This essay proposes the metaphor of arpillería as a key to narrating the history of feminisms in Chile, overcoming the linearity of "waves" and recognizing their plural, situated, and tense nature. Through a historical overview, it highlights the struggles of working-class women, suffragists, settler women, and activists who have embodied resistance against exclusion, dictatorship, and neoliberalism. During the dictatorship, arpillería became a visual cry of denunciation and memory, while during the democratic transition, the feminist movement faced processes of institutionalization that led to silence, internal tensions, and co-optation. In recent decades, indigenous, community, dissident, and transfeminist feminisms have emerged that expand the margins of the political, articulating body-territory, ancestry, and justice. Milestones such as the Feminist May of 2018 and the Social Outbreak of 2019 reactivated activism, highlighting structural violence and promoting legal and cultural transformations. The Monsalve case of 2024, accused of rape, exposed a new type of feminist silence, not imposed from outside, but from within the progressive political field. This episode, read as a "sackcloth of disenchantment," reveals the ethical limits of institutional feminism and the urgency of political coherence. Thus, the article concludes that current Chilean feminisms are configured as a living burlap, woven from difference, that faces ethical, political, and emotional challenges, and that, as in Violeta Parra's songs, transforms pain into memory and silence into collective action.
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