2026
What survives
Irene Antonia Diane Reece
For much of the twentieth century, garment manufacturing provided work for generations of women in San Antonio. Sewing skills that had long moved between women, households, and generations became industrial labor, performed at rows of machines and production tables in factories across the city. Black and Mexican American women were part of this workforce, cutting, sewing, pressing, and assembling garments that traveled far beyond San Antonio, even as the lives of the women who made them remained largely undocumented outside their own communities.
These jobs mattered beyond the factory floor. Their wages supported households and children, while years spent working side by side created communities among women whose labor was essential to their families and the industry that employed them. But this work could also mean low wages, inadequate benefits, demanding production quotas, and poor working conditions. San Antonio garment workers repeatedly organized against these conditions and for greater control over their labor. When factories closed and companies moved production elsewhere in search of cheaper labor, the industry did not disappear. It found less expensive workers elsewhere. Its departure still affected people at home.
For some women, the disappearance of this industry from San Antonio became another history they were responsible for carrying.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece arrived at this history through her own grandmother. While caring for her in recent years, Reece began asking questions about her life and learned about the multiple jobs she had held in San Antonio textile factories. What began with one woman opened onto generations of workers whose histories existed unevenly within the institutional record but remained alive within families.
Reece began visiting these women. She recorded their voices, photographed them as they are now, and scanned photographs they had kept themselves. Her interviews expanded to include family members, former garment workers, community leaders, former union organizers, and women associated with Fuerza Unida. Each encounter produced another fragment of a history distributed across living rooms, photo albums, memories, garments, and individual lives rather than contained within a single archive.
That movement between factory and home becomes the physical structure of hand-me-downs. A freestanding, five-panel room divider resembling the exterior of a South Texas home separates the two environments, complete with a screen door, windows, and printed-and-found textiles, including a silkscreened Fuerza Unida textile. Through its windows, visitors encounter a 13-by-11-foot photographic mural depicting the front porch of one of the women Reece interviewed.
Nearby, another mural of the same scale is filled with vibrant textile patterns, its seductive surface interrupted by two gold burglar-bar window guards. Reece considers how easily the objects produced by the garment industry can obscure the conditions under which they are made. Color, pattern, fashion, and status distract from the labor behind them. The burglar bars complicate what appears beautiful, turning the patterned surface into what Reece describes as a “pretty prison.”
The domestic environment continues into a living room with a vintage living room set, a hanging sconce, and a television playing a video assembled from Reece’s interviews. Contemporary portraits of the women hang throughout the gallery. Behind the television, framed photographs bring together images scanned from their personal photo albums, creating an archive from artifacts they cherish at home.
Nearby, a mirrored medicine cabinet is etched with the words, “To Love, here, is to refuse erasure. To resist is to remember.” The viewer’s reflection enters the work through the glass, while flowers fill the cabinet and spill onto the floor.
On the opposite side of the divider, Reece reconstructs the garment factory. Three vintage mint-green Singer sewing machines sit on large worktables with spool-thread stands, visually connected by a continuous textile feeding through each machine. Across the fabric are archival photographs of garment workers and fragments of text: “Fight for the living and those that have passed. Pour love into the archives.” Elsewhere, another reads simply, “My beloveds.”
The gaps in the historical record remain. Reece found considerably less documentation of Black women in San Antonio’s garment industry despite a longer history of Black sewing and tailoring in the city, including training at St. Philip’s College beginning in the late nineteenth century. Their absence raises a question that runs throughout Reece’s photographic practice: who determines what is preserved long enough to become history?
An archive, after all, is not simply what survives. It is what someone chooses to save.
Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and daughters have long served as unofficial archivists within families, preserving photographs, clothing, documents, stories, and names without necessarily describing that work as preservation. Reece does not present these materials as relics of a vanished industrial past. Many of these women are still here. Their voices speak from the television, their younger selves remain in family photographs, and their present-day portraits occupy the same room.
The factories are gone, their production moved elsewhere, but their history remains in the lives and stories of the women who worked there and what they learned and carried forward. hand-me-downs asks us to consider what survives when an industry disappears.