent away, we were relatively lucky. The town’s COVID-19 numbers would remain low until the summer. Although I was mostly incapacitated both physically and mentally, the moment seemed to demand that I do something. I felt the fear of working-class families who could not purchase health by staying home. Both my parents were essential workers in another state; eventually my mother retired to avoid the risks of exposure in the hospital where she had labored for nearly forty years, and my father’s hours were halved. From early on, BIPOC communities (from which many essential workers come) seemed to be on a path to devastation by COVID-19 because of preexisting racial inequalities. Many times a day we were admonished by the media to take precautions—handwashing, physical distancing—but some communities could not handwash their way to safety. They had to go to work. They had to breathe the air. And when they got sick, a dysfunctional, biased healthcare system held no guarantees of treatment. In late March 2020, I began to sew face masks. At the beginning of April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally admitted that wearing masks might reduce the risk of transmission and recommended universal masking. On April 2, I set up a shoebox on my porch with a sign: “MASKS / Take what you need, leave the rest for others / WASH before wearing.” In my town of six thousand residents, I hoped I could make a difference. The masks disappeared fast and had to be restocked several times a day. In return, anonymous takers left money, thank-you notes, gifts, and donations of fabric and supplies. Once, in April, I received a contribution in the currency of the time: a roll of toilet paper, a comical but sincere form of thanks at a time when toilet paper had disappeared from store shelves. Another time, someone left a large cardboard box full of lace trims. Thousands of yards of

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lace, lovingly collected over a lifetime, no doubt, some of it yellowing, wrapped around plastic spools and pieces of cardboard, the ends carefully pinned in place. I had no idea what to do with it until I ran out of elastic for mask ties—another scarce commodity for much of the spring—and, unable to acquire any for weeks, began using all sorts of substitutes, even lace. I sewed as fast as I could, most of the day and at night after my son was asleep. I gave up entirely on work—at least, the kind I was paid for. I moved my sewing machine and serger downstairs to the dining table so that I could watch my son while sewing. Making the same item over and over, I could be interrupted numerous times an hour (as was inev­ itable with my little one about) and easily find my place again. I mailed masks to family and friends and even to strangers who reached out to me on Facebook. One post office trip involved thirty parcels. I continued to give away masks from the box on my porch. Not knowing how long the need would continue, I began to keep a record of masks given. The simple act of counting gave some order to my day, the tally a semblance of narrative. I marked time in masks. Each week yielded a hundred or so. By the time I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad in late April, I had made around eight hundred masks for others. Having gotten faster at it, I now began making larger batches—fifty or a hundred at a time—for donation via the Squad to organizations serving asylum seekers, farm workers, Native Americans on reservations, and other communities that were hard hit by the virus and largely abandoned by the government. I counted my masks diligently, almost superstitiously, as if my modest personal ticker could counteract that other ticker, the steadily ballooning national death toll.

1,165 All Vietnamese Americans, if they are not tailors themselves, know people who sew. My mother taught me to sew, knit, and crochet when I was very young. The muscle and sensory memories of sewing formed so long ago that I don’t remember learning. What I know is in my body:

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when sewing by hand, the tautness of deft, repeated movements; a callused finger. Or, more often, the clamoring vibration of a metal-framed machine. I register with calm watchfulness the multitude of beautiful, even stitches shot out in the needle’s hammering wake. A gentle press of the heel of my hand keeps the fabric in line. Sewing familiar items, my movements are nearly automatic, though some attention is required for precise stitching. Practicing this skill my mother transmitted to me, I thought of all the things my parents had learned to do for themselves. Always enterprising, but never secure, they ran multiple small businesses throughout my childhood. There was the lawn-care business, the vending machines, the office-cleaning franchise—all of these in addition to their full-time jobs. As I sewed, I remembered my mother’s story of how she had cooked and sold street food in the refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. She must have been pregnant with my brother at the time. Working, always working, for our survival. Her hands are never still. How lucky I am to sew by choice. How blessed by my parents’ industry, their repetitive stress injuries, their exhaustion and loneliness in those early years in America. Huynh’s family sews, too—his mother, sister, and brother. During the pandemic, they have been making masks. Early in the pandemic, Huynh worked remotely from his parents’ house, where he alternated for long hours between his jobs and volunteer mask sewing. His mother, a tailor, asked about his sewing and soon joined him in the endeavor. Often Huynh cuts fabric and sews with his mother. They sit side by side. Speaking is unnecessary, as their work is before them, and anyway their relationship was never that smooth while Huynh was growing up. Talking could take them veering down rocky paths. And his Vietnamese was childish, like mine; along with many others from the “1.5 generation” of Vietnamese Americans, who came to the United States as young children, we never learned the language formally and have large gaps in our vocabulary. But here, now, both Huynh and

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his mother are content, at peace, working mostly in silence. Sewing together is “very healing,” says Huynh, as he recounts how, in an unguarded moment, his mother began to sing. When I interview Huynh over Zoom in early summer 2020, he tells me that he left Vietnam with his family when he was four years old. His earliest childhood memories include horrors no child could have fully absorbed—traumatic scenes involving violence, corpses, and a desperate boat passage out of Vietnam. Only recently, after many years of reading in prison to educate himself about developmental psychology (among many other subjects), did Huynh begin to understand his trauma history and its severe impacts on his life. As a child, Huynh did not receive the emotional care he needed from his parents, who were suffering in their own ways and ensconced in a culture that often dismissed or was unfamiliar with mental healthcare. It was no wonder that as a teenager he “chased belonging into the streets,” as he puts it. Hanging out with extended family members—other Vietnamese American teens and young adults—he felt accepted and cared for. This was during the tough-on-crime 1990s, when law enforcement agencies were hyperreactive to what they characterized as “gang activity” involving Southeast Asian youth, even when no organized gangs were involved. Huynh was a juvenile but was tried as an adult, and for having participated in a robbery in which his cousin shot someone, he was given multiple life sentences. Prior to his conviction, he recounts, he rejected a plea offer in which he would receive a “light sentence” of fifteen years in prison in exchange for testifying against relatives—a self-serving move that would be anathema to almost any Vietnamese refugee. After he declined, the prosecution against him resumed zealously. Nearly four decades after his family resettled in the United States— having fled their homes and communities in Vietnam—Huynh now faces the prospect of being forcibly returned to Vietnam, where he has no support network and struggles to speaks the language. At the time that I met him, Huynh was being assisted by the UCLA School of

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Photo supplied by Van Huynh.

Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic in petitioning for a pardon from Governor Gavin Newsom, which would give him a legal basis for fighting deportation. My own departure from Vietnam came when I was ten months old, also by boat. Except for a fear of deep water that has prevented me from learning to swim, I don’t know how these experiences affected me, but I don’t believe they shaped my life the way Huynh’s affected him. Huynh and I must have left Vietnam around the same year: he was old enough to remember, I was still an infant. To what extent did that accident of timing and neurological development save me from some of Huynh’s struggles? How does trauma wrap itself around the shape of each individual life, producing one fate or another? Certainly, differences in parenting, personality, gender, and luck played their roles. But he is restarting his life now after decades behind bars, while I am

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moving into my second tenure-track faculty position, with graduate degrees, a family, and financial security neither of us enjoyed while growing up. On camera before me, Huynh is calm, philosophical, quick to analyze, explain, teach. He is self-aware and comes across as opinionated despite being soft-spoken. Despite his careful demeanor, which never seems rushed, it is evident that he keeps extremely busy—a characteristic that continues from his time in prison, when he constantly jug­ gled volunteer work, education, and peer support. Now he does much the same and rarely has time to rest. He offers to connect me with nonprofit organizations he has worked with in California, knowing I am about to move across the country and will need a new network. In text messages, he calls me chi., or older sister, a signal of respect since I am younger. I think to myself, had circumstances or timing been different, who might he be? Who would I be?

2,121 There is research showing that crafting puts you in a state of “flow”—in which you are fully absorbed in the moment and task at hand—with possible health benefits for those who suffer from trauma, depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who named this phenomenon, calls flow the “secret to happiness.”2 Crafting can have calming effects similar to those of med­ itation, and it may work similarly, by training the mind to focus on the present rather than a painful past or uncertain future. Trauma can disrupt or transform a person’s sense of time, for example when a traumatic event repeats years or decades later through symptoms like flashbacks, hypervigilance, and catastrophic thinking. Crafting may enable a PTSD sufferer to recenter herself in a (relatively) secure, peaceful present. During the 2018–19 academic year, I lived in Philadelphia while writing a book, supported by a research fellowship. The opportunity was a godsend, as it granted me reprieve after a stressful few years at work. As much as I wanted the year to be supremely productive in terms

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of research and writing, my work goals much of the time gave way to my need for rest and recuperation. Like many nonwhite Americans, two years on from Trump’s election, I was angry, anxious, and emo­ tionally and intellectually exhausted. The constant assaults on democratic norms, on facts and logic, and on any belief in America’s being an inclusive or peaceful nation were both heartbreaking and mindnumbing. In particular, the Trump administration’s calculated cruelty to asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border was breathtaking. The family separation policy instituted in early 2018 systematically stole children from their parents and caged them in horrific conditions or lost them altogether to a nightmarish bureaucracy or even child trafficking. The policy attacked something more precious to refugees than their lives: their children’s safety. I thought often of my young parents arriving on a beach in Thailand, dehydrated, and handing their limp baby to a nurse to save. I nearly died at sea, but I was cared for by a stranger when we reached shore, with my parents by my side. I can’t fathom the pain any other outcome would have brought. The autumn of 2018 arrived with a convergence of stressful local and national events. First, a serial sexual assaulter was on the loose in my neighborhood, an unidentified man on a bicycle whose attacks were escalating in violence. And second, Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, setting off a spectacular month of uproar and hearings involving a sexual assault he had allegedly committed against a peer, Christine Blasey Ford, when both were in high school. Like many women watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings—watching Kavanaugh’s indignant, weepy denials and sloppy outbursts, set against Ford’s calm, dignified, methodical testimony—I was returned to past traumas, my own moments of violence and erasure. For many years now, I have benefited from sewing as a mindfulness practice. While the Kavanaugh confirmation careened to its inevitable, sickening conclusion—putting a likely sexual assaulter and spoiled man-child on the highest bench in the land, where he would have a

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role in deciding women’s right to control their bodies—I sewed. Often I sewed instead of writing, eating, or exercising. Longing for hope and beauty amid daily news of atrocities, and anxious for some kind of “productivity,” I decided it was time to pursue a longtime dream—to open an Etsy shop whose proceeds would be donated to antiracist and feminist advocacy organizations. So I did. It was called Underground Velvet, and it sold cotton and hemp bibs, burp cloths, lunchbox napkins, and toddler-sized aprons in bold, modern prints, with the tagline “#FightFascism with your kids.” For several months during my fellowship year, I kept up this shop, making enough in sales to donate to over a dozen grassroots and national organizations that were working toward equal rights and well-being for BIPOC, women, and transgender people. I joked about my network of leftist academic friends who were willing and able to shell out a rude amount of money for a bib if it supported the right causes. I knew the shop would not last forever— or perhaps it would pop up periodically when I needed it and the world seemed to demand it—but I carried on the project with a singular focus and intention that I had difficulty mustering for academic work at that time. As I reflect on this period of intense sewing, which presaged my participation in the Auntie Sewing Squad, something Huynh says stays with me. He speaks of the distressing, urgent human needs that motivate the Auntie Sewing Squad’s exhausting labor. Many members interviewed for this book mention a “sense of purpose” they gain from volunteering, but that does not diminish the grimness of the undertaking, or the deep frustration that members feel while sacrificing hundreds of hours to tasks that should not be necessary. Whether or not the work is meaningful in any deep sense, it is at least right, for it is needed. As Huynh says, “It is a tragedy when we miss those temporary callings. We miss our purpose, which is always evolving.” I, too, embrace the temporary calling. As Kristina Wong, the Aunties’ Overlord says, the goal is for the Auntie Sewing Squad to become obsolete. Until then, we sew.

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3,440 The contrast between the Auntie Sewing Squad and other mask-sewing groups I was part of could not be more striking. Early in the pandemic, I joined several on Facebook, hoping to find local and national networks that were coordinating donations. At that time, most mask-sewing groups were donating to healthcare workers, while the Auntie Sewing Squad was already turning toward Native communities on reservations, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable groups that were particularly underresourced. In one local group, sewists shared fabric and supplies to make masks for healthcare workers and other essential workers. Most of the members were older white women. Once, I met a group leader in a parking lot to collect a batch of donated fabric. She began the encounter by asking whether she was pronouncing my name correctly—“May-Lynn”— and I confirmed that she was. She replied, “I named a dog that once.” Before I could react, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t have more patriotic prints to give you,” and passed me the garbage bag of fabric. I quit the group that day. In another, also predominantly white group, members posted Trump paraphernalia along with their masks—goodbye to that as well. I could not understand the logic of a volunteer mask maker supporting a leader who had significantly worsened the pandemic through self-centeredness and genocidal stupidity. Never had incompetence been more murderously deployed. When a friend invited me to join the Auntie Sewing Squad, I could see right away the group was different: led mostly by women of color (specifically, mostly Asian American women), the group aligned better with my life experience and point of view. In our urgency to get masks to those in need—eventually, only Brown and Black communities—I felt a common political and ethical imperative. Indeed, the fact that the group named its most popular mask pattern after Huynh—a victim of an unjust criminal punishment system who devotes his time to advocating for others—told me all I needed to know about the group’s politics, about its belief that all people are valuable and should be safe and

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cared for. It also reiterates a central truth of mutual-aid work: that the vulnerable help each other because the powers that be will not. There is space for privileged allies in mutual aid, but it is peripheral: what drives the work is frequently a visceral awareness of social injustice that comes from personal suffering. One Auntie, Lisa Mummy-Wallig, a healthcare worker and jour­ nalist, wrote and shared a blog post in which she discussed her mask making as “rage sewing”—sewing to alleviate the intense frustration and anger that came from living under a sociopathic dictator in 2020.3 The administration plainly had no interest in fighting a pandemic that was disproportionately killing Brown and Black people unlikely to vote Republican. So here we were, a few hundred Aunties, Uncles, and nonbinary Unties trying to prevent mass death with no more than a home sewing machine, some quilting fabric, and an internet connection. Anger is an adaptation. For many Americans and would-be Americans—immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers—anger is necessary not only for one’s own survival but also for that of one’s community and even those outside that circle. “Without anger,” Huynh says, “I would have never survived prison. It was that raw energy that got me up in the morning, got me through such hard times. And so, we can do that now out here, which we are, using that anger to fight for social justice.” Anger walks always with justice, like a shadow. As the weeks of the pandemic ticked surreally by, disasters piled one atop another: more police killings of Black people, armed right-wing demonstrations, a sharp rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, synagogues and mosques torched or sprayed with swastikas, foodbank lines that stretched for miles, COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and immigrant detention centers, protests, floods, wildfires. In September 2020, as the US COVID-19 death toll passed two hundred thousand, the president declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the upcoming election. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Breonna Taylor’s killers went free after shooting her dead in her bed during a mistaken police raid. Through it all, there was the threat

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of personal violence. In Brooklyn, an Asian American woman was doused with acid while taking out her trash; another was set on fire. In San Francisco, two elderly Asian American women were beaten unconscious on the street. Anger melted into grief and hardened to anger again. The Squad’s dark humor permeated my home. I bought a poster that read “Sewing / Because Murder Is Wrong” to hang over the dining table I had commandeered for my one-woman factory. While sewing, I watched the broodiest Nordic noir crime shows I could stream online and listened to every podcast about serial killers, while my tech-savvy son, now four years old, filled my iPhone with selfies. Kristina Wong sent me supplies, along with a note—“Sew every inch of this elastic or I cut off fingers. XO, Overlord”—and I felt, as they say, seen. “I will,” I said to no one, removed the wrapper from a giant spool of elastic, and returned to my machine. Cocooned in my house, I could not stop rage sewing. I still can’t. Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Kindle edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [1951], n.d.), loc. 6341; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Flow Experience and Its Significance for Human Psychology,” in Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, ed. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 24, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621956.002; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” February 2004, www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret _to_happiness?language=en. 3. Lisa Mummy-Wallig, “Radical Hospitality and ‘Rage Sewing’ in the Time of Coronavirus,” Art2Action blog, May 26, 2020, www.art2action.org/post/auntie-sewing-squad-radical -hospitality.

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Mending Time A Movement Score Re bec ca Pa ppa s A movement score is a set of instructions used to describe the intention, structure, order, or content of a dance. Movers are expected to follow the directions but improvise within them, thereby bringing to the dance both form and formlessness. Scores are often written in the second person or declarative voice.

On January 5, your niece is born. She is named for your grandmother Miriam. You were making her a patchwork blanket. In March you set it aside so you could sew masks. 16" × 7.5". Measure. Cut. Repeat. Measure. Cut. Repeat. You crease the rectangle three times, flipping your middle finger and pointing finger to meet your thumbs, never getting the pleats as even as you want. Grip and fold, grip and fold. You realize you left your iron on and you’ve burned your plastic cutting mat. It curls up in the middle, bulbous, not flat. It is scarred. Nothing is unaffected. You feel the vibrations in the soles of your feet, your wrists and ankles as you feed the fabric through the machine. You once lived in an apartment below a sewer. Before you met him, you thought the people above you were having fast, mechanical, sex.

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This is not very much like sex. The fabric gets caught, You remove it and rip out the seams. You try again, it gets caught again. Why? You search the internet, you ask the Aunties. Why is everything broken? How can you make it work again? Since March 13, 2020, you have been at home. You can’t dance in a space with other people. You want to move collectively. Build something, make something, contribute something. You also want to stop. Mourn, grieve, give up. You try to talk to friends, but no one’s sadness is congruent. We are all falling apart in unmatched tempos. On April 8, you lose your grandfather. He was in a nursing home, and you hadn’t seen him since early March (mid-February)? He was ninety-seven. His wife, Miriam, taught you to sew. You open her sewing basket and see the tiny angel she affixed to the plaid lining. She did not believe in angels. She did believe in moving forward without regard for pain. You put your pins and the shears she gave you on your work table, and you begin again. Someone in Chicago sent you a bias tape maker, but you don’t know how to use it. You watch a video, scrubbing through because you are impatient. You are tired of this screen/portal/lifeline/energy suck. You give up and keep making bias tape by hand, using your left thumb and fingers to fold a two-inch strip of fabric in half, the raw edges meeting in the middle. Your right hand tries to keep the iron moving seamlessly, pressing down as the strip unfolds.

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You burn your fingers, you keep going. Your neck is stiff from looking down. You cut a series of rectangles from curtain remnants your mom has had since 1975. “I love this fabric,” she says as she hands it over so it can become masks. It is easier to keep sewing than to think about what is next. It is like being in suspended animation. Every twenty-five minutes you finish a mask. Two for each episode of Married at First Sight, mainlining the wreckage of romantic love and late-stage capitalism at its worst, as you sew these tiny, satisfying objects. Maybe this one will protect someone. Maybe this one will bring someone joy. Maybe this one will keep a stranger from harming their neighbors, friends, or loved ones. You are just a little Jewish, from Miriam and your grandfather Norman, but this is tikkun olam. Repair of the world through seams, fabric, pleats, and thread. A safety net of Aunties, mending, stitching, trying to hold us together.

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Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Mask Butterfly (prior page) and Stencil Rose (above) When things started to shut down in March 2020, I was sewing for an upcoming exhibition. Realizing this was the beginning of a national crisis, I started making masks for my family and community. There was rage sewing and worry sewing. At times, the gravity of the situation hit me, and I had to step away. While working with the UVH mask pattern, I saw butterflies emerge from the cut fabric pieces and intricate patterns in the stack of wooden stencils. I threaded paper versions of the butterflies onto a palm tree in my yard. I also took photos of the stencils, creating a digital collage, and thought they looked like a rose window. It was lighthearted and cheery, just what I needed.

Rebirth M ā h eala ni Flour noy

The first time I left my job was two days before my son was born. I assured my boss that I would be back in six months. I was well established in my new career. It is not easy to follow your dreams in Los Angeles, but I had actually succeeded. Life was complete, and I was about to add another person to a winning team. Within hours of his being born, I noticed something was not quite right with Aiden. Of course he looked a little strange, as all newborn babies do, but his blood work showed anomalies that did not improve. Less than twenty-four hours after his birth, they took him to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for observation. He did not leave that unit for another forty-nine days. During the next few years, I fell into a type of depression known only to the parents of dying children. With the help of social workers and friends, we shook off the shock and enrolled in programs, therapies, and even a compassionate-care drug trial for his genetic disorder. Life slowly got easier. Through the state of California, we got an in-home nurse who gave us a much-needed break and allowed me to return to work. I felt more complete. Sure, my life was a far cry from what it had been, but we had adapted. The second time I had to leave my job was when the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order was announced. Suddenly the life that we had figured out was gone, with the added twist that Aiden’s immune system was suppressed because of the drug trial. I returned to being a stay-at-home mom. The fear and isolation threatened to drive me right back into depression. I searched frantically for something I could focus on while

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­ uarantined. I heard about the PPE shortage and the call for homeq sewn masks. I thought of my mother, who had magically created ice-skating costumes and prom dresses for me out of yards of spandex and chiffon. I definitely did not have her skills, but I had a machine, the internet, and a big desire to be useful. Knowing that I did better as part of a team, I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad on its inception. The sense of purpose I have gained has been absolutely priceless. While COVID seemed to compact the world, the Squad has expanded my reach far beyond what I could ever have achieved alone. The Squad has helped this Indigenous woman of color protect the lives of my brothers and sisters in Indigenous communities and other vulnerable peoples. Though I came to the Squad seeking personal fulfillment, I am humbled to be a part of something so much bigger and more impactful. They saved me, and now I save others.

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Sewing through a Pan(dem)ic H e ll en L e e

I still don’t know why I started sewing masks for complete strangers whom I’ll never meet. Maybe it’s like snapping a wishbone or blowing on a fallen eyelash—a conjuring of luck—in a time of restless seclusion. But after a thousand masks, I realized that sewing sustained me through five overlapping stages—loss, defiance, sanity, faith, and hope—of coping with staggering surprises. Loss: Light gray with dark gray scrolls, remnants from a DIY project, for the front; dark gray pinstripes on white for the liner; twill tape ties. I sewed the first masks on the Ides of March for a cousin, who is a nurse and case manager in Southern California. Because her hospital was reserving personal protective equipment (PPE) for emergency room and intensive care staff, she was expected to visit patients unmasked. By this time, the university where I teach had already switched to remote instruction, and the county had declared a stay-at-home order. I immediately sewed a dozen masks for her. As I affixed stamps on the package, I finally recognized that the frenzy of adapting to this new, isolated existence had disguised feelings of grief for a normal life, something that had already been eluding me for over a year. I had immediately sequestered at home because I routinely catch every cold or flu that is going around and have suffered serious bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia, but I was sad. No more students in lively discussions. No more impromptu chats with colleagues. No more attending church or singing in the choir. No more “I was in the neighborhood” visits from friends. Just Carl, our two cats, and me. Nothing else. And, yet this abrupt change was unbearably familiar.

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Defiance: Navy blue with bright pink whales, from a shirt that no longer fits, for the fronts; white sheets for liner and ties. I stitched the next sets of masks to corral my stampeding anxiety. My family in Southern Cal­ ifornia had a leftover supply of N95 masks bought for protection from wildfire smoke in previous years, but my future in-laws farther north in the Salinas Valley did not. So I made a half-dozen for my fiancé’s parents. It felt like the least I could do—and despite everything, I was going to do something. I was not going to go down without a fight. Several months before, in October, Carl’s parents had abandoned their own home for several weeks after Carl tripped and broke his hip, just three days after I returned from caring for my dad. One minute I’m brushing my teeth before bed and hear something like heavy furni­ ture being dropped. The next minute, I’m calling for an ambulance. Carl was bedridden for weeks and unsteady on his feet for many more. Admitting that I needed help was a struggle: I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t go to work and also do all the physical labor—cooking, laundry, lifting, washing—of caring for another person on my own. Since the 1990s, I’ve suffered burning, aching, and numbness in my hands, wrists, and arms. For decades, I’ve gauged the degree of pain by dinnerware: china or plastic? When dropped plates and broken glasses tell me that it’s really bad, I switch to shatterproof dishes. This was one of those times, and I was fighting against what I had just learned: caretaking requires a lot from your hands. Sanity: Dark blue with white and gray tropical flowers, dubbed “Blue Ha­ waii,” from Super Auntie Amy for the fronts; white sheets for liner and ties. That I sewed hundreds and hundreds of masks without much additional pain feels almost like a miracle. It allowed me to help muzzle this virus, protect protesters who took to the streets, defend farm workers who labored in the fields, and safeguard asylum seekers who risked everything for the prospect of a new life. Sewing restored my sanity. When the pandemic struck, I had been haunted by the specter of death

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every moment of every day for seven months, after my father contracted a nearly fatal infection. In late August, three months before Carl broke his hip, my sister called from Southern California, telling me that my dad had hurt his back. “Do I need to be there for that?” I asked. It was the third day of the semester, and my mind was engulfed in getting classes off to a good start, so I didn’t really understand what she was saying. She repeated, with worry and exasperation, “It’s an emergency. Dad’s going into surgery.” That night, standing next to my mother and sister in the ER, I heard one doctor say, “The back is the easy part; it’s the staph infection we’re worried about.” The surgery was quick, but the infection lingered. My sister and I kept vigil by my father’s hospital bed for eighteen days, calling for nurses, translating between English and Korean, making sure he ate, attending to monitors, and watching the Dodgers. When my father returned home, my inner drill sergeant assumed command. Armed with medical equipment, detailed notes, and phone numbers, I kept both my parents on rigid medication timetables, coordinated IVs and daily nurse visits, washed and folded mountains of laundry, and organized deferred-maintenance tasks on the weekends when Carl came down. It kept me sane then—like the sewing does now—to do something rather than wait for things to get better. Months later, my dad was free of infection, my mom could laugh again, their house was thoroughly disinfected and scrubbed, and I had very little feeling left in my hands. Faith: Jewel tones of teal and magenta in a stained-glass floral design from Auntie Cathy; light gray sheets for liner and ties. It’s an act of faith when you put a tiny seed in the ground and wait for leaves to turn into flowers, then vegetables. I religiously plant seeds every spring, even though I know that nature will outsmart me. Squirrels pluck the figs and pears in our backyard. Insects nibble through the vegetables. Birds peck their share of seeds. Summer plays scorched-earth games. Even though I may not reap all that I sow, I get enough.

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That’s kinda how I see sewing masks for strangers. I sew/sow and send them out into the world. Despite debates over how many layers protect best, what fabrics filter best, which patterns fit best, I take the gardening approach: you can’t do it all, but you can do enough. So I sew mindfully and mindlessly; I sew with love and rage. I sew to calm and soothe my fears in my isolation; I sew to help and shield others who must venture out each day. All this sewing is an act of faith that one day, if we protect others and ourselves, we can be safe again. Hope: Shower curtain for the clear, see-through front; beige sheets for sides and ties. One of my early masks was for an acquaintance whose mother is deaf. Knowing that her mother needs to read lips and facial expressions, I modified a pattern and sent her some clear-front masks. They were actually pretty easy to sew, but it took the Aunties to help me get there. Initially, I was skeptical that I would like the Auntie Sewing Squad. I’m socially awkward and a reluctant joiner, but I thought it might be helpful. It absolutely was. Aunties have delivered supplies, sent care packages, and made me laugh. They all inspire me, whether they know it or not. So I want to end with the pivotal stage of pandemic sewing: hope. A while ago an old friend unexpectedly contacted me for the first time in several years. I had just mailed off two large boxes of masks for farm workers, completed an online training course for remote teaching, and written all my online syllabi and assignments for the coming semester, all within a span of a few weeks, so my hands were a wreck. I was also fighting off a long-simmering depression. I needed a good bucking up. As we spoke, I felt the return of hope. My friend told me about her bouts of cancer in addition to the loss of her father and a brother. She battled both breast cancer and lymphoma in quick succession—and won. In a moment of clarity, my troubles—real as they were and are— contracted. My body may frequently be uncooperative, but it hasn’t threatened to kill me. My father and my fiancé may have undergone

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emergency surgeries, but they happened before the pandemic forced hospitals to close their doors. The Pacific Coast wildfires may smother us in smoke, but we can shelter safely. I remembered that in this world, there are many, many others who have far less or suffer far more than I. I’m a middle-aged, disabled immigrant woman, so I don’t have many privileges, but I’m lucky to have a few. And, perhaps sewing masks is my way of acknowledging my luck to have the wherewithal to sew and the ability to make masks for those who don’t. So for me, sewing masks is an act of service, not charity: an offering of hope.

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Sanae Robinson Guerin, How to Measure, Selfie My 2020 began with a month spent painting a watercolor a day in Listowel, Ireland, as an artist in residence. I returned to the US in mid-March, just in time for our stay-at-home orders. I thought I’d be spending the time in my studio continuing to paint and make art, but because of our government’s lack of preparedness, I instead searched for a way to be of service. I dusted off my industrial machine and started sewing masks to donate to healthcare workers. This practice turned into a new project: a mask a day. It led me to work with the Auntie Sewing Squad, which kept me safe and sane through the pandemic and the ramp-up to the 2020 election.

Nourishing Salve Laur a K a rlin I wanted to help cut fabric with you, but a newborn and going back to work from maternity leave to run a dance company in these times (lolz) has just made it impossible. I’m broke, sleep-deprived, and I don’t sew, but I still want to help, and I’ve been trying to think of what I have to offer. It seems small, but I make salves and balms, and I thought I could send some to Aunties and Frontliners. I imagine hands could use some nourishing. March 2020

Since I first made this suggestion to Overlord Kristina Wong, I have sent gallons of salve all over the country to Aunties, frontline medical staff, Indigenous communities, farm workers, protesters, and their community organizers. It is yet another way to care for people, to offer connection and healing at a time when we need both. And while I love making the salve for others, I am sharing my recipe here so that people can make their own. I see sharing recipes as another form of knowledge exchange and mutual empowerment.

Infusing the Oil Making a salve begins with a herb- or flower-infused oil. I tend to use sweet almond, jojoba, apricot kernel, olive, and grapeseed oil. Every batch is different, depending on what I have on hand. For the herbs and flowers, I like calendula best. I also often use comfrey, plantain leaf, yarrow, chamomile, lavender, and rosemary. For healing salves, you can get fancy with dandelion, arnica, and many other herbs. Do your research.

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Using quart mason jars, add dried herbs to come about half to three-quarters of the way up the jar and pour in oil to fill the jar. Allow to sit for four to six weeks. If you’re busy or impatient, skip this step and instead place the jar in a pan of water (a water bath). Heat the pan until the water is quite hot—but don’t let it boil—then take it off the heat, let it steep for a couple of hours, and strain it, discarding the herbs.

Making the Salve

3½ ounces oil ½ ounce shea butter ½ ounce beeswax 1 teaspoon arrowroot powder

Essential oils for scent (optional—see notes) Place the oil, shea butter, and beeswax in a jar, and place the jar in a pan with some water (a water bath). Gently heat the pan, stirring occasionally, until the butter and wax have melted into the oil. Breathe in the scents. Remove the jar from the pan. Add the arrowroot powder and any essential oils you’re using, stirring vigorously until it’s all blended. Pour the mixture into two-ounce tins. These are often available from herb and spice companies. Recycled tins are also environmentally friendly. Avoid thin plastic containers, because hot salve will melt the plastic. Store in a cool place, because it sucks when this stuff melts all over a purse left in a hot car. Not that I know that from firsthand experience.

Notes I sometimes make up to half a gallon of salve at a time, but this recipe makes about half a cup. You can scale it up or down as you like. The basic ratio is seven parts oil to one part shea butter and one part beeswax, and some arrowroot powder. You can use different butters—mango, kokum, cacao, go wild! Arrowroot powder helps the salve to be absorbed into the skin without feeling greasy.

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I tend to use four to six drops of lavender essential oil to accentuate the fragrance. You can use other oils, like lemongrass or mint—the list is endless. Start with less, smell and test, then add more if desired. Do your research and be mindful of unsubstantiated health claims. Make sure to use essential oils, not aromatherapy or cooking oils, which are not intended for topical use. Be careful with citrus oils, because many cause photosensitivity. Use steam-distilled citrus oils, not cold-pressed, for any substance that will be applied to the skin. Check labels. Do your research. Use ingredients intended for this purpose. Play! Breathe! Enjoy!

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Mutual Aid

Sewing the Pieces Back Together R ebec ca S ol nit Auntie is also an ethic, a way of being with others. Kareem Khubchandani

If aunthood at its best is a form of mutual aid, perhaps mutual aid at its best is a form of aunthood, and both can be forms of resistance to patriarchy and capitalism. That is, they can be more fluid, less linear, transactional ways in which love, resources, and power move in and out and through a life, a group, a society. That movement can be imagined as a series of acts of connection or reconnection, stitches that patch together a torn garment or piece together a new one. This essay is an exploration of ideas of connection and disconnection that became both crucial to how people conducted themselves in the pandemic and the source of immense conflict.

I: Nuclear Monuments One summer evening in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic, I went walking in a meadow near Truckee, California, and unexpectedly encountered a monument to the Donner Party. Atop the tall plinth, a huge bronze man holds one hand to his brow, as if scouting the horizon, and the usual pioneer wife-mother stands next to him, with the usual babe at her breast. In this iteration a crouching girl child clings to the man’s leg. The grouping suggests that he is ruggedly independent and the other three are dependents. “Virile to risk” begins the inscription on the plaque, whatever that means about the blundering party that, thanks to mistakes and discord and poor judgment, got itself strand­ ed in this location over the long, snowy winter of 1846–47 and is most

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famous for the cannibalism to which some of the stranded resorted. Women and girls survived at higher rates than men and boys.1 It reminded me of another such monument I’d seen four years earlier, when I went to report on the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline led by the Lakota people of Standing Rock.2 I followed a protest led by Native youth to the statehouse in Bismarck, North Dakota. On the vast lawn in front of the building, there was a similar pioneer monument confronting them, along with state police. Another resolute bronze man towered over another woman with babe in arms on one side of him; on the other, instead of a clinging girl, was a young man with a hand on a wagon wheel. At the Donner memorial I realized these were, as well as monuments to white invaders of Native lands, affirmations of the nuclear family. The standard-issue nuclear family is, of course, a heterosexual couple and their unfledged offspring, ruled over by the father-husband; it is, in other words, a breeding pair, a labor arrangement, and a power structure. It is how family has long been celebrated in the USA, in ways that erase or diminish or disparage the extended family and alternative family structures and the need for larger social configurations. Though the Donner Party included single men and some extended and blended families, the nuclear family was the portable minimum unit for production and reproduction, and westward migration often shriveled social units down to this minimalist formulation. Both Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House on the Prairie books and Hamlin Garland in his Son of the Middle Border recount how their fathers tore their wives and children away from the security and conviviality of extended family into risky and lonely incursions across the West. Perhaps these monuments were erected across the American West in the twentieth century because the rise of wage labor and economic migration had stripped down the normative family into something like this pioneer minimalism. The nuclear family as portrayed in these statues is closed and self-sufficient, with one power center, like the nucleus

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of the atom from which the term is drawn. The extended family, by contrast, might have multiple and dissenting power centers, as might a family woven into the larger community, or one in which women as well as men were decision-makers (or both heads of household were women or men or nonbinary). All of these family forms, to say nothing of queer chosen family and other models, are more fluid, multicentered, negotiable. My white family was one of those uprooted nuclear families, with all the attendant problems of loneliness and patriarchal domination. My parents both came from immigrant enclaves in which extended family was important, but it wasn’t something they seemed to know how to value or replicate, possibly because white people riding the wave of postwar affluence didn’t think they needed those networks of support. Moving to San Francisco at eighteen didn’t bring me closer to that extended family, but it did bring me into a nonwhite-majority city and four decades of proximity to queer culture, with its alternative model of chosen family. I remained bound in crucial ways by the limits of how my white people were doing family, but benefited greatly from the other versions around me. They weren’t necessarily mine to enter into, but just knowing the alternatives existed opened doors and windows of possibility and imagination. My connection to the Auntie Sewing Squad came about through a friendship with Valerie Soe that began in the late 1980s; it was she, as a founding member, who drew my attention to the extraordinary work the Squad was doing. As a student of disaster utopias and grassroots organizing, I wanted to witness what was clearly an extraordinary model of intersectional feminist organizing, of skilled labor primarily by women of color, of a farsighted early advocacy of the value of masks in limiting the spread of the pandemic, and a model of mutual aid and solidarity. The group’s opposite might be the white men across the United States who saw wearing masks as somehow compromising a masculinity they defined as an utter lack of obligation to others; the

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first form of insurrection the Squad represented was against the politics of disconnection. But I was talking about the nuclear family, though the selfishness of these men is not unrelated. The nuclear family is often imagined and portrayed as the locus where love, compassion, care, and responsibility begin and end. Conservative ideology’s emphasis on the strong family can be inverted to see that it is also an emphasis on weak ties and commitments elsewhere. It’s a kind of contract law and a kind of emotional capitalism, of return on investment and ownership: transactional love.

II: In Praise of Aunthood Enter aunts. An aunt is by title and definition tangential, liminal, and peripheral: not a parent or spouse, but the sibling of a parent, often imagined as older (though I became an aunt at eighteen). If the nuclear family is a sealed container, she is, ideally, a window, a door, a messenger coming and going. Colm Tóibín writes of nineteenth-century aunts in English novels, “One of the other purposes of aunts is that they allow for dramatic entrances and departures. All through the 19th century, aunts breach the peace and lighten the load.”3 The aunt is often someone who, arriving and departing, opens doors and brings in what was absent and takes away what was trapped within. (Uncles can do the same, and queer uncles have an honorable place in the pantheon of liberators of the young—but there seems to be neither the literature nor the vernacular lore celebrating uncles as aunts are celebrated, and of course they also feature as abusers in too many stories.) In Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon, the protagonist, Milkman, has an icily ambitious father who has isolated his wife and children—and across town a bootlegger aunt whose all-female household, with its erotic energy, its traffic of customers, its violation of rules and indifference to rank, is the antithesis of the father’s house. At the end, Milkman realizes of his aunt, “Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly.”4 Milkman’s aunt is kinder

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and freer than his father, but what’s significant in Morrison’s story is that she’s influential, that her impact is not linear, that the forces that shape us are often those that lie beyond the nuclear family and contradict or offer escape from it. An aunt can single-handedly denuclearize a family. She is someone subversively without contract—there are not a lot of rules for what aunts, unlike parents and grandparents, do, so the role is optional and unconstrained. Of course, aunts are sometimes outlaws and sometimes, so to speak, in-laws, or rather enforcers of laws and status. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia is a member of an official category of female upholders of patriarchy, which raises the question of whether there is also a sort of auntarchy that aunts can uphold (and certainly, the term antifascist, truncated as antifa in the heated Trump era, has spawned the pleasant offshoot term auntiefa or Auntie Fa). I had thought about aunts a lot, but it was the Auntie Sewing Squad that taught me how varied and potent versions of aunthood and auntiehood are and how familiar and specific the term auntie was to many of its Asian American members. So I asked around and read up. I had encountered in life and art plenty of liberatory aunts and aunties, but not many who show up to enforce the rules, the status quo, and patriarchal authority. Maria Qamar published a graphic book titled Trust No Aunty, but despite the title, she explored the liberatory as well as the policing possibilities of auntiehood.5 Arti Sandhu writes of her alarm at first being called “Auntie” and then her recognition of the invitation included in the term: “My quick downward spiral was halted by my realization that now as an auntie in that space, or any other space for that matter, the rules didn’t apply to me anymore. I was free of societal pressures and expectations of body ideals, beauty regimes, and even good manners associated with almost any prescribed role.”6 Rage Kidvai, who founded the podcast Bad Brown Aunties with the climate activist Thanu Yakupitiyage, declares, “One of the main points of Bad Brown Aunties is to rethink and reframe ‘aunties’ in empowering terms: as people who challenge patriarchy and are essential to culture

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and community.” She mentions feminist aunties and revolutionary aunties as not just the “backbone of movements” as caregivers, but “people who created the logic of revolution.”7 Then mutual friends steered me to the scholar and drag performer Kareem Khubchandani, who theorizes what he calls auntology, the culture and power of aunties. When we spoke, he declared: “The border of the family is an important way of imagining it.” The aunt or auntie “is and isn’t part of the family: that gives her a lot of permission to open up the family. She can be the troublemaker. It’s precisely because they’re on the border they can open it up or close it in.” His border metaphor suggests aunts/aunties have the option of being either the smugglers or the border patrol. He also noted the power not just of individual aunties on the borders of families, but of congregations of aunties forming—to keep up the nuclear metaphors—a kind of critical mass. He grew up witnessing the aunties around his mother “doing feminist work without ever calling themselves feminists, just by supporting each other. This idea of the aunty—as someone who is the repository of culture and who tells us whether we’re doing it right or wrong, who praises and affirms us— also has the potential to open up space for queerness. An aunty doesn’t have to be a cis woman. Aunties . . . willingly hold culture and hold space for us to explore it and to live it and to be feminine with each other.”8 Aunts/aunties choose freedom or constraint for themselves and others. It might be worth noting that though in the USA freedom is often imagined as disconnection, free has deep etymological roots that go all the way back to the Sanskrit priya, meaning “beloved.” More recently the word shared a common ancestor with friend, and its old form in Proto-Germanic meant “beloved; not in bondage,” i.e., a member of the family and not a servant or slave. That is, the free person was connected and related; the unfree person was only owned. The idea that freedom means being without obstruction or impediment, as in independent, unobliged, comes much later (and it’s part of what drove those antimaskers).9 But the question is always, What kind of family?

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Part of the logic of the nuclear family is that it exists to perpetuate the paternal line, the family name, the lineage, all terms suggesting a straight line.10 Patrilinearity is concerned with inheritance, including the inheritance of genes, names, property, and power, and its linearity is created by pruning. An aunt is outside this linearity. She might be from the same tree if she’s a blood relation, but she’s a different branch. Aunties who are not blood relations are about still other forms of affiliation and solidarity. You could call them nonlinear. Linear is a straight line; outside the straight is the queer. Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life is open to many interpretations, or at least emphases, but the dominant one in the century after its publication focused on biological, and thereby heterosexual, reproduction and survival of the fittest. The latter, as a narrative of competition, readily became an endorsement of free-market capitalism, and survival was generally defined as self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation, a kind of selfishness in search of immortality. A later round of popular evolutionary versions focused on “Man the hunter”—on early human males as providers and early human beings as nuclear families, with women and children as dependents, often portrayed as staying home waiting for the man to bring the food. It’s a recasting of post–World War II middle-class American suburban life as primordial and universal human nature. In virtually every hunter-gatherer society, all capable members contribute to survival. In many, gathering by women supplies far more calories far more reliably than hunting by men, and people live in bands, extended families, and other networks that reach beyond the nuclear family. Feminist evolutionary counternarratives include “alloparenting,” or care of infants and children by people other than biological parents, as crucial to survival, a form of care that breaks up the narrative of narrow selfinterest. Some scholars emphasize grandmothers specifically; others, such as the anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy, see this as a broader cooperative enterprise. This framework suggests that the role

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of aunts precedes humanity and possibly produced it. If close allies of mothers helped ensure the survival of offspring, then the extended family is a given, with adult female siblings, or mothers and daughters, or aunts and nieces, in proximity to each other and their children.11 Mutual aid in these narratives predates our species. Another feminist narrative emphasizes that the first human tools may not have been the stone weapons that have survived for tens of thousands of years, but vessels, sacks, bags, and nets that did not. These are often imagined as women’s tools to hold infants and gathered food, precursors of all the spinning, weaving, netting, and sewing to come. Since the 1960s new theories of evolution have veered away from competition as a driving force to center on symbiosis and cooperation. In the 1960s Lynn Margulis proposed that multicellular life was the result of two kinds of single-celled organisms joining together billions of years ago. It was a revolutionary narrative of convergence rather than divergence, collaboration rather than competition. What had previously been seen as distinct individuals in the plant, animal, and fungus kingdoms were in fact “metabolically complex communities of a multitude of tightly organized beings.”12 Her ideas, widely rejected at the time, have prevailed. By 2012, a trio of biologists could publish an essay titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” They noted that, like plant scientists before them, zoologists “are also finding that animals are composites of many species living, developing, and evolving together.” Throughout the animal kingdom, symbiosis “blurs the boundaries of the organism and obscures the notion of essential identity.” They conclude, “We are all lichens.”13 The biologist David Griffiths picked up where they left off, arguing that lichens, organisms that are a kind of ongoing mutual aid, “potentially offer a queer way out of heteronormative narratives of human and non-human sexuality and sociality by decentering heterosexual biological reproduction as the only way that life (re)produces.”14 That is, forces other than heterosexual propagation matter in sustaining and propagating life and shaping systems.

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This could be one interpretation of Khubchandani’s observation that aunties open up space for queerness. The pioneer statues fall off their pedestals, the straight line of lineage curls and forks, the individual turns out to have been a gathering all along, the family tree becomes a forest.

III: Isolationists and Interconnectionists These changes in the way biology is imagined and represented par­ allel recent changes in other areas of thought—including economics, psychology, neurology, and sociology—that likewise argue for a more interconnected worldview. This worldview emphasizes human empathy, sharing, collaboration, interconnection, and fluidity. Its antithesis is what I think of as “the ideology of isolation” fundamental to modern right-wing thought: the idea that nothing is connected to anything else, that actions have no consequences, or at least that actors are not responsible for those consequences. This is the libertarian logic behind tax cuts; gun deregulation; the refusal to address climate change; and in 2020, the furious refusal to comply with actions that would limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, most notably wearing masks. Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than right and left. The isolationists deny the scientific and moral case for interconnection as fact and treat its mention as an affront, whether it’s how human-produced carbon dioxide accumulating in the upper atmosphere changes the climate or how viruses circulate. You could describe the position as “Nothing is mutual; there is therefore no justification for aid. I’m on my own and so are you.” The pandemic was, like the climate crisis, a reminder that we are interconnected, and what we do affects the whole. The Auntie Sewing Squad was at the other end of the spectrum from the isolationists. The Squad took a strong stance in supporting and promoting mask wearing in March 2020, when US medical experts were still waffling about the utility of masks—in part because such experts took the Western, individu-

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alist position that masks were useful only insofar as they protected the wearer. ASS provided, eventually, hundreds of thousands of masks for vulnerable strangers across the country. It was, as mutual aid in disaster often is, an endeavor to make up for institutional failures. But its form was distinct: hundreds of people, mostly women, the majority of them women of color, separately cutting and sewing cloth masks at home that were gathered for distribution to marginalized, vulnerable populations, coordinating via social media. ASS constituted an exemplary project in forming new connections and community even during quarantine; in creating effective networks for distributing materials and collecting batches of masks; in sharing skills, patterns, news, and ideas; in emphasizing community care and self-care for the makers and supplying it as affection, praise, support, and often food, while those makers toiled on behalf of strangers they would never meet; in harnessing a traditionally feminine craft performed in private to radical social intervention in groups and in public; in, as other essays in this volume point out, taking labor that has often been exploited and devalued and recognizing the potential for agency and dignity in it; in embracing political discourse as part of the project while other mask-making groups strenuously avoided it; in transforming rage at institutional failure into kindness to those affected by that failure; in continually reaching out to those in need with consciousness of the race, class, and gender politics in play; in making the specific project into a vessel for larger ideals; and in incorporating aesthetics— an appreciation for beautiful fabrics, colors, and craft—into a political project addressing public health. At the other end of the spectrum was an insistence that wearing masks was an intolerable imposition and violation of rights, egged on by President Donald Trump’s disinformation and mockery of mask wearing, physical distancing, and other measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Denial of the seriousness of the pandemic and civic responsibility prompted a series of violent crimes, including murders, carried out largely by white men in response to being asked to

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wear masks. For example, in western New York, a bar patron knocked eighty-year-old Rocco Sapienza to the ground after being asked to wear a mask; John Duncan, age seventy-seven, was stabbed to death in Lansing, Michigan, after asking a fellow shopper to wear a mask. There were mass protests in the spring and summer of 2020 by those (largely white conservatives) who saw masks as impinging on a form of “personal freedom” defined as lacking obligation to others. In what is now seen as a precursor or dress rehearsal to the January 6, 2021, right-wing attack on the US Capitol, heavily armed groups opposed to pandemic shutdown measures and masks intimidated legislators inside Mich­ igan’s state capitol. Some of the participants in that event hatched a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, incensed by her invocation of emergency powers in response to the pandemic (and apparently also angry that this powerful person was a woman) and committed to murderous violence to achieve political goals. Writing about pandemic mutual aid in Taiwan, Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang describes what might be the opposite of that worldview: In the modern/colonial world, we are disciplined to be lonely. The oppressors call this loneliness “individuality.” They try and make us believe that the body of an ideal individual is impermeable and intact. Therefore, we imagine the impermeable and intact spaces to safely contain our bodies, and we reify such spaces by cutting through places with racial, gender, and national borders. . . . We know that bordered spaces and individualized bodies are violent designs. We undo borders and create shared spaces. We not only acknowledge but also actively embrace our bodies’ vulnerability and permeability.15

IV: Mutualities A disaster, natural or otherwise—a flood, earthquake, war, pandemic— upsets the status quo and the usual order. The disaster is terrible, but it often opens up the possibility of change. The old forms of organization have failed or been overwhelmed. Problem-solving is in the hands of unofficial people who often form new organizations and discover new

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capacities within themselves and as groups. What is produced is not only aid but other senses of self, society, possibility—and connection. This is the paradise built in hell: emergent alliances, associations, and organizations, and the ways they network to circulate what’s need­ ed, where it’s needed. If institutional authority resembles the husbandfather in a nuclear family, then it’s the extended family and the neighbors who reach out to help and comfort and rebuild. The shared experience of disaster often also results in a sense of solidarity across social divides and draws people out of social isolation. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, New Orleans was hit by a largely unnatural catastrophe that was due to both infrastructure that failed as it was predicted to fail and a lack of evacuation plans beyond the every-man-for-himself order to go. Left behind was a largely poor, largely Black population that was also disproportionately young (mothers with small children) and old, the people without the resources to get themselves out of there. In this chaos a couple of white Texans joined New Orleans residents Malik Rahim and Sharon Johnson when they asked for help with the white vigilantes threatening them and other Black people. The Texans had worked with Rahim on the case of the Angola Three, Black Panthers who had spent decades in solitary confinement in Angola Prison in Louisiana, and Rahim was himself a former Panther. They founded the group Common Ground Collective, orchestrating volunteers to address the need for supplies and medical care and, later, to help with demolition and reconstruction of the flood-wrecked houses of the city and pursue wetlands restoration. The group’s slogan was “Solidarity Not Charity,” a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s statement “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”16 For Galeano, the giver is always also a recipient, and sometimes what circulates is awareness. During the pandemic, I began to wonder about what makes mutual aid during disasters mutual, since it’s often a one-way flow of goods and

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services, as Galeano’s declaration acknowledges. I wondered whether it is not the circulation of goods and services that creates mutuality, and instead the exchange is a recognition of mutuality that already exists in longer, wider, deeper ways. Galeano speaks of horizontality, a sense of equality between giver and recipient. In Spanish, horizontal­ idad became a crucial word in Argentina’s 2001 financial disaster and insurrection, as a way to describe relationships of mutuality and equality among the people taking care of each other and organizing neighborhoods and movements.17 Mutual aid is how lichens work, and how disaster relief works, and how societies that function work. It involves specific acts, but also a recognition of underlying interconnectedness. It’s not the material specifics of the transaction, but the spirit of the thing, and that spirit is itself the mutual aid, the belief that we are, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”18 Mutual aid is also unofficial—as governments or large institutions fail, improvisational and emergent organizations, usually based in the affected places or populations, succeed. It’s antithetical to top-down models, in which those at the top lack the capacity, conceptual and practical, to respond to the intricacies and particulars of myriad rapidly changing situations. Mutual aid draws on forms of power that usually go unrecognized and can even be insurrectionary. Following the 1986 Mexico City earthquake, mutual aid evolved into labor organizing and human rights activism. After sweatshops collapsed, killing hundreds of seamstresses and leaving thousands more unemployed, and owners prioritized salvaging materials over saving lives and livelihoods, the country’s first seamstresses’ union emerged. Horizontal relationships counter the vertical power of institutions. Every mutual-aid project has its nonlinear history of how it arose, of where the work led, of the tangled, branching threads of influence and impact that go beyond simple narratives about how a project succeeds or fails. For example, the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans is still running fifteen years after Katrina, and a thread of its history

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leads back through Rahim to the Black Panthers, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. The Panthers should be as much remembered for their food programs, health clinics, and other forms of mutual aid as for their public theater and direct political action. So in a sense the answer to “What happened to the Black Panthers?” includes a free clinic now up and running in Algiers, Louisiana. The same indirect and long-term consequences can be traced for ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, and so many other insurrectionary organizations and movements. Similarly, the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, catalyzed in the summer of 2016 by Lakota women at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, came out of a long-standing Native commitment to protection of the land and water. The immense Native American gathering dovetailed with the climate movement’s commitment to stopping fossil-fuel pipelines and with a widening recognition that climate justice is also racial justice. Plans for the pipeline advanced and were checked by legal decisions again and again; as of early 2021, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, has upheld a finding that the lack of an environmental impact statement was illegal, and many constit­uencies are pressuring the Biden administration to cancel the project. But if stopping the pipeline was the direct goal, the indirect consequences were remarkable. One was the apology, by ex-soldiers on their knees representing the four thousand veterans who had come in support, for what the US military had done to Native Americans over the centuries. Another was the inspiration to a young Latina New Yorker who had driven out with friends to join the encampments in the fall of 2016; she decided, because of what she had seen and felt, to run for office, and when she won her primary in the summer of 2018, the nation and the world got acquainted with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a powerful voice for climate, racial, and gender justice (and a force for organizing relief in the Texas climate-driven cold-weather crisis of February 2021). Native youth at Standing Rock, I was told in 2020 by a Standing Rock Lakota

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medic, had reaped hope and encouragement from what happened there. As it turned out, the Lakota medic was working alongside Constance Parng, who later became a member of the Auntie Sewing Squad. After ASS expanded its role to provide large-scale shipments of supplies and sewing machines to the Navajo Nation, Parng brought the need for medical supplies and equipment at Standing Rock to the attention of the group. That led to a project to equip medical teams on the reservation, and she worked with a Bay Area doctor and a medical nonprofit organization to fill those needs and support long-term expansion of medical capacity at Standing Rock. A three-ton shipment of medical supplies went to the reservation in October 2020, and a drive to send warm winter clothing quickly followed. It is too soon to say what the Auntie Sewing Squad is creating, beyond hundreds of thousands of masks to help prevent the spread of this terrible new disease; new friendships; a sense of purpose and capacity for resistance against the horror of the pandemic, its isolation, and the Trump administration’s vicious failures; and a remarkable example of radical mutual aid. But you could say that the Auntie Sewing Squad took hold of the sin­ gle garment of destiny of which Dr. King spoke and sewed it into protective masks, and that not only were miles of thread used to sew, but other, invisible threads stitched together relationships of solidarity across the continent. Notes Epigraph: Kareem Khubchandani, “Auntology,” India Culture Lab, May 15 2020, www.youtube. com/watch?v=WSppRQe3kBs. 1. S. A. McCurdy, “Epidemiology of Disaster: The Donner Party (1846–1847),” Western Journal of Medicine 160, no. 4 (April 1994): 338–42. 2. Rebecca Solnit, “Standing Rock Protests: This Is Only the Beginning,” Guardian, September 12, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/12/north-dakota-standing-rock-protests -civil-rights. 3. Colm Tóibín, “The Importance of Aunts,” London Review of Books, March 17, 2001. 4. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage, 2004), 336. 5. Maria Qamar, Trust No Auntie (New York: Gallery, 2017). 6. Arti Sandhu, “Auntologies Online,” Voice of Fashion, December 18, 2019, https:// thevoiceoffashion.com/intersections/by-the-gram/auntologies-online-3419.

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7. Rage Kidvai, “Bad Brown Aunties Is a Podcast for the Aunties Who Made Us,” n.d., www .kajalmag.com/bad-brown-aunties-podcast. 8. Rajat Singh, “SariNotSorry: An Interview with Kareem Khubchandani,” Kajal Magazine, 2016, www.kajalmag.com/sarinotsorry-an-interview-with-kareem-khubchandani/. 9. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “free.” Judith Butler’s essay on Donald Trump in the Guardian touches on the modern sense of freedom as being without constraints or responsibilities: “The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome, and there would be a ‘freedom’ from the left and its punitive restrictions on speech and conduct, a permission finally to destroy environmental regulations, international accords, spew racist bile and openly affirm persistent forms of misogyny.” Judith Butler, “Is the Show Finally over for Donald Trump?” Guardian, November 5, 2020, www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/donald-trump-is-the-show-over-election-presidency. 10. I ponder this question in my essay “Grandmother Spider,” on the art of Ana Teresa Fernández, which references this pruned-down family tree: “Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative.” Rebecca Solnit, “Grandmother Spider,” in Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 72. 11. See, for example, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Peter S. Kim, James E. Coxworth, and Kristen Hawkes, “Increased Longevity Evolves from Grandmothering,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1749 (December 22, 2012): 4880–84, https:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.1751. 12. Lynn Margulis, quoted in David Griffiths, “Queer Theory for Lichens,” UnderCurrents 19 (2015): 40. 13. Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (December 2012): 336. 14. Griffiths, ”Queer Theory.” 15. Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, “Sharing Spaces and Crossing Borders: The Voices from Taiwan,” in Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the COVID-19 Crisis, ed. Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 53. 16. Eduardo Galeano, quoted in David Barsamian, Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine (Boston: South End Press, 2004), 146. 17. See Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006). 18. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, available at https:// kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf.

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Melissa Quilter, ASS Quilt My great-grandmother was her farm community’s most ardent quiltmaker, but I did not learn to make quilts until I was a student at the University of Virginia. I walked out of the lab and into a quilt shop, fell in love, and taught myself this craft. I made quilts for my kids’ elementary school raffles and whenever an occasion called for it: births, deaths, birthdays, rites of passage. Once my kids were grown, my quilts became a form of political expression. I made quilts for my Indigenous neighbors to honor their water walks, and for political leaders I loved. On January 1, 2017, I began my first resistance quilts. One called for justice for children held at US border detention camps. In the Auntie Sewing Squad, I reveled in the beauty of each Auntie, Uncle, or Untie’s contribution and felt called to assemble just a fraction of this beauty into this quilt.

Science Is the Light on the Sewing Machine K a r l Haro von Moge l

On the morning of Saturday March, 14, 2020, I was in a retail checkout line buying essential supplies (like millions of other Americans) when I got the email that my university was shutting down. My research on citrus disease and genetics would be put on hold and experimental plants left to wither and die. I found a way to cope with the situation when I was tapped by my friend Kristina Wong to join the Auntie [Uncle and Untie] Sewing Squad. My science influenced my sewing: I make shirts with plant and crop prints. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, my sewing soon became my science. When we started sewing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had yet to recommend masks to the US public. The scientist voice inside me kept asking questions: Do these work? Which mask design is best? How much do nose wires help? Which materials and how many layers should be used? Can quilting fabric and flannel or pillowcases trap coronaviruses? Meanwhile, antimasker memes comparing wearing face masks to using chain-link fences to catch mosquitoes started spreading on social media to discourage the public from wearing them and to question their effectiveness. While it felt like we were sewing in the dark, it was not pitch black. Aerosol scientists were testing how well different materials filtered particles, but we really needed to see how these masks performed on actual human beings. Before long I was leading a research project on fabric masks at the University of California, Riverside. Now I would do science with my sewing machine! Science builds on what we know and chips away at the unknown. We understand more little pieces every day, from how COVID-19 is

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transmitted to the differences between elastic and ties in the fit of face masks. We’re witnessing fast-paced science under the microscope, complete with untested hypotheses, small sample sizes, and mistakes. Maybe kimchee doesn’t protect against the virus, but maybe homemade kimchee can, if it keeps sewists happy making masks for others! Some people take the messiness of science as a reason not to trust it, because it seems like the facts are always changing. I look at it another way: the universe is messy, and it is amazing that we can know anything at all! A data-driven life is humbling, as it puts our assumptions to the test and shows us possibilities we never knew existed when unexpected results emerge, as when some of my homemade creations outperformed commercial masks. This is a critical time for science communication and social science. If we want to make the world a better place, we need to understand the world and also how people interact with the world. A perfect mask or vaccine does no good unless you can convince people to use it. Science can illuminate many dark corners, including the question of how and why science itself is often ignored. Science is the light on our sewing machines, and if you are sewing masks at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, even a dim light is better than no light at all.

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Lisa Prostak, My Dad Sewing This photo shows my dad sewing his T4 (technician fourth grade sergeant) stripes onto his army uniform in 1944. He was eighteen and had been training as a tailor before being drafted; as the third son of poor Italian immigrants, he had no prospects of going to college. He never became a tailor, though; after the war he went to college on the GI Bill and became an optometrist. But he taught me several hand stitches and how to sew on buttons. He hemmed all my pants and skirts and even performed surgery on my dolls and stuffed animals. I miss him. I spent thirty years as a biologist, and after my husband passed away, I decided to become a science teacher to combat the growing antiscience movement in the United States. I hope to inspire young minds to think and reason. It’s the long game.

Querida Abuelita Rafaelita Lor e na M a driga l

Querida Abuelita Rafaelita, The loud brrrr barrels past my ears as my eyes catch your feet en el pedal pressing forward and your arms disappear again and again behind flourishing reds purples and greens—telas now airborne in your fury tan impaciente que eres to finish that dress, that skirt, that blouse, those many alterations pa el señor del centro, la vecina, la amiga de tu amiga you clothed a whole community once— gifted new and one-of-a-kind pieces to your family, took in and let out seams with ease, wrestled with fabrics and inspected your machines otra vez se me atoró and so I check my bobbin, rethread the whole damn thing, tighten the screws, maybe it’s time to oil it again—so many masks, I’ve lost track of time. We are trying to mask whole communities now, in oranges blues superheroes and kente cloth, las telas vuelan from LA to the Bay, from Beacon Hill to Jacksonville, from Pembroke to Newport in urgency to protect the essential and the forgotten no tenemos paciencia— these aunties are battling COVID, wildfires, hurricanes, nationwide incompetence pa todo el país. Nonstop our machines are threading salvation like you did from Tijuana to San Diego to Downtown’s Spring St. where las costureras orchestrated • 

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deafening hums and rattles and choreographed the dance of hands and feet and precuts for 3 pennies 6 pennies a piece—6 days a week over 30 years of sweat and ganas you spent in warehouses to feed and clothe your children— Gracias because of you this Singer 237 is home with me churning out masks in a never-ending pandemic, and as I cut the fabric your decades-old shears, stained with rust are snipping along with me, as I adjust my seat I see you raising your feet to the pedals, as my machine begins tat-tat-tat-tat I’m transported to your apartment where the brrrrs barreled past my ears and telas flew above me in this magic that you shared with me. Con mucho amor y agradecimiento, Lorena

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Lorena Madrigal, Sewing Machine

Treasuring Mom Joy Pa rk-T hom as

My mom, Young Ja, is eighty-one years old. She suffers from diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, among other conditions. Six months into the pandemic, isolation and inactivity have taken a toll on her, right when activity and social connection are crucial for the survival of older people. I am her only connection with the outside world, so my weekends are filled with eldercare. It has given me the opportunity to hear her stories of growing up in Korea under Japanese occupation, of begging American soldiers for used chewing gum, of learning to make kimchee, and of receiving a turquoise-green sewing machine at her wedding in the early 1960s. I treasure her stories, mischievous smile, tenacity, and love. But I am also filled with despair. In March, when my mom declared she would never survive the shutdown, I thought she was exaggerating. Now I am helping her draft her will and funeral arrangements because we both see that day looming. The breakdown of the social contract, democracy, and compassion in the United States has fueled the belief that wearing a mask infringes on one’s freedom. But the longer Americans refuse to wear masks, the longer the pandemic will continue; and the longer the shutdown circumscribes the activity of the medically vulnerable, the more likely it is that my mom will die of infirmity and dementia before it ends. I cry knowing that this probable outcome could have been avoided. From the moment I saw Kristina Wong’s Facebook post in April 2020 about making masks for underserved groups, I wanted to join. While other friends were selling masks, Kristina was subsidizing the purchase of serger machines to enable greater participation. So I took her up on

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her offer. This generosity was just the first example of a key tenet of the Auntie Sewing Squad: We Care. That care is expressed in the form of the masks we send out and also in the form of care for each other, extending even beyond our immediate circle. Thanks to the generosity of Aunties, my mom and I attended a Zoom stretching class led by a Super Auntie, the dance theater director Laura Karlin, and a yoga class taught by Caring Auntie Puneet Singh, which helped my mom stay active and learn something new. We also attended a Zoom tutorial on making kimchee, taught by Sewing Auntie Grace Yoo, that rekindled some of my mom’s interest in passing on tips for making traditional recipes and prompted stories of her youth in Korea. I continue to make kimchee for my mom, and she happily tells me my skills are improving. By including my mom, these moments of Auntie care also became part of her eldercare. And the compassion the Aunties shared with us helps me feel less alone and less invisible as I shoulder the crucial responsibility for my mom’s survival. More than ever, during the pandemic, the task of ensuring the well-being of extended family has fallen to women as de facto nurturers. At the same time, the number of domestic abuse cases has skyrocketed. Being an Auntie means enacting the social contract, the democracy, and the compassion that the United States has failed to enact as a nation. So with the group’s support, I organized my own mask campaign for the Center for the Pacific Asian Family, a Los Angeles–based shelter for survivors of abuse who are non-Englishspeaking women and children, to extend our help to some of those mothers who carry the heaviest burden. Not just my mom, but all the moms who protect later generations, need our efforts to protect them. The productivity and the care this group provides give me hope because sewing masks for the Auntie Sewing Squad, both on my 2020 serger and on my mom’s 1963 Singer, is the one way I can help keep others—and therefore my mom—alive.

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Earl’s Girl Pound Cake Di ana W illi ams

My mom, known affectionately in our neighborhood as Miss Earl, taught me how to bake. Of course every recipe was a pinch of this, a bit of that. My early days in the kitchen with my mom instilled in me two things: (1) test, iterate, commit to paper only when it’s delicious; and (2) pound cake is comfort. The Auntie Sewing Squad formed during a time of extreme duress. So I started making pound cake for the Aunties to comfort them as they worked tirelessly to provide masks to others.

Ingredients 3 sticks (1½ cups/12 ounces) unsalted butter, softened

3 cups white sugar 6 large eggs, separated, at room temperature



2 cups cake flour, sifted



1 cup all-purpose flour



½ cup heavy whipping cream



½ cup buttermilk



1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ to 1 teaspoon almond extract

½ teaspoon lemon extract (optional)

Instructions In a large bowl, cream the butter with the sugar until well combined. Add the egg yolks one at a time, stirring to blend completely after each addition. Add all the egg whites at once and stir until fully combined.

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Alternate adding one-third of the cake flour, all-purpose flour, cream, and buttermilk at a time. Mix thoroughly after each addition. Stir in the vanilla, almond, and lemon extracts. Grease and flour a 9½-inch Bundt pan or 2 loaf pans. Spoon the batter into the pan(s). Then raise the pan(s) approximately 1 inch from the work surface and drop back down to even out the batter and dislodge any air bubbles. Place the pan(s) on the middle rack of a cold oven and turn the oven to 325°F. Bake for 1 hour, then check by inserting a toothpick into the center of the cake. If the toothpick comes out with wet batter attached, bake another 15 minutes, or until the toothpick comes out with either moist crumbs attached or clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes before turning it out of the pan to finish cooling on a rack.

Tips Gather and measure all of your ingredients before you begin. The buttermilk can be replaced with another ½ cup of heavy whipping cream, for a total of 1 cup cream. Using 3 cups of cake flour and no all-purpose flour will make the texture lighter. Pound cake tastes better the next day. That’s a tip and a fact. Toasted pound cake is delicious (but don’t leave it unattended while toasting because the sugar content makes it liable to burn quickly).

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Posterity

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Teaching Sewing, Teaching Care Gr ac e J. Yo o

Compassion and the Classroom At the beginning of California’s shelter-in-place mandate, it was common for panicked families to hoard items like toilet paper, to the point of causing severe shortages. In my town, it was milk. Everyone was buying gallons. I discussed the crisis with my neighbor, who has three kids, as we walked our dogs: we agreed milk would likely be in short supply for several weeks. Many Americans have never had to fear for their futures. But in my family, just a generation ago, the Korean War brought uncertainty, panic, and chaos. On January 4, 1951, the battle of Uijeongbu triggered a mass evacuation of Seoul. Decades later, when asked about his experiences during the war, Dad would say the Korean War brought out selfishness in most folks: “Bombs were flying. You didn’t have time to think about others.” People fled past the maimed without being able to help. Yet there are still stories of people displaying empathy, leadership, and courage. My grandmother recounted an encounter that saved her life and that of my uncle. The last train to Busan arrived in Seoul already packed. People were riding on top of the train. As my terrified grandma boarded with her newborn son, hordes of others tried to push her off. An older man saw and said loudly to the crowd, “Do not throw this mother and baby off the train. I will make room.” As my grandmother entered her nineties in the throes of dementia, this was the story she repeated again and again. She still hoped to thank him someday, though we told her he had probably passed on. It was this story of compassion that entered my heart and mind as the pandemic worsened. I wanted to see that same selflessness now. Not

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the hoarding of milk, but the opposite impulse: protecting and caring for our fellow beings. I understood the instinct to hoard for one’s own family. It paralleled my family’s war story, but this time it was happening around the nation and the world. As fear of COVID-19 plagued every American town, I wondered, “How, in the face of uncertainty, can we still give to others compassionately?” As a professor at San Francisco State University (SFSU, or SF State), I took my question with me into the classroom. As we transitioned suddenly that spring to remote learning and remote interaction, I sensed my students’ anxiety. Many had moved back home quickly or were living alone, struggling to procure food and other necessities. Online learning was new to most. Some students adapted by being on the screen all the time. I pleaded with my students to go out for walks, to reach out to others, and to eat healthy foods, all while practicing physical distancing. Sharing my students’ uncertainties, I assigned them to read diaries written by young people in the early days of the lockdown in China. I hoped they would realize that they were not alone and that connection with others is important. My writing prompts to students included these: “Describe your first day sheltering in place.” “What was the one thing that gave you joy today?” “When reading about young people in Hubei, China, how do you see your experience as the same or different?” I wanted my students to consider how they could use their strengths to support others. As I posed that question to my students, I also began to ask it of myself.

Mask Consciousness and Learning to Sew from Professor Soe Early in the pandemic, the US government created mass confusion about the use of face coverings, first telling the public that masks were unnecessary and ineffective, then advocating universal masking. I already knew face coverings were key because my cousin in Korea had said the country had seen a drop in new cases after everyone began

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masking. I told her that in the United States, we were freaking out about mail, packages, and groceries being tainted with COVID-19, though there were no known cases of the disease being contracted from those sources. In Korea, my cousin reported, infections had been traced to unmasked individuals eating, talking, and socializing from less than six feet away. On March 26, 2020, ten days into California’s stringent shelter-inplace mandate, I attempted my first pandemic shopping trip. I wore a mask and snow gloves at Grocery Outlet. Half the shoppers were wearing gloves and some kind of mask or scarf, but the folks working the cash registers were unmasked. I asked the employees I interacted with if they had masks. They said they did not but would wear masks if they were available. When I asked if they would take hand-sewn masks, they said yes. Then on social media I saw former students saying they were petrified of going to work in healthcare without personal protective equipment (PPE). I realized then and there that I needed to sew masks for people working on the front lines. Around that time, I asked my colleague Valerie Soe what she was doing for spring break. She said, “Sewing. You should be sewing, Grace.” I told her I didn’t know how. She said she would teach me over Zoom. And so I set a spring break goal of obtaining a sewing machine, cloth, and elastic, and learning to sew masks. Another colleague loaned me her sewing machine and gave me a bedsheet to start practicing with. Soe helped me make my first stitch, but learning to sew was not easy. I had never sewn anything in my life. The first day, all I could manage was figuring out how to turn on the machine. Then came a week of needle, thread, and bobbin problems that almost made me quit. When friends asked me how life was, I always responded, “I am having sewing drama!” One night, I rethreaded the needle ten times. Another time, the bobbin thread wrapped itself around the bobbin case. Then there was the cutting—not just fabric but the cord of a headset I needed for teaching on Zoom. What can I say? It looked like elastic. Then there was no elastic to be found in the whole country. In late March, Ama-

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zon said it might arrive in mid-May—too late. I resorted to begging on Facebook: “Friends, I want to continue making masks for grocery store workers and healthcare providers. If you have elastic lying around, I could use it. Elastic is the new toilet paper. I have salvaged some from an old bedsheet but would prefer new elastic to use.” After a week of appeals, I received elastic from my cousin in South Korea. Shortly after that, I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad, which provided me with elastic and fabric. And so my shelter-in-place sewing adventure began in earnest. My first mask donations were to healthcare workers, farm workers, low-income elderly people, and San Francisco MUNI bus drivers. By mid-April, my sewing was going more smoothly. I could sew five masks in two hours. Once, by using a technique called daisy-chaining, I made ten in an hour for a senior facility next door. At times I got overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the need and fell into what I called my “sewing blues”—but once I got the hang of sewing, it was fun and actually turned out to be a good way of coping with pandemic stress. I had been thinking about the limited opportunities that would exist for my students that summer, since most summer programs and work opportunities had been canceled because of COVID-19. With my new skill, I realized I could be a positive role model for college students by demonstrating and offering skill development, creative expression, meaningful productivity, and contributions to local communities.

Developing a Summer Course: Teaching Students to Sew and Care With the support of the College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, I launched an independent study summer class in which students would sew masks for vulnerable communities through the Auntie Sewing Squad. Students were also asked to respond to the question: In the midst of COVID-19, how does sewing cloth masks for vulnerable communities of color impact you as a student? your family? your neighborhood? I set the following learning objectives:

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1. Explore the experience of COVID-19 in communities of color. 2. Gain skills and knowledge for sewing cloth masks. 3. Gain skills in research methodology, specifically in-depth interviewing. To date, I have not heard of another such college class for credit anywhere in the country, though a couple other professors in the Auntie Sewing Squad did incorporate mask sewing into their fall 2020 courses. What I wanted to teach during these times was care. My pedagogy of care was rooted in what I think of as auntiehood, a set of values and practices that go beyond care for immediate family and extend to all those around us. For me, as a faculty member in Asian American studies and public health, the pandemic crystallized the need for protection and care for everyone. I wanted students to gain skills that could be of service to others. By sewing masks, we can protect ourselves as well as others. My students would sew for Indigenous people, low-income elderly and immunocompromised people, farm workers, and incarcerated individuals. I was energized, and so were they: before the deadline, five SF State students emailed to express their enthusiasm. They said they had been wanting to learn to sew in order to make masks for vulnerable communities. Friends and Aunties offered loaner sewing machines, fabric, thread, postage, and elastic. These gifts all brought good energy and fueled our work. The students and I met for weekly Zoom sessions for ten weeks in the summer. We focused on learning how to sew and understanding the impact of COVID-19 in communities of color. Aunties from the Squad visited as guest speakers, including two Super Aunties— coordinators who had organized large mask campaigns for vulnerable communities, a responsibility that required research, making contacts, and negotiating complex logistics. One shared her experiences sewing and organizing for Indigenous communities, including the task of sending five supply vans to the Navajo Nation with sewing machines, sewing supplies, cleaning products, and medical supplies. Another

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Grace Yoo gathering sewing machines from friends for students. Photo by Albert Chang-Yoo.

spoke of “stitching generations,” and in fact several students were sewing with their mothers and bonding over a skill the moms already possessed. Each week I held class on Monday and hosted Zoom “sew socials” on Friday. On weekends, I shuttled masks and supplies to my students’ homes around the Bay Area; all summer I felt like a delivery driver. The students learned the UVH sewing pattern (named for its designer, Uncle Van Huynh, a member of the Squad) and a second design, known as the origami mask for its folded shape, from Àplat, an

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organic home-goods company that sold the masks and made the pattern freely available online. Many of my students’ parents were essential workers who asked for masks that could hold a disposable filter as an extra measure of protection. With a little help from Aunties Melinda Creps and Miky Han, the students embarked on learning yet another design, one that included a filter pocket. A highlight for the students was receiving packages of homemade cookies and breads from the Auntie Care team. The class grew from five to nine students and soon expanded beyond SFSU to include students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Hamilton College in upstate New York. The students and I were invited by Kathy Yep, a professor at Pitzer College, to share our experiences of sewing and provide a short lesson on how to sew a mask. My students gave Zoom presentations on why they had started sewing and on the meaning of sewing for others via the Auntie Sewing Squad. Barely a month into the class, my students taught the Pitzer College students, faculty, and staff how to sew masks. I had a proud Auntie moment watching them. By the end of the summer we had completed the one thousand masks that we had set as our goal. Our work tracked with current developments and urgent needs in a wide range of communities. In mid-July, for example, I organized a drive for the Aunties to provide 1,200 masks for San Quentin State Prison inmates. At the time, San Quentin was dealing with over two thousand COVID-19 cases and nineteen deaths. Donating to prisons is difficult because of stringent restrictions on who and what can enter the facilities, but it was part of the Aunties’ mission to supply the populations that were hardest to reach at a time of urgent need. Students sewed and sent two hundred masks; other Aunties supplied the rest. My students also sewed and donated one hundred masks to the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico, whose healthcare services, like those of other Native communities, were severely and systemically underresourced; two hundred to farm workers in California and elsewhere, mostly immigrants who were laboring

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through a historic heat wave; one hundred to houseless individuals in San Francisco; one hundred to asylum seekers on the US-Mexico border; and one hundred to workers in the Imperial Valley, a border region in Southern California where a devastating outbreak occurred among farm workers and migrant families. Each of these communities faced distinct public health challenges during the pandemic. The students learned that these challenges arose from preexisting social inequities. For example, at the time of the Imperial Valley mask drive in July 2020, seventeen people a day were being airlifted out of the region because intensive care for those seriously ill with COVID-19 was unavailable locally. Those most affected were low-wage, Latino agricultural workers who lived in crowded housing and worked long hours side by side without adequate protection. Asylum seekers, who arrived at the US-Mexico border from many countries, met draconian policies such as the outrageously named Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, a.k.a. the “Remain in Mexico” policy) instituted in January 2020. Under the MPP, many migrants fleeing violence and political persecution could no longer present themselves to US border officials to ask for asylum, a right guaranteed under international law, and instead had to live for months in tent cities in Mex­ ico without legal status, income, running water, or medical care. Under these conditions, face coverings were an inexpensive but effective measure of protection against uncontrolled community spread of the virus, but they were unavailable to many. This was a problem the Auntie Sewing Squad and my students worked to address. In addition to sewing masks and discussing the social and political contexts in which they were doing so, students also learned research methods by conducting oral history interviews with Aunties. The goal was for students to uncover how members of the Auntie Sewing Squad had started sewing and how they found meaning and purpose in their sewing for others. I wanted them to engage with Squad members, compare and contrast the Aunties’ experiences with their own, and participate in preserving the work of the Squad.

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Oral history is traditionally a method of documenting history “from below”—that is, documenting the lives and experiences of people who might otherwise be left out of the historical record because they occupy less powerful social positions. Given the Squad’s focus on neglected communities, this principle was pertinent for us. Although the Aunties could not speak for the recipients of their masks—and did not attempt to—they could offer their own perspectives on forms of social solidarity and political resistance. We were able to capture history as it happened by focusing on a group, consisting mostly of women, who were performing unofficial and unpaid (and historically devalued) labor in order to help people who lacked government protection during the pandemic. What follows are the results of the oral history assignment— first-person narratives from the Aunties set alongside reflections from my students. It was particularly meaningful to end this summer project on this note of connection because Aunties had provided essential care, instruction, and encouragement to my students all summer. Most of the students did not initially know how to sew, and several did not have sewing machines. Throughout the summer, I watched students become empowered through learning a new skill that was saving lives. I was proud to see that they had developed purpose and meaning in sewing for others. By the end of the summer, they had developed their own connections, community, and forms of mutual care. Sewing stitched them to each other and to the Auntie Sewing Squad.

Avenues for Solidarity: An Oral History Collection The following profiles are based on oral history interviews with Auntie Sewing Squad members conducted by students of the first sewing class, along with the students’ reflections on their coursework. The profiles have been augmented by the students with background information from other sources, including the Aunties’ working group on Facebook. 208  

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Beauty and Rage Jessica Arana, interviewed by Catrina Alonzo JA: I’m an artist, graphic designer, and educator based in Los Angeles. I have a background in sewing that I learned from my grandmother, and other art forms, but my role in the Auntie Sewing Squad is organizing. I created a matrix to measure communities’ potential for contagion and illuminate their lack of access points and vulnerabilities. I set it up so we could visually see the communities that are impacted most by the pandemic and that are in need. I also pair community organizations with pledge campaigns and coordinate the Aunties as they create and distribute masks to these groups. As one of the Super Aunties, I’m focused on coordinating drives for farm workers, asylum seekers, and low-income Black and Brown essential workers and their families. Being part of the group is really incredible and fulfilling: the beauty of the fabric, the colors, and having a team of people making beautiful things and a community of people to talk to about sewing and craft materials and creativity. At the same time, there’s this feeling of rage that many communities aren’t being protected, and a feeling of deep sadness and anger that even if we work really hard at providing masks, there will be people left out. And so I have both a sense of pride being a part of the Auntie Sewing Squad and a frustrated feeling of “I have to do this work because it has to get done.” Community work has always been double-sided. We are doing work the government and higher officials should have done. My experience interviewing Jessica opened my eyes to the reality of CA: our current situation. The work the Auntie Sewing Squad does for the people is so inspiring, but we must also remember why we are doing it. Ultimately, the Auntie Sewing Squad is fronting masks for communities that were not given rightful aid from our country. My main takeaway from this interview is that even in desperate times, our communities will come together to support one another.

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As Jessica and I were talking about the Auntie Sewing Squad and both of our roles, we agreed the sense of community was strong. COVID-19 only highlighted issues that were already present in our country. The need for aid was always there, but now our communities are coming together. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement happening around us now, we have seen different communities come together to fight for one another and be each other’s support. I am grateful to have been able to interview Jessica because she influenced me to keep myself grounded during these times, especially with doing work for our communities. She inspires me to keep fighting for the people around us.

Go Big or Go Home Melinda Sciutto Creps, interviewed by Allison Phuong I’ve been a teacher for twenty years and currently teach third MSC: grade. I learned to sew from my grandmother when I was nine; she taught me quilting. I had done a little arts and crafts before that, but really took to sewing. I’ve made about twelve quilts. My role in ASS is I sew, and I mail to whoever needs it. My house is also a hub for the Bay Area—for distributing fabric, elastic, anything Aunties need. I think I have seventy spools of elastic currently, and a thousand yards of fabric are coming soon. Personally, I’ve made over five thousand masks. I only make one kind of mask because I’m a creature of habit. I did look at over twenty patterns, though, and went with the pleated one by Leah Day. I pledge 250 masks a pop. I always pledge big because “Go big or go home,” right? I have lofty goals, but the end result is so great that I don’t mind sewing from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., sometimes 1 a.m. When I reach the next thousand, I think I am going to have a party. I do celebrate every day, though, because I think of who they’re going to: migrants, Native Americans/First Nations, CASAs (court-appointed special advocates), farm workers, Planned Par-

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enthood, three Black Lives Matter protests, a street medics’ association. I’m really happy that each of my masks goes out to keep someone safe. For me, the Squad is all about helping. I wake up with pur­ pose. Anyone who has gone into the profession that I have—be it healthcare, teaching, counseling—we are all helpers, so however I can help, is where I want to be. It makes my heart happy that I can and am helping those who are in super-vulnerable communities who have no other way of obtaining masks. At the same time, it’s important to realize there are limits to what we can each do. Tomorrow’s another day, and you can make more that day. My advice is: find something you love, because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re going to hate living, and that’s no way to live. I had seen Melinda here and there between mask drop-offs and maAP: terial pickups, but getting to sit down with her and hear about her intentions and motives really opened my eyes and inspired me to continue learning, sewing, and finding ways to be of service. I was able to sew and donate 117 masks, not including the many I sewed to help protect my family and loved ones. Additionally, I made my parents so happy! They never thought their American daughter would be sewing, but they are so proud. Sewing has been a part of Vietnamese culture for many generations, so getting the opportunity to learn how to sew this summer has stitched me back to my roots. I have now seen and know the love and care it takes to sew. And I will never again take it for granted. My favorite part of this experience was sewing alongside my SFSU peers via Zoom. It gave me a sense of community, support, and joy that I never thought I’d be able to feel while living remotely in isolation.

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More Than a Lifeline—a Community Hellen Lee, interviewed by Allison Babbitt HL: I’m a professor of English at Sacramento State University special­ izing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and ethnic US literatures. I met Valerie Soe through a profession­ al organization—the California Faculty Association, where we worked together on the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus. [The caucus has since changed its name to Asian Pacific Islander Desi Caucus (APIDA).] I would say my role in ASS is sewing slow and steady. I sew batches of twenty-five masks and can make fifty masks in a week. The pacing allows me to change up the activity on my hands. I’m currently working on a 225-mask pledge for farm workers. My sewing journey began with watching my mother sew in the garage. She did piecework to supplement our income. I started using a sewing machine in seventh grade, and in my twenties and thirties I made my own clothes. Before I met the Aunties, I was already sewing masks. I began in March after talking with my cousin about the lack of PPE in her hospital. I have preexisting health conditions, so the reality of COVID has been pressing for me. I leave the house once every two weeks, maximum. So when I ran out of supplies, the Auntie Sewing Squad became essential. And it’s not just a lifeline of supplies. At first that’s what it was, but then it became a community. I’ve never laid eyes on these people, but they’re funny and witty, and over time we have gotten to learn about each other. We are so different, the Aunties, but there is a shared purpose: to help and protect people who are the most neglected, underserved, and exploited. That keeps us together. AB: Hellen’s work is meticulous, artful, and innovative. She is also precise with her words. She did not hesitate to correct me, and I was grateful for that. We were able to speak about a wide range of topics. I felt at ease in our conversation, and I was able to share pieces

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of myself that I don’t normally get to speak about. Her wisdom and reading recommendations have been guiding me during the past couple of weeks. I really appreciate the questions that she is asking in her research, and I have begun to ask similar questions about the world around me. Working within a sewing collective was the most powerful part of my experience. I felt connected to the active members of the Auntie Sewing Squad through our interviews, the supplies they provided us, and the goodies they sent to us. The action of sewing kept my hands and my mind active this summer. Ultimately, the people who made the biggest impression on me were my peers. They make me so hopeful. It makes me really happy to think I might be bringing some of that hope into our community.

From Couture Fashion to Sewing Masks Rosalind Guder, interviewed by Kiyanna Moheit RG: I’m a fine art photographer living in Los Angeles. I learned to sew in my seventh-grade home economics class. During college, I decid­ed to become a fashion designer, so I transferred from university to a fashion college. After graduation, I went to work for an old couture designer and eventually opened my own shop, making custom garments. But it was hard work for too little pay, so I eventually went back to university and got a business degree. About a year before the pandemic, we had a family tragedy that really shaped my response to this crisis. My son fell off a friend’s roof and hit his head. He was in a coma for a month, and we weren’t sure if he would get better. After what seemed like forever, my son did fully recover. I kept in touch with the nurses. There were so many uncertainties during that time. But one thing that came out of it was I became friends with some of the nurses who were caring for him. So, when the pandemic hit, I messaged

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some of them on Facebook and asked about the shortage of PPE for healthcare workers. That’s when I began sewing for healthcare workers. I got hold of some medical-grade H600 fabric and made over 1,300 masks and 350 scrub caps. As the healthcare workers started to get their own supplies, they didn’t need me as much, so I started donating to other people as well. I joined several mask-sewing groups on Facebook but left all of them except the Auntie Sewing Squad. The Aunties gave me the most happiness because of the diversity and community: working with the Squad has meant the camaraderie of us all working together and the kindness everyone has displayed. Eventually I made some YouTube instructional videos to teach more people to sew masks. I’ve had to scale back my Auntie work some to find some balance with my personal life. But I recently did some socially distanced portrait-photography sessions for Aunties as a Community Care offering. These were fun and meaningful, a way to give back to the group. There is no doubt that Rosalind Guder has had a tremendous imKM: pact in the Auntie Sewing Squad. She has worked so tirelessly to provide healthcare workers with proper PPE and donated hundreds more masks to communities in need. After speaking with Rosalind, I feel inspired to find more ways to contribute. I began my sewing journey as a novice with the simple stitch my mother first taught me when I was eight years old. Since I started sewing with this group, I feel nostalgic, and it has given me a sense of peace. Sewing and donating masks has made me feel happy because I feel like I’m helping to make people safe during this pandemic. I have now made two hundred masks with the encouragement of wonderful Aunties like Rosalind Guder. I am extremely grateful to be a part of such a wonderful and caring community.

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Things Are Getting Worse, Not Better Mikyung “Miky” Han, interviewed by Windy Tran MH: Sewing has always been part of my life. When I was a child, my mother sewed for garment businesses, and I must have absorbed that knowledge. Although she never formally taught me, I gained the foundation for sewing by watching her for hours. In February this year [2020], before the pandemic impacted the United States, I saw that many people were gathering large quantities of PPE to ship to family members in places like China, and I realized quickly this would mean there might not be enough for my own family. My concerns proved to be right, and I couldn’t find any N95 masks in any of the stores or online. So, I decided to sew fabric masks for family and elderly friends who lived in other states. In March, I got back in touch with an old friend, Dr. Grace Yoo. She introduced me to the Auntie Sewing Squad. I’ve made 988 masks for the Aunties so far, mostly children’s masks. In the Sewing Squad, we may have differing views or beliefs, but sewing unites us and is the foundation for our collective mission to help others. The Squad has allowed me to personally connect to so many commu­nities I normally wouldn’t have, such as the migrant communities and First Nations. During these past months, although we have gained more knowledge about the coronavirus, the pandemic has only worsened, especially now in the more rural communities. It seems things are getting worse in every state, not better, because so many communities lack the resources to get the protective gear they need. As part of the ever-growing Aunties network, I believe each of us is making an impact one mask at a time. WT: Interviewing Dr. Han highlighted how the simple act of sewing has stitched together different generations. After interviewing Dr. Han, I realized that our paths to mask making were very similar. Although we are from different generations, we both recognized

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that there was a need, and we stepped up to meet that need. Like Dr. Han, I also grew up with a mother who was constantly sewing for work; through the simple act of observation, I gained my own knowledge of sewing. In Dr. Han’s words, sewing is a dying art, but this dying art suddenly became one of the most in-demand skills as this pandemic continued. Listening to Dr. Han’s story and path to sewing masks was an inspiration to me because she proves how much of an impact one person could have on several communities. Sewing this summer has given me a sense of purpose because it allowed me to support numerous communities while in isolation. Sewing has also given me the unexpected opportunity to reconnect with my mom. As a first-generation Vietnamese American, I grew up watching my mom sew garments as a way to support the family. I never realized how hard sewing was until I started sewing masks. In many ways, this summer has stitched me to my mom in a new way because the act of sewing gave me insight into her experiences sewing. As I sat there sewing, my mom would offer me tips to sew a sturdier mask. It gave us the opportunity to bond and strengthen our relationship.

We’re All Activists Jenni “Emiko” Kuida, interviewed by Rhianna Borra-Croft JK: Before the pandemic, I hadn’t sewn for many years. I learned when I was about ten or eleven from my grandmas. Both were seamstresses working in sweatshops in the 1920s. My mother learned to sew from them, too. Most of my clothes were handmade when I was a kid, which I despised. But sewing masks has made me realize how much hard work went into the clothing. Man, my mom put so much love into everything that she made. I don’t think I could have ever appreciated enough at the time what she was sewing. Sewing masks wasn’t easy at first. I made the first one, and then it took me about a week to make the other seven. Now I can crank

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out about twenty-five a week. We have “stitch and bitch” sewing socials on Zoom, and through those the Aunties have taught me a lot of sewing hacks. I’ve learned to make two types of masks. During the week, I’m a grants manager at Koreatown Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles. I’ve worked for nonprofits going on thirty years, mostly for organizations focused on API [Asian and Pacific Islander] and Japanese Americans, in addition to environmental work. During the pandemic, funders were just coming out of the woodwork with new grants, so I was working more than full-time, then sewing on weekends. I would start sewing Friday night and sew until Sunday. Now I fit it into my day: “Oh, I have an hour for lunch; maybe I can sew for half an hour.” If I’m on a Zoom call, I’ll turn off my video and cut out patterns, or if I’m watching TV on a weeknight I’ll cut fabric. I was in Target and they were selling masks at two for $5, and I was like, man, $2.50? I think I put more than $2.50 of sweat equity into each mask. I hope the people making these masks are getting paid a decent wage, because it’s hard work. It makes you appreciate the clothes you have. My masks have gone to Yakima, Washington, agricultural workers, the TransLatin@ Coalition and Immigrant Defenders Law Center in LA, and the Detroit Food Academy. As of August 7, I have made 630 masks, but I’m hoping to reach the 700 club and eventually the 1,000 club. We’re all activists in the group. Who Auntie Sewing Squad sews masks for, for a lot of us, that’s a really big and important part of why we do it. Kristina has been very intentional about who we are sewing for and why and who we are not sewing for. We are definitely meeting needs that need to be met. RB: It was a pleasure getting to interview Auntie Kuida. Her commitment to her community is apparent. She made it clear that her mission, alongside the other Aunties, is to serve the people who were failed by the system. Auntie Kuida does so much work for her community, not only with her day job, but also in her free time. It’s

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inspiring to see how she managed to balance working overtime at her job during a pandemic with sewing hundreds of masks for the Auntie Sewing Squad. Sewing this summer with the Auntie Sewing Squad has had a big impact on my life. Before this summer I had never even touched a sewing machine, but now I can say I have sewn one hundred masks for ASS. I have met so many incredible people that I can now call my friends. Having to quarantine in the city has been emotionally taxing, but I’m grateful that I’ve had an amazing support system behind me. They’ve taught me it is possible to create a community and build relationships even if it is remote.

Sewing Is an Avenue for Solidarity Candice Kim, interviewed by Olivia Aquino CK: I joined the Auntie Sewing Squad when I saw a Facebook post from my college friend, Kristina Wong, asking for help sewing masks. I thought, “Sure, I love crafts! I kind of know how to sew. I could watch some YouTube videos and maybe help out.” I started sewing on an old sewing machine I had bought on a whim a few years back, but soon I moved into a more logistical role within the group, distributing supplies. My parents own a flower shop and donated elastic when nonessential businesses had to close. I quickly became a top distributor of elastics! I make sure that folks in the Squad, especially those who are homebound or immunocompromised, have access to the materials they need to make masks. I come to ASS from a background in community organizing: I worked as an organizer with the California Nurses Association and Physicians for Social Responsibility before moving into more legislation/policy–centered environmental work. Although the orga­ nizing ASS does is more informal and mutual-aid-based, that prior experience led me to guide the group toward sending not only masks but also materials for other sewers to communities like the

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Navajo Nation. I wanted to make a connection with and also uplift them and support them as they fight for their communities. Sewing is an avenue for solidarity. When I sew, I sew not just as an individual, but as a part of a whole. I sew to give to folks in need or for my family because of a system that has failed us. I sew in resistance, in healing, and in solidarity. OA: I felt disconnected and helpless seeing what was happening in the world while in quarantine. I can’t be physically present in the community, so the Squad was a really great alternative. It’s given me a meaningful way to stay engaged and vigilant while still prioritizing my family’s health. Sewing masks has also made me think much more critically about where and how I get my clothes. Every stitch and fabric tells a story. I feel closer to my ancestors. My mom and her mom used to sew all their clothes when they immigrated from the Philippines, so I know it brings my mom joy to see me sewing like she did.

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The Auntie Sewing Squad Kids Sewing Camp Gi na Rive ra

I am a stay-at-home mom with four kids, two of whom have autism. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to inch into our lives, I took out my sewing machine to make masks for my family. Although they were not yet mandatory, I knew that with my daughter’s epilepsy, this was not a disease we could afford to bring home. I sewed furiously, making up to one hundred masks a week. I donated to others, but I needed support from others who were also sewing en masse. I joined Facebook groups, but I found that some of these groups were collecting masks and selling them without the makers’ knowledge. When I wandered into the Auntie Sewing Squad, I knew I had found my home. After a while, I felt burned out. I asked the Overlord, Kristina Wong, what else I could do to help. She mentioned that she had posted a joke about child labor, or recruiting kids to sew, and her friend Cindy Wang Brandt wanted to make that joke a reality. Cindy promoted the idea of a sewing summer camp, gathered parents and children, and scheduled Zoom meetings. They just needed a leader who could teach kids how to sew. With Anabelle, my twelve-year-old daughter, by my side, we launched the sewing camp. The camp ran for one hour per week for four weeks. I came up with lesson plans and a list of supplies. I wanted it to be fun and approachable for kids and parents. Not everyone had a sewing machine, so I taught hand sewing. Each week’s session featured a special guest Auntie, Uncle or Untie, who spoke about their career and the importance of masks, health, and sewing. This was the syllabus:

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Week 1: Hand sewing a sock puppet. Kids became acquainted with handling a needle and thread. Week 2: Hand sewing a mask. Kids learned about patterns, facings, cutting, and measurements. Week 3: Making ear savers. Kids learned to cut fabric pieces, use a sewing machine, face fabric with the right side out, and sew on buttons. Week 4: Sewing a mask using a sewing machine from start to finish. Building on prior lessons, kids applied their skills of cutting patterns, making facings, measuring, cutting, and sewing all the pieces together to make a mask they could be proud of. As camp leaders, Anabelle and I felt sad when sewing camp came to an end. Being a part of this gave us such a sense of purpose. But we felt pride to see kids express their happiness and excitement when they finally put on their completed masks and ear savers. They now have a skill that will serve them all their lives and can help create muchneeded masks during this time of pandemic.

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Auntie Sewing Squad…to the Rescue! by Dominie + Teena Apeles

Dominie Apeles and Teena Apeles, To the Rescue I’m eight years old and learned how to sew by attending the ASS summer camp and with help from other Aunties, and then I taught my mom, Teena. Now that we can sew and have donated masks, we understand the remarkable journeys masks make from Auntie and Uncle sewists to people all over the country. We are inspired by the selfless actions and amazing creativity of the Auntie Sewing Squad, especially their concern for people they’ve never met. We all can save lives!

Technical Assistance Auntie Vi brina C orona d o

Helping folks in the Auntie Sewing Squad with their sewing difficulties was rough at first. Some folks were suspicious of my advice. That made sense. A person can say they know how to fix a sewing machine when they do not. At least one Auntie told me my advice was not what her mechanic had told her. As a professional theatrical costumer, I’ve made costumes for Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera, and I learned to fix machines because I needed a working machine to finish a job. As I explained why I made particular suggestions and revealed my sewing and machine-repair background, folks began to trust my knowledge. Also, Aunties reported that their machines ran better when they heeded my advice, and their sewing was nicer. So folks would tag me when someone had a problem. One of the first technical questions I responded to was from Overlord Kristina, asking why we should buy Plexiglas pattern templates. Couldn’t we just use cardboard? I answered that a cardboard edge degrades over time, so the template gets smaller and loses definition. You can cut around Plexiglas templates with electric knives that cut many layers of fabric, making the process much faster. Many Aunties have basic sewing machine maintenance and repair skills and make helpful comments. Others give well-meaning but incorrect advice. So when someone posts on Facebook about a problem with their machine, I read all the comments from others before I talk to the person about what may be wrong. Most of the problems I’ve seen can be fixed by cleaning out lint from under the needle and around the bobbin case, oiling the machine, or changing the needle. Since I can’t be in the same room with the person, I ask a lot of questions. I get the

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machine make and model, so I can find an online instruction manual. Often the person does not know the terms for parts or processes—or gets terms mixed up—so I can’t take their description of the problem for granted. I ask for images—like pictures of wonky stitching—and study all the information before I start guiding Aunties through fixing their machines. Once, an Auntie had given up on her machine and asked for recommendations for a new one. I asked what was wrong with the machine. She said the take-up lever was moving horizontally. At first, I did not think I could help her, but I researched online how the take-up lever on her machine is attached, sent her videos, and explained how to stabilize it; and she fixed her machine. She did buy a new machine—for her daughter—but kept for herself the machine that I helped her fix. I love to see Aunties, especially new stitchers, get braver and more comfortable working with their machines by having technical assistance available.

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Connecting My Family’s One-Hundred-Year Herstory J e nni “Emiko” K uida

Like thread, sewing weaves through my family’s herstory. Growing up in the 1970s, my mom made most of my clothes. Mom would have pins in her mouth and a measuring tape around her neck, and I would fidget and complain about pins poking me during late-night fittings. Looking back, I am ashamed at how ungrateful I was, yearning for store-bought Chemin de Fer jeans and knit T-shirts like the other kids wore. I took sewing classes in middle and high school and actually enjoyed making my own clothes. By then, Mom had started working and did not sew as much. I loved picking out colorful fabrics and Butterick or McCall’s patterns, and Mom would help me with my sewing projects. But when I moved away to college, I stopped sewing. In the 1990s, I became an activist in the Japanese American community. Learning about the struggles of Thai garment workers and Latinx women toiling in unsafe sweatshops reminded me of my own family’s story, with immigrant grandmothers who worked as seamstresses in Los Angeles. Grandma Okazaki, on my mom’s side, taught schoolchildren hand sewing in Japan in the 1920s, sewed for her five children, and later worked at a small factory doing piecework in Boyle Heights, California, in the 1950s. My mom’s first job was clipping threads while taking the streetcar with her mother downtown. On my dad’s side, Grandma Kuida came from Japan in the 1920s. After living through the Japanese American concentration-camp experience during World War II, my dad’s family moved to Crenshaw in South LA. Grandma took the J car, the Jefferson Boulevard streetcar, downtown during the 1950s and 1960s, also doing piecework, sewing

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cuffs on dress shirts. Grandma’s foot-powered Singer sewing machine, more than a hundred years old, still sits gathering dust in the garage today. A week into sheltering in place, I saw on Facebook that Kristina Wong was sewing face masks for whoever needed them. My friend Lei­ lani Chan started to sew masks, too. On March 31, 2020, I pulled out my sewing machine and sewed my first eight masks to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. It took all week to complete them, but I was hooked. In May, Mom gave me a big box of fabric with scraps dating back forty-five years. Each one takes me viscerally back to childhood and connects me to my Japanese grandmothers. Maroon paisley scraps from a dress I made forty-one years ago have made their way to asylum seekers and other immigrants at the US-Mexico border encampment in Texas. Mom’s green gingham and floral fabrics have been transformed into masks for farm workers in New Jersey, low-income Black youth in South LA, and Head Start preschoolers in Louisiana. Once-forgotten pieces of cotton fabric are now leading new lives as lifesaving personal protective equipment. In a million years, I could never have imagined the destiny of these fabric scraps. Almost eight hundred masks later, I honor my mom’s and grandmothers’ legacy with each mask I sew.

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Winnie Fong, Sewing with Mom I went home to quarantine with my mother in Sacramento, California, where we bonded over sewing masks for community-based organizations representing farm workers, essential workers, survivors of domestic violence, and the LGBTQ community. We took turns cutting and sewing the fabric into two hundred masks in just a few weeks.

Sewing for the Next Generation Sy lvia Kwon

One summer day in Berkeley, California, while visiting college friends who had recently moved to the Bay Area, without exchanging any words or looks, my younger sister and I tailed an Asian mail carrier for several blocks. We had never seen a person who looked like us working as a government employee. In our small Midwestern town, police officers, firefighters, county officials, teachers, librarians, and others in public service roles were always white. Only when we reached a busy intersection did we awaken from our trance and continue our search for a nearby café. Growing up during the 1980s, we were one of eight Korean families living in a small suburban community twenty miles outside Flint, Michigan. We were part of the “brain drain” of highly educated immigrants from Asian countries who had begun settling in the Midwest with their families two decades earlier. As a young child, and later as a moody teenager, I rarely felt as if I belonged in my predominantly white surroundings. My parents didn’t help. My greatest wish growing up was to have a mother who was actively involved in the community. I imagined that if she joined the local women’s club, volunteered at the senior center, or organized school fundraisers, I would fit in and feel accepted. My mother, however, never attended any gatherings or meetings and frequently hid from our Michigander neighbors, who were kindly but reserved. Her haphazard attempts to learn English ended when I was twelve years old. Instead she spent most of her time at our kitchen table reading books that she ordered regularly from a Korean bookstore in Chicago. Watching her withdraw, I struggled to understand

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what her actions meant for me and my future. Would I avoid participating in my community? Would I speed-walk into my house to dodge my neighbors? I’m now a parent of third-generation Korean Americans. The Northern California town we live in is predominantly white. But my two children see me working on equity issues in education, volunteering in their schools, and more recently sewing masks for the Auntie Sewing Squad. They join me on my trips to exchange supplies with other Aunties. They cut fabric and elastic straps. They’ve even sewn a few masks themselves. Six months in, I am amazed that we are still sewing and fulfilling pledges. I am one of the Aunties who refuses to keep an accurate account of the number of masks they’ve made. I hate what that number represents. Even so, I am grateful to the friend who first signed me up. Like me, my children are members of a nationwide mutual-aid movement. Because of the Auntie Sewing Squad, they are active agents of social change. They will always have this experience to remember that they belong and helped their neighbors near and far during a global pandemic.

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Drawn by Gwendolyn Kim and written by Leilani Chan, Ova Saopeng, and Nouthak Saopeng.

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Chocolate Shortbread Hearts M e lissa Quilter

These cookies are inspired by a recipe from Maida Heatter. I began making them for board meetings, when I felt the need to sweeten the gathering and soften people’s hearts. When I began making these for Auntie Care, I added one refinement: before placing the cookies in the oven, I sprinkle the tops of the cookies liberally with granulated sugar. This recipe uses a food processor, but you can also combine the ingredients by hand, using a pastry blender or two table knives to cut the butter into the dry ingredients.

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour



1 cup cornstarch



1 cup powdered sugar



½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder ¼ teaspoon salt

2 sticks plus 2 tablespoons (9 ounces) chilled butter About 1 tablespoon vanilla extract Flour for dusting work surface Granulated sugar for topping (optional)

Instructions Preheat oven to 300 °F. In a food processor, combine the flour, cornstarch, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and salt. Process until ingredients are fully mixed. Cut the sticks of butter into ⅓-inch slices and drop them into the food processor on top of the dry ingredients.

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Process until mixture forms a ball. While processor is running, add vanilla extract. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. I use a tightly woven dishcloth. Roll the dough out to a thickness of ⅓ inch. (I like these cookies best if they are on the thick side.) Cut into shapes—hearts are nice. Place cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet. If you like, sprinkle with granulated sugar before baking. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove the cookie sheet. Allow the cookies to rest on the sheet before moving them. These are tender cookies. Enjoy!

⊲ Elena Dahl, we (can) do it After finishing a batch of masks, I arrange them into a little community, imagining they’re leaning on each other to make meaning, to organize themselves into one thriving body. Once they’re shipped out, I’m left with their scraps, which I press between glass and fiber-based silver gelatin paper and then flash with light. The developed print serves as an afterimage. It proves that while light does shine through these woven fibers and thus some virus particles can also pass through them, they are better than nothing. They were there when our government was not.

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Coda M a i-Li nh K . Hong, C hr issy Yee Lau, a nd Pr e e ti S h a r ma

November 2020 We write this coda in a time of uncertainty—the start of the ninth month of the pandemic, a transition to a new presidential administration, and (yet another) surge in coronavirus cases across the United States with no end in sight. Speeches by politicians and government officials alike have reminded us to “prepare for the worst, hope for the best” at different times of crisis throughout 2020—the ongoing pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprisings, hurricanes, wildfires, and a potential coup. This month’s wearied optimism should mark a sense of relief, but there’s talk of imminent testing shortages in Northern California, hospitals at capacity in the Midwest, and morgues set up in Texas. States are adjusting their pandemic restrictions, hoping for the best configurations of indoor spaces, city curfews, and advisories (not orders), without reinstating more stringent shelter-in-place policies yet. The last time the federal government offered a stimulus check was in March, and supplemental unemployment insurance ended in June. All the while, US media and policy blame the latest surge on the failure of individual responsibility. Kristina Wong comments that “none of us expected to be running a medical supply company in the apocalypse.” Her humor breaks the bleakness of what is to come, as does the honest energy of the eight hundred Aunties in the Auntie Sewing Squad. During election week in November 2020, members of the Squad anxiously awaited results. On

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Election Day, many kept busy by rage sewing or distracted ourselves with photos of cute babies or fluffy pets. As the “red mirage” showed Donald Trump in the lead that evening—because in-person votes, which tend to be more conservative, were counted first, and hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots had yet to be counted—Aunties went to bed in nervous anticipation. On Wednesday, we kept refreshing the news page for updates, with jokes that Nevada was only “five minutes away” from their full count. Meanwhile, Trump framed the legal counting of mail-in ballots as a “steal” and filed lawsuits protesting the results to rile up his base. On Thursday, Aunties paid close attention as Trump’s lead began to narrow. On Friday, a wave of relief swept over us as the swing states Georgia and Pennsylvania began to turn blue. By Saturday, the election was called, and we took time to celebrate, knowing there was much more work to do. Before the election, Aunties had worked for weeks on getting out the vote, denouncing the administration’s brazen acts of obfuscation regarding the pandemic, science, and white supremacy as dangerous— and deadly. Some volunteered to staff election-campaign phone banks, while others sent postcards to voters. Some sewed and sent votingthemed masks to Aunties in swing states, while others wore their handsewn collars, commemorating the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while leading university classes on Zoom. Many had sewn masks for a voter-registration organization in Georgia. These efforts helped to support organizations that spoke with disenfranchised BIPOC communities. The November 2020 elections had the highest voter turnout rate in US history. Getting out the vote and protecting voters’ rights was nec­essary to kick out Trump, but it would only begin to take down Trumpism—the combination of toxic masculinity, economic greed, and white supremacy that brought him to power. Defeating Trump—the basis of President Joe Biden’s political platform—is not enough. As all eyes focused on the election, the number of COVID-19 infections in the US reached an all-time high. On the Monday after the elec-

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tion, November 9, there were ten million known cases. The number of new cases per day also hit a new high of one hundred thousand. By then, more than 237,000 people in the US had died from COVID-19.1 Testing was still limited. Hospitals were once again inundated. Many people continued to refrain from wearing masks, especially at Republican gatherings. North Dakota and South Dakota had the highest COVID-19 mortality rates and the lowest rates of mask use of all states in the Union. Biden has promised to create a COVID-19 task force when he takes office in January. But white neoliberal solutions, like cutting welfare, enacting tough-on-crime legislation, and administering diversity training in police forces, have often done more harm than good to BIPOC communities. As Dean Spade affirmed on the Truthout website, mutual aid will still be necessary, no matter who is in the White House. So the Auntie Sewing Squad will go down sewing. During the week of the election, the Auntie Sewing Squad ran a drive to collect warm coats and extreme-weather gear for the residents of the Standing Rock Reservation. Although the rate of COVID-19 cases had decreased significantly among Indigenous populations, the goal of this campaign was to prevent another wave. The Squad sent winter gear such as heavy jackets, hats, and scarves, so that Standing Rock communities could continue to maintain physical distancing in their tents in zero-degree weather. Super Aunties are once again spearheading two major drives: a five-thousand-mask campaign for the Navajo Nation and another for farm workers nationwide. Aunties are coordinating fabric distribution to sewists in fabric deserts, exchanging care, in the form of fruit and vegetables, at local hubs, and stockpiling finished masks for delivery. At its core, the Auntie Sewing Squad demonstrates radical care for vulnerable communities and for each other in the face of government failure. Both the labor of making a mask and the practice of wearing one are ways to protect others. After more than eight months of frantic sewing and logistics, and a roller-coaster of a year, Aunties are exhausted, angry, grieving, and hurt, even as we await with ­caution

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the end of the disastrous Trump regime and the rollout of several new COVID vaccines. As always, we continue to look after each other, ­sustaining our practices of community care. In doing so, Aunties not only prepare for the worst; we also try to call forth what we can in ourselves and each other. We want to meet on the other side of this. Note 1. By the time this book went to press in June 2021, the US death toll from COVID-19 was nearing 600,000, though it had significantly slowed due to vaccination.

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Timeline

12.31.19

The World Health Organization (WHO) first reports a “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, China; other global health organizations begin investigating as well.

01.21.20

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launches an agencywide response to the virus.

01.30.20

The WHO raises a red flag about a novel coronavirus outbreak.

02.11.20

The disease gets its official name, COVID-19, from the WHO.

02.28.20

At a campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump calls the coronavirus a Democratic hoax.

03.19.20

California becomes the first state to issue a stay-at-home order, acting independently of the federal government. Other states gradually follow with similar measures.

03.24.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad is formed by Kristina Wong and other Asian American women in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

03.27.20

Congress passes the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, an economic stimulus bill.

04.03.20

The CDC recommends that everyone wear cloth face coverings in public.

04.09.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad centralizes information on how the group works, how to obtain fabric and supplies, and mask patterns.

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04.10.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad hosts its first Zoom sewing session.

04.19.20

A request is made to the Auntie Sewing Squad for eight hundred masks for the Navajo Nation. Aunties meet the goal in one day.

04.23.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad marks its one-month anniversary. Auntie Gwendolyn Kim draws the official logo.

04.23.20

Three hundred masks are requested from the Squad and sent to farm workers in Ventura County, California.

04.25.20

Auntie Headquarters officially renames its version of the “Fu” mask pattern the “UVH mask” in honor of Uncle Van Hyunh and to subvert orientalizing.

04.28.20

Johns Hopkins University reports one million cases of COVID-19 in the US.

05.07.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad sends more than sixty masks to the NAACP’s Brunswick chapter in Georgia in honor of Ahmaud Arbery, after a video was released showing that he was fatally shot by three white men while on a run in his own neighborhood in late February.

05.16.20

A call goes out to the Auntie Sewing Squad for five thousand masks for multiple Indigenous communities, including those of the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud Reservations, the Zuni Pueblo, and the Navajo and the Tohono O’odham Nations.

05.22.20

The Squad’s first relief van with supplies for the Navajo Nation heads out, carrying personal protective equipment, sewing machines and materials, and household goods.

05.27.20

The US death toll from COVID-19 passes one hundred thousand.

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05.30.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad declares a day of solidarity with the Black community and the Black Lives Matter movement.

06.19.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad’s core values are announced.

06.20.20– Widespread instances of racism toward Asian Americans 06.25.20

continue to be reported as Trump refers to the virus as “kung flu” at rallies in Oklahoma and Arizona.

07.24.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad reaches a milestone of seventy thousand masks sewn and sent to vulnerable communities, including Indigenous communities, farm workers, migrants seeking asylum, incarcerated people, and community-based organizations.

08.28.20

Auntie Sewing Squad headquarters brainstorms how to help get out the vote in battleground swing states and puts out a call for mask donations to the New Georgia Project to support its mission of registering voters in disenfranchised communities of color.

09.04.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad reaches a milestone of one hundred thousand mask donations.

09.16.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad donates 8,700 masks to vulnerable communities affected by the California and Oregon wildfires.

09.19.20

The US death toll from COVID-19 passes two hundred thousand.

10.03.20

Auntie Care holds a socially distanced swap meet in Southern California to exchange fresh fruits, homemade treats, other care items, and sewing supplies. A table is set up for Aunties to write notes to be mailed to Aunties in other regions.

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10.05.20

Aunties complete thousands of masks for community-based door-knocking and election canvassing efforts before a multistate voter-registration deadline.

10.19.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad begins a drive to provide warm coats and extreme cold-weather gear for Lakota communities in Standing Rock and Black Hills.

11.03.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad hosts a virtual rage-sewing session to watch the election returns.

11.15.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad continues to send masks to support get-out-the-vote efforts in Georgia for the Senate runoff election in January.

12.11.20

The US Food and Drug Administration approves the first emergency-use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine.

12.14.20

The US death toll from COVID-19 passes three hundred thousand.

12.14.20

Sandra Lindsay, a Black woman and critical care nurse in Long Island, New York, is the first American to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

12.31.20

The Auntie Sewing Squad closes the year having sewn and distributed 250,000 masks.

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Auntie Sewing Squad Mask Patterns M a i-L inh K . Hong a nd C h ey Towns e nd

Here we include instructions and patterns for making the three styles of mask most popular in the Auntie Sewing Squad: the Contoured Mask (also known as the UVH Mask), the Pleated Mask, and the Folding Mask. Equipment and sewing supplies required: Sewing machine or handsewing needles, scissors, measuring tape, thread. Fabric: For breathability and effectiveness, it is best to use two or three layers of tightly woven, nonstretchy, 100 percent cotton fabric. Quilting fabrics work well, as do bedsheets with a 200–300 thread count. Tightly woven cotton-polyester blends can work, but check for breathability. Wash and dry your fabric before sewing to prevent shrinkage afterward. Nose bridge wires (optional): Nose bridge wires improve the fit of masks and help prevent glasses from fogging up. Various materials can be used, including pipe cleaners, florists’ wire, plastic-covered twist ties, coffee bag closures, and specially made metal strips that are three to five inches long. Fold in sharp ends to prevent injury to the wearer or damage to the mask. Elastic: Most Aunties use ¼- or ⅛-inch flat braided elastic to make ear loops that are between eight and ten inches long, but any thin, stretchy material can be used, including hair elastics or a T-shirt cut into narrow strips. Alternatively, a long fabric tie (thirty-six to forty-eight inches long) can be attached to each side for fastening the mask around the head. Laundering: Cloth masks should be washed often and air-dried.

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CONTOURED MASK Adapted from the UVH Mask by Uncle Van Huynh

1

With right sides together, sew FRONT pieces together along center curved edge (1/4" seam). Repeat for LINING pieces.

2

3

With right sides together, match centers and edges. Sew FRONT to LINING (1/4" seam) along top and bottom. Leave sides open.

4

Finish ends of FRONT and LINING with 1/4" rolled hem. (Fold where indicated on pattern, and stitch in place.)

Turn right side out. Attach elastic or ties at ends. If using elastic, attach at one end, try on, and trim to fit before sewing other end.

OPTIONAL Topstitch center seams to keep flat.

OPTIONAL Topstitch 3/8" from top edge (as shown) to form sleeve for nose bridge insert.

CUT LINE SEW LINE FOLD LINE TOPSTITCH ELASTIC or TIES ATTACH HERE

M

SIZE

2

3

CONTOURED MASK CUT WITH RIGHT SIDES TOGETHER FRONT – CUT 2 LINING – CUT 2

4

ELASTIC 9" – CUT 2

PHOTOCOPY AT ACTUAL SIZE

0

½

1 INCH

1

PLEATED MASK Cut 1 FRONT rectangle, 1 LINING square, and 2 ELASTIC pieces according to measurements on opposite page.

1

3

Fold mask into 3 downward pleats and secure with pins or clips. Mask should measure 2–2.5" high. With right sides together, center LINING on FRONT. Using 1/2" seam allowance, sew across width of LINING at top and bottom.

2

Turn right side out. Stitch 1/8" from top and bottom edges.

4

Secure pleats by topstitching 2" from each end. OPTIONAL NOSE BRIDGE WIRE Tuck wire into top seam inside mask before stitching across top edge (Step 2). Stitch just below the wire, and sew a few vertical stitches on each side of wire to secure.

TUCK WIRE INSIDE TOP SEAM.

Adult M/L FRONT LINING ELASTIC

MEASUREMENTS Adult XL

Child SM

Child M/L

11" x 8" 8" x 8"

12" x 9" 9" x 9"

9" x 6" 6" x 6"

10" x 7" 7" x 7"

11"

12"

9"

10"

5

7

Place 11" elastic across end of mask on LINING side.

6

Fold end of mask twice to just past edge of square LINING, forming a casing for elastic. Stitch in place, taking care not to sew elastic. Repeat at other end. Mask should measure 8.5"–9" wide.

Tie elastic ends in a loose slip knot. Try on and adjust knot for fit. Hide knot inside casing.

FOLDING MASK 1

3 1½"–2" LEAVE OPEN Do not sew.

With right sides together, sew FRONT to LINING as shown. Leave the bottom open and four 1" openings at the corners to create an elastic casing on each end of the mask. Use 1/4" seam allowance.

Fold top and bottom edges 1.5" toward center on LINING side (up to 2" for closer fit). Sew 1.5" from each end (up to 2" for closer fit).

4

2

Leave 1/2" openings around elastic.

Make the fold! Open the top and bottom flaps, bringing together the horizontal ends. Press if desired.

5 Turn right side out and topstitch ends 1/8” from edge. Insert elastic through openings from top to bottom. Topstitch across top and bottom, folding in bottom edges 1/4" to create a finished edge. Leave 1/2" openings around elastic. Do not sew elastic.

Tie elastic ends, adjusting to fit. Trim excess. Hide knot inside casing.

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Ch

t ul Ad

ZE SI

l al

ge ar

Sm

/L

ild

Ch

m iu ed M

E

Z SI CHILD

S

GE (A

S

GE (A

6)

5)

12

2-

CUT ON FOLD

FOLDING MASK CUT ON FOLD AS INDICATED FRONT – CUT 1 LINING – CUT 1 ELASTIC 11" – CUT 2

PHOTOCOPY AT ACTUAL SIZE

0

½

1 INCH

Contributors

Dominie Apeles is a sculptor, animator, filmmaker, martial artist, musician, dancer, animal lover, and fourth grader. Her work has appeared on the PBS SoCal website and at the Los Angeles Pacific Film Festival, and she has performed at the Bootleg Theater, the Ford, and the Music Center, among other venues. Jessica Arana is a Xicana/American/Mexican design educator and practitioner with expertise in Borderland identity. She is passionate about centering cultural knowledge in education. Her work has appeared in Design Observer and Eye on Design. She co-curated the Google Arts & Culture exhibition Across Borders: A Look at the Work of Latinx Designers. Badly Licked Bear was strongly considering wearing a mask in public for the remainder of their days before it was cool. An avid birdwatcher, they see black swans everywhere. Laurie Bernadel is a web developer residing in North Carolina. Prior to the pandemic, she did not know how to sew. She taught herself via YouTube to help make masks for local healthcare workers, relieved to have left the healthcare field less than six months before. The Auntie Sewing Squad has kept her faith in humanity alive. Joni Byun, a 1.5 generation Korean American, is here to help. She’s a Commissioner on the Status of Women, long-time volunteer for the American Heart Association, court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for kids in foster care, and reluctant sewist who has made over fifteen hundred masks and counting with the Auntie Sewing Squad.

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Audrey Chan is a Chicago-born and Los Angeles–based artist and educator. Her research-based projects use drawing, painting, video, and public art to challenge dominant historical narratives through allegories of power, place, and identity. Leilani Chan and Ova Saopeng of TeAda Productions (teada.org) run a nomadic theater of color based in Los Angeles. They are also the proud parents of Nouthak Hakumele Saopeng, who has been bravely attending fourth grade online during the pandemic. Overlord Kristina Wong was TeAda’s first intern, and later a staff member. Vibrina Coronado (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) is a theater artist of costuming, puppetry, and sets, as well as a writer, producer, and director of plays and a teacher. She focuses on Native issues and culture and stories from her rural North Carolina community. Her play Borders received a staged reading at Voices of the Earth Short Play Festival at Bemidji State University. Melinda Creps is an elementary school teacher who joined ASS in March 2020 because it gave her a sense of purpose during the pandemic—a safe and simple way to participate in saving people “one mask at a time.” Sewing masks has rekindled her love of sewing. She is also the Bay Area Hub. She loves her three cats and they all check for quality control. Elena Dahl is Assistant Professor of Art at Wittenberg University. She works with physically and digitally manipulated photographs, sounds, and materials to make feminist historical revisions and speculative fictions. Her exhibitions include Context 2018 at Filter Space in Chicago and Auto/Update at the Carnegie in Cincinnati, Ohio. Māhealani Flournoy is a professional chef based in Pasadena, California. She is a mother of a child with special needs and works to raise awareness of her son’s disorder, Aicardi-Goutières syndrome, through social media. She is a longtime member of Hālau Hula ‘O Moani‘a‘ala Anuhea in Monterey Park, a hālau that perpetuates Hawaiian culture

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through dance, chants, and aloha. She is currently working toward a degree in Hawaiian studies through the University of Hawai‘i. Winnie Fong is an urban planner based in Los Angeles promoting equity and inclusive communities. She also volunteers in LA Chinatown to combat gentrification and displacement in order to protect local businesses and long-time residents, including working-class immigrants and senior members of the community. Ellen Gavin is a writer, producer, and activist living in Los Angeles. Ellen was a bilingual staff writer on an eighteen-episode Nicaraguan television drama, Contracorriente, broadcast throughout Latin America. For twenty-three years, she was the founding artistic director of the Brava Theater Center, serving women and playwrights of color. Sanae Robinson Guerin is a freelance art director for advertising agencies in Los Angeles and New York City. She is also an artist and activist working in watercolor, pen and ink, photography, stained glass, mosaic, wire sculpture, and fiber arts. She has exhibited in galleries and museums in many cities across the United States. Karl Haro von Mogel is a plant geneticist working on genome editing of citrus at the University of California, Riverside. Karl studied both plant genetics and science communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is passionate about science and communicating it to the public. He also keeps bees and sews awesome shirts. Mai-Linh K. Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced, specializing in Asian American studies, race, refugees, and justice. Her essays and articles have appeared in Amerasia Journal, MELUS, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, the Virginia Journal of International Law, and other journals and edited volumes. Her poetry is forthcoming in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press). Since 2017, she has cochaired the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies.

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Gayle Isa is grateful to her third-grade daughter, Davina, for teaching her to sew and getting their family involved in ASS. Together, they have made over one thousand masks, coordinated delivery of hundreds of gifts of Auntie care—and received a new kitten from one of the Aunties. Jacqueline Bell Johnson is an artist whose work explores the intersection of organic and architectural structure by using repetition of form and craft processes, with an undercurrent of feminism and gendered labor. Exhibited internationally, she serves on the faculty at Norco College teaching studio art and writes for Art and Cake. Laura Karlin is a Super Auntie who slays at the group’s Spreadsheet of Glory to track mask production and distribution. She is also the Salve Auntie, Choreography Auntie, and leader of Auntie Sewing Squad Super Stretching Sessions. Laura is the founder and artistic director of Invertigo Dance Theatre in Los Angeles. She is also a mother, a reproductive justice activist, a gardener, and a fan of Popsicle stick jokes. Candice Kim is a Los Angeles–based community organizer, artist, and public health practitioner. She has spent many years working on community-centered environmental justice campaigns and is the director of Moving Forward Network at Occidental College Gwendolyn Kim is an LA-based artist whose drawings are inspired by the closeness and kind gestures of family and friends, which are the backbone of our everyday lives. When she’s not drawing, she enjoys daydreaming, reading, binge watching, and web searching with twenty to thirty open tabs. Jenni “Emiko” Kuida is a sewing activist with Auntie Sewing Squad, Koreatown Youth and Community Center, Little Tokyo Service Center, Great Leap, Walk ’n Rollers, and Japanese American Community Services. She cowrote “101 Ways to Tell You’re Japanese American” and has edited and contributed to the publications of the Japanese American Historical Society and Rafu Shimpo.

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257

Sylvia Kwon is a researcher, evaluator, and consultant who has worked in education for over three decades. Originally from the Midwest, she is astonished daily to find herself living with her two children, dog, and partner in a ranch home on the West Coast. Chrissy Yee Lau is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American history, women’s history, and public history. She has published her research in the anthology Gendering the Trans-Pacific World and a special issue of Southern California Quarterly on Asian American public history. She has also researched and developed exhibitions at the National Museum of American History and the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. She is the director of the Auntie Sewing Squad Oral History Archive. Her forthcoming manuscript, Transnational New Women, is a history of how young Japanese American women negotiated the US and Japanese imperial ideologies around modern womanhood. Irene Tayag Laut has been a proud Pinay social worker and mental health professional for the past twenty-five years, as well as the mother of two amazing children, caregiver for a father with dementia and a mother adjusting to his illness, a loyal sister and friend, and an Auntie for life. Dana Leahy is a writer and comedian. Her two plays Are You There Margaret? It’s Me, God! and A New Pittsburgh Christmas Carol live on in the minds of the ten people who saw them. She is incredibly proud to be a part of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Hellen Lee is Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, teaching courses on late-nineteenth-century and multiethnic literatures of the United States. Her research on racialized women’s informal labor has appeared in books, journals, and encyclopedias. She is an active member of her church and her labor union. Heather C. Lou is an angry, Gemini earth dragon, multiracial, Asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, depressed, anxious, womxn of color artist 258  

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and educator in Minnesota. Heather’s work is a form of intergenerational healing that challenges and dismantles white supremacy. Learn more at hclouart.com. Lorena Madrigal, Assistant Professor of English at East Los Angeles College, finds time to sew masks when she’s done grading essays. She is also part of the Peaceweavers, a group in Los Angeles that sews, crochets, and knits beanies to donate to refugees and unhoused people. Lauretta Kanahoa Masters is a mother, grandmother, retired certified nurse practitioner (CNP), and working advocate for social justice, human welfare, and the preservation of our environment. Sharon McNary has been sewing since first grade and later learned knitting and weaving, so the fiber arts are an important form of expression for her. She works as a reporter at a public radio station serving Southern California. Laura McSharry Cooledge is an artist and graduate of the California College of the Arts, a mom, avid gardener, nature lover, and designobsessed creative. One of five daughters raised by a closet feminist who required them all to learn to sew, she has to date completed around fifteen hundred masks. Rebecca Pappas is a choreographer whose projects address the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her work has toured nationally and internationally. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and Djerassi and received funding from foundations including the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation. She is Assistant Professor of Dance at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Joy Park-Thomas is a freelance reality-television story producer on shows including Top Chef, Project Runway, and Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo. Her feminist science fiction short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles NaNo Anthology series. She is currently working on an urban fantasy trilogy against the backdrop of environmental apocalypse.

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259

Constance Parng is an actress, writer, and director of Hakka-DaiChinese-Taiwanese descent. Propelled into action by the pan­demic, she served as Super Auntie for Native nations and cofounded the Lakota Well-Being Project with Standing Rock tribal members to raise the standard of care for the Lakota people. Constance finds inspiration in seeing the sublime in the everyday, and putting compassion into action. Lisa Prostak works as a science teacher at a private middle/high school with the hope of impacting future generations’ relationship with science. She usually knits, but when the COVID-19 pandemic began she made masks for her family and friends. Then she wanted to donate to medical personnel, which led her to join the Auntie Sewing Squad. Melissa Quilter was born and raised in Idaho in the Selkirk crest of the Rocky Mountains, in a family of pioneers, farmers, and progressive educators. Educated at Occidental College and the University of Virginia, Melissa has worked in research labs and expedition support. She is a fourth-generation quiltmaker and marina caretaker. Gina Rivera is a mother of four, in-home support service provider, and suicide hotline volunteer and peer professional. Always looking for opportunities for self-improvement and helping others, she joined the Auntie Sewing Squad, starting out sewing and later teaching kids basic hand and machine sewing. Challenge accepted! Preeti Sharma is Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her scholarship on feminist theories of work, racial capitalism, service economies, and alternative labor organizing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies and Society and Space. She also published Nail Files, the first national policy study on labor issues in the nail salon sector, a report she coauthored for the UCLA Labor Center. Her book project, The Thread between Them, examines the transnational beauty practice of threading through labor, regulation, and contestation in beauty salons across Los Angeles County in the neoliberal immigrant service sector.

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Valerie Soe’s experimental videos, installations, and documentary films have been exhibited worldwide. Her most recent film, Love Boat: Taiwan, premiered in 2019 and has won awards and exhibited at ­sold-out screenings at film festivals around the world. Soe is the author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com, winner of the 2012 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital, which looks at Asian and Asian American art, film, culture, and activism. Her essays and articles have been published in books and journals including Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism; Afterimage; Asian Film; and Amerasia Journal. She is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State ­University. Rebecca Solnit is a product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school and the author of more than twenty books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) and five books with the University of California Press. She is a devoted aunt and great-aunt, official Auntie to the Bay Area Sunrise Movement hub, and a sadly mediocre seamstress. Amy Tofte is a playwright and screenwriter who was awarded a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has also been awarded residencies from the Autry Museum, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Yaddo. Her work has been presented throughout the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, including at the Edinburgh Fringe. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Chey Townsend is a Los Angeles–based freelance graphic designer, maker mom, and relentless creative. Continually striving to use her powers for good, she has focused her work on childhood literacy, cele­ brating neurodiversity, environmental issues, women’s rights, equity, and racial justice. She is honored and humbled to be an Auntie. Duyen Tran is a consultant on wellness, personal development, and social justice organizing. She sews and coleads care exchanges for the

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261

Auntie Sewing Squad. She is most proud of being an Angeleno and moonlighting as a cultural and culinary historian, feasting on LA’s colorful foods and fables. Dave Vindiola is a software consultant who trained as a chef in New York City. He works as part of the San Diego ASS group of sewers and seamstresses. Dave is inspired by his Overlord, the others in the group, and those who benefit from the efforts of ASS. Diana Williams is a film and television producer based in Los Angeles. Raised in New Jersey and a graduate of Georgetown University, Diana has traveled the world, been chased by a gang of feral pigs, and has no fear of street food . . . but has never competed on The Amazing Race. Alina Wong is Assistant Vice Provost for Educational Equity at Pennsylvania State University. Her research explores the social construction of racial identity and applies intersectionality as a framework to cultivate institutional change and accountability. She facilitates workshops that examine power, privilege, and oppression with a focus on individual and collective responsibilities for social change. Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian, writer, and elected representative in Koreatown Los Angeles. She uses humor as a tool to highlight racial dynamics as well as to provide a space for conversation and laughter. Her solo shows include a commentary on nongovernmental organizations in Africa, The Wong Street Journal, and a deep dive into Asian American mental health in Wong Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The national tour of her show Kristina Wong for Public Office, about her real-life successful campaign for public office, was sidelined by the pandemic, and now she performs Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord on Zoom, recounting the experience of building the Auntie Sewing Squad in ten days. She has received awards from Creative Capital, the Map Fund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the National Performance Network, along with a COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and eight Los Angeles Artist-in262  

•   Cont r i butor s

Residence awards. The Center Theatre Group honored her as the 2019 Sherwood Award recipient for her exceptional contribution to the Los Angeles theater landscape and her work as an innovative and adventurous artist. She has also been a comedy guest on late-night television. Grace J. Yoo is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a medical sociologist with a background in public health who has spent thirty years researching and teaching about health, illness, and social support in the Asian American community. She learned to sew during her 2020 spring break and plans to continue to sew with students until the pandemic ends. She is Auntie Grace to her nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews, and to her many students. Belinda Vong Younis is a second-generation Chinese American and the daughter of Chinese Cambodian refugees. Her artwork incorporates the practice of collecting and the playfulness of scale, and highlights the significant contributions and undervalued labor of garment workers. Belinda’s work is greatly inspired by and honors the life, labor, and legacy of her mother.

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Index

Alma Backyard Farms, 93 Angel Island, 88 anger, 145. See also rage sewing API Rise, 134 Arana, Jessica, 85–86, 93, 209–10; abuelos and facultad, 102–3; nepantlera, 104, 104n1 Arbery, Ahmaud, 90, 244 Asian American studies, 4, 92; and Auntie Sewing Squad, 4, 204 asylum seekers, 3, 84–88, 104, 144–45; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 85; support from organizations, 11, 86, 137, 156, 207, 209, 226, 245; targeting by Trump administration, 142, 207. See also borders; mask-making campaigns; refugees aunties: cultural lineages of, 12–13, 38, 45–46, 168, 174–75; as literary figures, 171–73; revolutionary roles, 14; taxonomy of care, 56–57 Auntie Sewing Squad: analysis of labor, 39; ASS Bingo, 24; ASS Care-Van, 60–61; ASS Core Values, 22–23; ASS Kids Sewing Camp, 220–22; The Care Manifesto, 14, 17; critical race and feminist critique of pandemic mask making, 17, 19; Facebook page, 44, 50–53, 96, 117–27, 134, 192, 208, 218, 226; family responsibilities, 45, 135, 137, 153– 54, 156, 174; as interconnectionists, 177; job titles, 45–46; map of participants and hubs, 20–21; Mary Poppins box, 27– 28; mask sewing patterns, 247; mission • 

statement, 42; nonprofit activism and, 52–53; radical care, 12, 41; requirements to receive mask donations, 42, 89. See also aunties; care work; Community Care; masks; mask-making campaigns; mutual aid Badly Licked Bear, 83, 96–99 Black Lives Matter (BLM): Day of Solidarity, 76, 91; masks supplied for protestors, 11, 90–92, 106, 211; publicity for, 62. See also solidarity Black Panthers, 10, 179, 181. See also mutual aid Boggs, Grace Lee, 14–15 Borderlands identity, 85, 104, 104n1, 254 borders: Border Angels, 86; and crossing, 85, 94, 178; encampments, 84–85, 88, 181; metaphor of aunt or auntie, 173; Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), 207; militarized, 10, 104; shelters located nearby, 84–85; South Texas Human Rights Center, 87–88; USMexico, 3, 48, 142, 185, 207, 226. See also asylum seekers brain drain, 228–29 Bullard, Monica, 90, 92, 94, 120 caregivers, 3, 7, 14, 41, 79, 173, 258 care work: community and, 18, 52; gendered and racialized dimensions of, 40; sewing, 38; taxonomy of, 56–57 Castagno, Bettina, 110, 118 Chang, Wei-Ling, 91

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Centers for Disease Control (CDC): stance on masking, 2, 4–5, 9, 84, 136; timeline, 243 charity. See cross-racial organizing; mutual aid; radical care; solidarity childcare, lack of, 7, 16, 40, 135, 146–47. See also care work children: child labor, 68; and definition of care, 40; dying, 153; family separation, 84; kids sewing camp, 220–21; as refugees, 133, 139. See also The Place for Grace chocolate shortbread hearts, 234–35 Choices for Freedom, 94 Community Care, 38, 42, 51–52, 58, 62, 154. See also recipes Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, 39–40, 78, 243; inequity of loans for small businesses, 40; lack of federal relief distributed to Indigenous communities, 78; limitations on $1,200 stipend, 39 Corpus Christi Immigration Coalition, 87. See also South Texas Human Rights Center COVID-19: and children, 100; effects on global garment industries, 48–49; governmental shortcomings in response to, 38, 41, 46, 63, 86; influence on BIPOC communities, 77–78, 136; spread throughout Navajo Nation and Indigenous communities, 79, 97, 101, 110; timeline of the pandemic, 243–66 cross-racial organizing, 4, 12, 14–15. See also solidarity disability: disability and medical leave, 44, 135, 192; medically vulnerable people, 192; physical pain, 156. See also mental health Earl’s Girl Pound Cake, 59, 194–95 Edwards, Jonathan (Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo), 81, 83–84, 109. See also

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Indigenous communities; Standing Rock Reservation essential workers, 228; federal government shortcomings, 46; gendered and racialized labor, 7, 136; lack of PPE supplies for, 40–41, 43, 53; requests for masks, 9, 49, 85, 97, 202, 206. See also mask-making campaigns fabric desert, 27, 28n1, 241 Facebook, 8, 16, 44, 53, 144, 203, 214, 220, 223; virtual feed, 116–27. See also Auntie Sewing Squad; mutual aid facultad, 102 fat quarter, 28, 28n2 flow state, 141 Floyd, George, 76, 90 garment production, 45, 47–48; Asian and Latinx workers as warriors, 48; “fast fashion,” 48; neoliberal policies, 48. See also Garment Worker Center (GWC); labor; mask-making campaigns; sweatshops Garment Worker Center (GWC), 49; homework, 50–51; Homework for Help, 50. See also S.B. 1399 grandmothers, 15, 21, 67–68, 102–3, 113, 148, 185, 189–90, 200, 209, 210, 216, 225 Homemade Medical Masks for the California Central Coast, 8 humor: as part of ASS Core Values, 22–23; and Auntie Sewing Squad, 16, 43–45, 53, 147, 239 Huynh, Van, 134–35; in relation to Fu mask, 134; interview by Mai-Linh Hong, 138–41, 143–45; reflections on anger and survival, 145; threat of deportation, 135, 140; UVH sewing pattern, 152, 205 incarceration, 90, 92–94, 134, 204, 245; Japanese American incarceration, 14, •   index

225–26; prison-industrial complex, 92. See also API Rise; Choices for Freedom; mask-making campaigns; The Place for Grace; Transformative In-Prison Workgroup Indigenous communities, 11; Bear Soldier COVID-19 response team, 79, 83–84; Gallup Indian Medical Center (New Mexico), 80. See also Navajo Nation; Parng, Constance; solidarity; Standing Rock Reservation Isa, Gayle, 51–53, 58–59 Kim, Candice, 49–50 kimchee, 30–31, 62, 187, 192–93 kindness: as part of ASS Core Values, 22–23 Kochiyama, Yuri, 14 Kronos Quartet. See Radical Care (film) labor: discourse of skilled vs. unskilled, 45; Mexican, 84; organizing and mutual aid, 180; piece-rate pay, 49; sweatshops, 40. See also Auntie Sewing Squad; mask-making campaigns; mutual aid; S.B. 1399 Lao Family Community Development Center, 89 L.A. Protects program, 49 Lewis, John, 28 mask-making campaigns, 82, 85, 93; absence of governmental leadership, 12, 68, 86; benefits of, 66; cultural appropriation and fabric choices, 82; donations of masks and supplies, 7–8, 18, 32, 42–43, 80–104, 110, 137, 158–59, 161, 182, 204; as expression of solidarity, 77, 158; familial legacies, 67–68, 102; gendered labor of, 9; historical references, 8; intentional collaborations, 86; physical and emotional tolls of, 38; requests for, 2, 8, 25, 27, 43–44. See also asylum seekers; cross-racial organizing;

incarceration; Indigenous communities; mutual aid masks, 63, 64, 67, 151; anti-Asian racism and, 6; Asian countries and, 4; commercial sales, 9–10; contoured, 248; debates about, 2; discourse about freedom and, 3; folding, 252; governmental mandates to wear, 5; N95, 96–97, 156; normalizing the wearing of, 9; pleated, 250; sewing patterns, 247–53. See also Centers for Disease Control (CDC); Garment Worker Center (GWC); mask-making campaigns; personal protective equipment (PPE); Trump, Donald mental health, 139, 141; depression, 153, 158. See also flow state; trauma model-minority stereotype, 76; Asian American student activists, 76 mothers, 69, 102, 113, 134, 136–39, 158, 173, 212, 214–16, 225–26, 227, 228–29; eldercare, 192–93; motherhood, 105–6, 153–54 Mummy-Wallig, Lisa, 109, 145. See also rage sewing mutual aid: and aunthood, 168; critically examining social structures, 11, 42, 178–79; in relation to charity, 11–12, 41–42, 45, 51, 53, 54n8, 158; race and communities of color, 15–16, 18, 38–39; as redistribution of resources, 10, 78, 82, 99, 101, 177–82, 241; and social justice organizing, 134, 145, 168, 170, 175, 218, 229. See also aunties; Black Panthers; Facebook; mask-making campaigns; solidarity nannies, 41, 104. See also caregivers Navajo Nation: Valentina Blackhorse, 79; COVID-19 cases, 11, 79, 97, 101; masks and supplies sent to, 11, 96–100, 110, 182, 204, 218, 241, 244; significance of dignity and respect in donations, 82–83, 204

index   •  

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Nemeth, Sally, 41 nourishing salve, 161–63 Nuncio, Marissa, 50, 55n21 Parng, Constance, 79–81, 84, 108–13, 182; Hakka, 108; sewing machine donation, 110 passion: as part of ASS Core Values, 22 Peaceweavers, 86–87 personal protective equipment (PPE), 38, 96, 154; federal government shortcomings, 46, 63, 86; to Indigenous communities, 79–80, 97; restrictions for, 80, 85; to US-Mexico border communities, 85; S.B. 1399, 50 The Place for Grace, 90 radical care, 12, 39, 41, 51, 53, 241 Radical Care (film), 41 rage sewing, 63, 109, 145, 147, 152, 158; while awaiting election results, 240 recipes: chocolate shortbread hearts, 234–35; Earl’s Girl Pound Cake, 194–95; nourishing salve, 161–63; tsukemono pasta salad, 114–15; ube halaya, 70–71; vegan kimchee, 30–31 refugees, 18, 42; from Laos, 89; from Syria, 86; from Vietnam, 109, 133–47. See also asylum seekers San Francisco State University (SFSU), 201 Saopeng, Ova, 89 S.B. 1399, 51 scientific problem-solving, 186–87 sewing: ASS quilt, 184; camp, 220; familial influences, 137–38, 188; measurements, 160; meditative practice, 18; mutual aid, 18; parents, 188, 192; as refuge, 132; solidarity, 18; survival skill, 18; teaching, 18, 200. See also rage sewing sewing machines, 137, 145, 154, 186, 191–92, 204–5, 212, 225; bobbin problems,

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202–3; donations of, 96–97, 99, 110, 182; home vs. industrial, 43, 47, 50; inexperience with, 202, 208, 218; as inheritance, 38, 69; purchase of, 7, 9, 46, 67, 80; requests for, 83; technical assistance, 223–24; YouTube tutorial videos, 7, 82 Sewing Masks for Area Hospitals, 8 sewists, 8–9, 25, 144, 187, 222, 241 Soe, Valerie, 2–3, 41, 170, 201–2, 212. See also Radical Care (film) solidarity: Asian American and Indigenous activists, 81; Black Lives Matter, 76, 91, 210; in relation to charity, 41–42, 77, 158, 179; Common Ground Collective, 179; Dakota Access Pipeline and #NoDAPL movement, 79–80, 106, 109, 169, 181; Indians of All Tribes, 81–82; Lakota Well-Being Project, 112; and praxis, 105–6, 225; sewing and, 18, 208–19; undocumented immigrants and, 87. See also cross-racial organizing; mutual aid South Texas Human Rights Center, 85–88 Standing Rock Reservation, 79–80, 83, 106, 109–12, 169, 181–82, 241 Stop AAPI Hate, 6; Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center, 6 sweatshops: dangerous working conditions, 40; debates around the term, 15–16, 40, 47–49; mask making, 63, 66, 69; origins of the term, 47. See also Garment Worker Center (GWC); labor; Wong, Kristina Taylor, Breonna, 62, 90, 145 teaching: academic coursework, 200–201; courses and programs cancelled, 203; students sewing and donating cloth masks, 203–4, 206 Third World Liberation Front, 77 Tran, Duyen, 51, 62 Transformative In-Prison Workgroup, 93 •   index

transparency: as part of ASS Core Values, 22 trauma, 135–36, 139; and crafting, 141–42 Trump, Donald, 3, 86, 240; critiques about, 16, 62, 87, 91; disinformation about masks, 5, 177, 183n9, 243, 245; failures of presidential administration, 6, 84, 86, 142–43, 182, 242; supporters of, 17, 144; white women voters, 17 tsukemono pasta salad, 114–15 ube halaya, 70–71

Western Navajo Seamstresses COVID-19 Dooda, 97. See also Navajo Nation Wong, Kristina, 262–63; beginning to make masks, 43–45, 47; Community Care, 51; as Sweatshop Overlord, 15–16, 43–44, 147, 220 World Health Organization (WHO), 4, 243 Zoom: recipes, 30, 62, 193; sewing socials, 52–53, 66, 202–6, 211, 217, 220, 244, 262; university teaching, 240

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