In all likelihood, colcha embroidery originated in colonial-era New Mexico and southern Colorado. The colcha stitch is a long, self-couching stitch, secured to the ground cloth by anchoring stitches. (2) This form of embroidery developed as a means of marrying practical and aesthetic concerns. During the Spanish colonial era, women had to make nearly everything required by the dictates of domestic life. They used the wool of the hearty churro sheep brought to the region by their settler ancestors. They spun this wool into yarn and tinted it in the subtle colors distilled from plants indigenous to the high desert or with dyes from other regions of New Spain. The art form now called colcha embroidery was devised to cover woolen ground cloth efficiently and completely. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Mexico and southern Colorado, needlework on altar cloths and bed coverlets featured stylized flowers, vines, and leaves.

Contemporary colcha embroidery is thickly entwined with discourses of continuity and Hispanic heritage. The careful replication of colonial practices today recalls the frugality and the ingenuity of earlier times. It also reasserts the imprint of gender on everyday life; women's embroidery was visible in the home (on burial cloths and tablecloths) and in sacred spaces (on altar cloths and saints' dresses). The endeavors of today's colcha artist--from the use of churro wool and handspun yarn, to the application of locally derived dyes, "traditional" design patterns, and even the stitch itself--are intimately bound up with ideas of value, authenticity, and cultural persistence in a region that refuses the erasure of its deeply Hispanic identity.