We stay in the Americas this week, moving from Mexico to the Andes region to look at an arpillera cloth art piece (Spanish for “burlap.") The coarse fibered fabric serves as the backing for these elaborately embroidered, story-telling panels in cloth of many colors that bear its name, stitched together with bits of fabric and braid, yarn figures, and the occasional found object. Arpillera-making gained popularity in Chile in the 1970s , where the narrative cloth panels carried messages of protest against the repressive regime of Dictator Augusto Pinochet. The folk art form, then, moved across the border into Peru in the 1980s, when Maoist guerrillas drove peasants out of their homes in the Andean highlands into crowded shantytowns in the capital of Lima. Communal sewing circles helped the poor and displaced to survive. A folded note from an unknown artisan in a pocket on the back of this week's featured embroidery work describes its image from the New Testament along with the date and the identifying number of one such group of arpillera-makers in the Peruvian capital: This painting represents a biblical scene that is the miracle of Jesus, when he calmed the stormy sea and saved the twelve apostles from shipwreck. Group 4 Lima 7-9-90. (John Kohan)