Sergio Hernández’s cartoons invoke familiar images of Americana, with a twist of social consciousness and shades of Chicano youth culture. So in his whimsical spoofs of classic American icons like Mount Rushmore, the political subtext jumps into the foreground.
Sergio Hernández
In this mini-documentary by Latinopia, Hernández talks about his coming of age as an artist, his involvement with the Los Angeles-based magazine Con Safos, and using ink to draw out his struggles with the duality of being Chicano American. But in the end, for the political cartoonist, there really is just one American story… and countless ways of telling it.
Since the earliest days of European settlement on the continent, the tobacco crop has been nourished by all the bitter contradictions of the American project. Originally harvested by indentured servants and enslaved blacks, the crop today is still a lucrative bounty for a massive agricultural industry. For years, migrant workers in the tobacco fields of North Carolina have been organizing and agitating for fair wages and working conditions, under the leadership of groups like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (an affiliate of the AFL-CIO).
In the late 1990s, acclaimed photographer Joseph Rodriguez trained his lens across the vast fields of the Tar Heel state’s tobacco kingdom, as part of his Mexican Migration Project. His camera uncovered labor conditions that you can still find today on many of the nation’s farms.
The hazards of the job–which include pesticide exposure, dangerous heat and child exploitation–are a pervasive feature of farm life in America. The situation is particularly grim now that the White House has backtracked from earlier efforts to tighten labor protections for children working in tobacco production. But things might be changing in this corner of the country: recently, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee finally moved forward with talks with Reynolds American about improving working conditions. There’s still a tough road ahead for pro-migrant labor activists, but for these workers, struggle is a way of life.
To see more of Joseph Rodriguez’s photography of urban life, global crises, and migrants around the planet, go to his website, josephrodriguezphotography.com.
No writer understands the border culture between Mexico and the United States more intimately than Luis Alberto Urrea, this week’s guest on Moyers & Company.
His own life is the stuff of great novels. Son of a Mexican father and Anglo mother, Urrea grew up first in Tijuana and then just across the border in San Diego.
Over the years he has produced a series of acclaimed novels, including The Hummingbird’s Story, The Devil’s Highway, and his latest, Queen of America – each a rich and revealing account of the people of the borderlands that join and separate our two nations.
Discussion of TUSD book ban begins at 30:00 minute mark.
Three of Urrea’s books were among scores of others removed from classrooms earlier this year when the Tucson school district eliminated Mexican-American studies on the accusation it was “divisive.” But there’s no ban on ideas in Bill’s studio, and Urrea talks with Bill Moyers about that episode as he unfolds the modern reality of life on the border.
my friends are full of it
stories on a fault line
fiddling with the lock while the edifice swayed
they stayed through it, my friends
then counted the cracks on the wall
we figured out a way to get thinner
found their addresses
these friends of ours
figured out a way to get in through a deadbolt
fucked up the jewels inside
told them to leave
furniture and all, told them to fake it
national identity, figure out a way
to gun it, vials of acid
by the door, told them to take it
up in their new countries
no national identity for 4 years
found their citizenships
folded up with the towels
old soviet kitsch, stowed away
head down in a basement
rolled up rugs and mirrors in boxes
told them there wouldn’t be any
so they bolted with them
now everybody’s got a friend
from me, chock full of narrative
and talking refuge
everybody is a refugee
when they never knew me
friend or other, everybody
is a displaced person
figured out a way
to tell off
Born in Moldova, Marina Blitshteyn is currently based in New York and is the author of Russian for Lovers (Argos Books, 2011), where this poem first appeared.
On March 21, 2012, the Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown issued a press release, reading:
‘SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today appointed Juan Felipe Herrera to the position of California Poet Laureate.
‘Mr. Herrera, 63, is the author of twenty-eight books and currently serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He was a professor and chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004 and a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990.
‘Herrera’s work has received wide critical acclaim including numerous national and international awards. In a 2008 review of his work, Stephen Burt of the New York Times wrote, “All life, all art, involves boundaries, if only those of birth and death. Some poets keep us conscious of those boundaries; others, like Herrera, discover their powers by defying them. Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”’
As a California poet, I was beyond thrilled. As a Pinay, immigrant, and multilingual poet of color, reading the news was an emotional experience. Juan Felipe Herrera has been a tremendous influence on my poetry and career as an author, but more importantly, he has been a tremendous force in the way I work and teach in our intersecting communities.
The Harriet staff reported on March 23, stating the much-needed obvious, “Remarkably, Herrera will be the first Hispanic [sic] writer to serve in the post.” What took this state so long, I also wanted to know. The press release goes on to state,
‘The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Mr. Herrera earned a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He was elected to the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2009.’
In addition to Herrera’s impressive list of accomplishments to date, perhaps it’s Governor Brown’s well-known liberalism, the perfect confluence of factors, that enabled this to happen now. Indeed, a couple of years ago, during the Schwarzenegger administration, with a group of poets including Oscar Bermeo, Ching-In Chen, Javier O. Huerta, Craig Santos Perez, and Matthew Shenoda, we nominated Herrera for the position, so very wary of how our then-governor would read such unabashedly political poetry, in which “political” means that the poet continues to directly and critically engage state and federal border policy, as evidenced in his poems, “Everyday We Get More Illegal” (audio | text), and “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border”:
But you know what? No matter now. It’s done, and this appointment is so well-deserved. Perhaps this will change things; at least, I can hope it does. I was privileged to have this brief exchange with Herrera.
BJR: So, first off, congratulations again on being named California Poet Laureate. Where were you when you got the news? Did Jerry Brown call you? How did it go down?
JFH: I was driving my seven year old Civic down 210 about to roll onto the offramp to 91West when the phone rang. It as Tere Holloman from the Appointments Office. She congratulated me and told me that I had been appointed as California Poet Laureate. Of course, I still needed to be sworn in by Governor Brown and confirmed by the Senate. A short call. Then I ambled toward campus a little shaked – it was hard to believe. A week or so later I was in Sacramento as a co-judge for the California Arts Council’s High School Out Loud Recitation state championship. Seconds after Corbin Gomez won, I ran to the Governor’s office and was sworn in.
BJR: Given California’s history of mean-spirited legislation towards immigrants, non-English speakers, and people of color — for example, props. 187 and 209, apparent in the title of your book, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Publishers, 2007) — how do you bring poetry that is unafraid to be political and multilingual to the Californian mainstream?
Good question. Of course, the mainstream has many currents. And that’s the key. Many voices, many communities, many languages, many traditions and points of view. I am interested in being inclusive and in this wider circle I am interested in calling on people to tell their story through verse. Many, if not all of our stories, lives, have faced conflict, challenges – poetry is a way to share. It is not as easy as it sounds because it takes focus, honesty and a willingness to show ourselves to others we do not know. This is the most political thing we can do – to be brave about our lives and be willing to step into a wider neighborhood of lives, to be part of the polity, the city. The questions of color, language, race and class have a lot to do with how we compound suffering in the lives of others based on distorted criteria. Poetry can breathe through these hard perceptions and conceptions of what is right, good, and meritorious, and just maybe provide a little more humanity to make things better, softer, freer, more equitable. Poetry is a potent anti-fear spray.
BJR: Given your own history of collaboration and performance with artists in various disciplines, who are your ideal back up band, supporting cast, and co-stars?
JFH: My consistent performance ohana family is Margarita Robles, Genny Lim, Jimmy Biala, Francis Wong, John-Carlos Perea. It changes every day. Co-Stars and Supporting Cast: You don’t know how many amazing (I think you do) poets I have met recently at UC-Riverside — let’s see, Rachelle Cruz, David Campos, Michelle Lin, Angel García, Holly Giglio, Stephen Ellis, Kamala Puligandla, Jesus Leyva, Ivy Chen… Poetry is so alive I can’t believe it. Everywhere I turn there is a poet writing a masterpiece. My great poetry familia in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angleles, Fresno — what would I do without them, they are part or me and my poetry. All of California, from fields to the cafeteria.
Everyday we get more illegal
Yet the peach tree still rises & falls
With fruit and without
The birds eat it the sparrows fight
Our desert burns with trash & drug trucks en route
It also breathes & sprouts vines & Maguey
Laws pass laws with scientific walls & detention cells
Husband deported with the son
The wife & the daughter who married a citizen
They stay behind broken slashed unpowdered
In the apartment to deal out the day & the puzzles
Another law then another
Mexican Indian spirit exile migration sky
The grass is mowed then blown by a machine
Sidewalks are empty clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
Peers down from an abandoned wooden dome
In an empty field
It is all in between the light
Everyday this changes a little yesterday homeless
& without papers Alberto left for Denver
A Greyhound bus he said where they don’t check you
Walking working under the silvered darkness
Walking working with our mind our life
Yes, that’s a picture of me carrying a box of grapes. Home from college in the summer of 1993, the only way to spend time with my family was by joining them at work. My father insisted on taking the photograph because he didn’t want me to forget where I had come from. Why am I smiling? Even working among family and friends didn’t lessen the burden of the heat and exhaustion and aching muscles. I had cuts on my fingertips from mistaking their dusty roundness for a rotting grape. Grape picking and cleaning are skills I never mastered.
The dominant theme of my posts on Harriet this season, in case you didn’t notice, is the border: the banned border, the bilingual border, the science/ spirituality border, bordercrossings, and today this: a discussion of the centerpiece poem to my next poetry collection, Unpeopled Eden, which is about war and borders. “Our Deportees” (which you can find in the March/ April 2012 issue of American Poetry Review) is a long poem that took me a decade to give shape, but it started brewing long before that.
Shortly after migrating from Mexico in 1980, I made a school friend, Demetrio Chapa, who had been raised in California and was hip to all things American. At home, I was subjected to my grandfather’s folk music from Veracruz and my grandmother’s pirekuas, folk songs in her native indigenous tongue. So Demetrio introduced me to pop music . He had a funny little record player with colorful vinyl records, and among the tunes that made us get up and dance was Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”
That song carried such positive memories of my first friendship, that when my family moved again I wanted to take it with me. I found it at a department store and begged my father to buy it. I have no idea what compelled him to make this purchase, except that over the years I knew not to ask for anything, so this was a rare occasion indeed. He bought me the full-length album called 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, with Dolly wearing glamorous heels as she’s hauling all kinds of work equipment: a lawnmower, a hoe, a hose, a paint roller–objects I associated with my family’s world of labor.
I was such a “good boy” that my grandparents humored me and allowed me to play my album on their precious console once in a blue moon. And that’s how I discovered two other tracks, “House of the Rising Sun,” which I suspected was about prostitutes (thank goodness my family didn’t understand English!), and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which also sent me for a loop: a song about 28 farmworkers getting flown back to the border, only to die when the small plane goes down on Los Gatos Canyon.
The song, I would find out later, was a Woody Guthrie cover. He wrote this song as a protest poem back in 1948, shortly after he read an account of the accident, which named the four white casualties (the pilot, co-pilot, flight attendant, and border guard), but referred to the 28 Mexican casualties as simply “deportees.” This was the era of the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which was an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to allow entry to Mexican laborers particularly during wartime. (My maternal grandfather participated in the early 1960s.) The “deportees” on that plane had overstayed their welcome, but Guthrie called them bordercrossers, connecting them to a much larger social issue, undocumented immigration and the open contempt against them, which continues to this day. Here’s a cool YouTube video with a song version by Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son:
When I began to search more consciously for material, I kept going back to this song, haunted by the father’s gesture. I could not forget where I had come from. Yet somehow I couldn’t quite get into the writing of it. For years I tried creating lives for the nameless, much like Guthrie gave life to the plane wreck, but it seemed wrong–these people had names already, but the world had refused to hear (or remember) them. I felt uncomfortable making a fiction of them. And then in 2008 I came across an article written by Chris Mahin, a historian and anti-war activist, on the 60th anniversary of the accident, and that motivated me further: I had to get this poem down on paper.
It came to me then: instead of writing about the spaces the workers inhabit, I would write about the spaces they vacate, leave empty, and are forced to occupy or abandon–the fields, the deportation bus, the detention center, the plane, the sky, the communal grave.
While I was working with these parameters, and the decision to use 9-line stanzas as the poem approached each place like the 12 stations of the cross (the poem comes to a close with 6 sections)–yes, all number divisible by the holy number 3–I stumbled upon another article that claimed to have located the names of all but one of the “deportees.” That gave me permission to construct, like Guthrie does in his song, a kind of roll call, in the last section of the poem:
Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Diportado No Identificado.
I was reminded of the precariousness of names, identities and even documents, when I had all of my papers stolen in Puerto Rico in January. All seemed fine until I had to board the plane back to JFK without ID. I had to be interviewed by an IVE–an identification verification expert–from the State Department. It was a stressful 45-minute process that took place after I signed a document that said I would be placed under arrest if I didn’t pass the test. Among the requests the IVE made was that I name one other person who was related to me, who shared my last name, who also lived in the U.S. (read: was in “the system”). I could not name any although I have dozens of relatives living in this country. Undocumented, they don’t have this incredible privilege that I have to hold my name up for everyone to see, to walk into an airport and voluntarily board a plane to wherever it is I want to go, want to be.
Guthrie’s song remains attractive to protest singers. I invite those interested to seek out the versions crooned by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and of course, by Dolly, the country sensation who first invited me not to forget where I had come from, long before my father’s advice, long before the photograph I keep mounted on my writing desk, right next to my computer.
*** First 100 guests receive a free pro-migrant poster ***
On May 3, CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez is teaming up with other creative minds for UndocuNation: An artistic response to the Immigration Crisis. With talks, food, revelry and rabble-rousing, the event offers “an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system.”
Sponsored by CultureStrike, Center for New Community, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), UndocuNation will use various media platforms to raise consciousness about the struggle for immigrant rights: music, installation art, readings and personal testimony--all “working to shift the national imagination on race, migration, and what ‘America’ should look like.” The event will take place at the YBCA Forum on May 3, 6pm, 701 Mission Street in San Francisco.
The event announcement puts artists at the vanguard of a massive and often ignored human rights struggle:
“2011 was a devastating year for immigrants. Once again, President Obama and his Administration Congress failed to administer relief to the estimated 12 million undocumented women, men, youth and children living in this country. On the contrary, they broke records by deporting over 1,000,000 migrants. Various anti-migrant laws were enacted in states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Utah. Alabama managed to come up with a law that far surpassed the evilness of Arizona’s SB 1070.
“Despite the fact that politicians tried to make it a living hell for undocumented immigrants in this country, loads of young folks came out of the shadows as undocumented and unafraid, giving the immigration movement that push of energy that it needed to challenge these laws and demand justice .
“The anti-immigrant movement continues to scapegoat immigrants for social, economic and environmental problems. ‘UndocuNation: an artistic response to the Anti-Immigrant Movement’ intends to encourage inclusive and artistic dialogue on the intersection of race, migration and art.”
The program will feature innovators and change makers like hip hop historian Jeff Chang, author Daniel Alarcón, and the conscious comedians of Laughter Against the Machine. A full list of artists and performers is below.
Janine Brito started doing standup comedy in St. Louis and is now a rising star on the San Francisco scene. A sarcastic, snarky smart bomb of comedy funk straight from the 80’s, Janine has been featured in the SF Chronicle and The SF Weekly called her “a mean lesbian”. But she’s pretty sure that they meant it in a good way.
Nato Green, a San Francisco native and former union organizer, was named The SF Weekly’s Best Comedian of 2010 for putting on “legendary” shows that keep audiences “doubled over.” Nato is the creator of Iron Comic, the Iron Chefspoofing hit comedy game show that packed houses at SF Sketchfest four years in a row and the Bridgetown Comedy Festival 2010 and 2011.
Julio Salgado’s activist artwork has become the staple of the DREAM Act movement. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his illustrations, which depict key individuals and moments in the DREAM Act movement. Along with Jesus Iñiguez, Fernando Romero and Deisy Hernandez, Salgado co-founded DreamersAdrift.com. The website aims to re-claim the narrative being about undocumented folks via music, poetry, writing, videos and art.
Jesús Iñiguez is a spoken-word reciter, slam poetry writer, hip-hop rhymer, full-time LOVER and forever a freedom fighter. AND, when time permits, a DREAMhead essayist very fond of wordplay. Also a videographer, photographer, and learner not afraid to err. Co-founder of Dreamers Adrift.
Oriana Bolden makes movies, screen prints and an occasional news outlet post/article. The majority of her work is about people trying to get free. Swing by www.projectprojecting.com to see what she is up to at any given moment.
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator and performance poet. She is one half of the poetic duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the hip hop anthology Total Chaos. Walidah has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons.
Daniel Alarcón is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio, winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. He is Contributing Editor to Granta, and was recently named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under Forty.” Alarcón is co-founder and Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a transnational Spanish language storytelling podcast, which launched 2012.
Sean San José works as the Program Director of Theatre for Intersection for the Arts and resident theatre company Campo Santo. For Intersection he works with long term resident companies Campo Santo, the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, the Living Word Project (Youth Speaks’ theatre company), Felonious and host of composers, visual artists, and community groups.
Favianna Rodriguez is a visionary artist on a mission: To create profound and lasting change in the world. In 2009, Rodriguez co-founded Presente.org, a U.S.-based, nationwide organization dedicated to the political empowerment of Latinos.
Yosimar Reyes, a Two-Spirit Poet/Activist Based out of San Jose,CA. He has been featured in the documentary 2nd Verse: the Rebirth of Poetry, and published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press). His words have open up concerts for Carlos Santana in his latest endeavor Architects of a New Dawn. He is currently touring his self-published chapbook For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly.
Cloee Cooper organizes with the Center for New Community to expose and resist nativism. Since 2010, she has worked with people in more than 15 states to target organizations with ties to white nationalism. She produced documentary films on resistance to the anti-immigrant movement including “A Look Inside SB1070”, “Bernard’s Story”, and “Undivided” and is a regular contributor on imagine2050.net.
DJ Sloe-Poke 1) doesn’t mess around with any of the artsy stuff, 2) you won’t hear him tactlessly scratching and 3) he goes to a club to rock it. He has opened for shows as diverse as Mos Def, David Lee Roth, Yellowman & Jaguares. It really doesn’t matter who or what genre Sloe Poke is spinning for — he always has the perfect mix.
Imin Yeh works in the medium of woodcuts, screen prints, and downloadable craft projects to create large-scale installations and interactive artworks. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had recent exhibitions at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Incline Gallery, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.
In a stunning rejection of celebrated author Ana Castillo’s offer to read and speak with Tucson high school students next week, Tucson Unified School District administrators added a new chapter to the nation’s most troubling censorship crackdown and dismissed any overtures for healing in the torn community.
A widely sought speaker on the national lecture circuit, the renowned poet and novelist, whose beloved stories are read throughout schools in Tucson and Arizona, had offered to waive her honorarium and travel to Tucson on her own dime, as part of a special effort to bring “healing to all sides.”
According to Tucson High School literature teacher Curtis Acosta, whose now outlawed Mexican American literature courses drew praise on CNN for their healing role in the aftermath of the tragic Tucson shooting last year, TUSD Assistant Superintendent Abel Morado turned down Castillo’s extraordinary opportunity over concerns that the national media would accompany the author.
Despite the fact that the New York Times recently profiled author Matt de la Peña’s visit to Tucson High School, Morado applied a different standard to Castillo and her host teacher Acosta, a former Mexican American Studies teacher under unparalleled scrutiny and district/state surveillance. Last week, in fact, according to a Tucson High student that preferred to remain anonymous, Arizona Department of Education representatives made an unannounced visit to former Mexican American Studies classrooms, “looking over people’s shoulders” and largely disrupting study with comments and note-taking.
Acosta called the denial of the author’s visit “odd and hypocritical due to the exact similarities to Mr. de la Peña’s visit, I am not sure how the situation is any different except for the fact that I was a former MAS teacher asking for permission, since I am sure that Dr. Castillo being Chicana could not be the reason. Certainly TUSD isn’t going down the route of banning women writers.”
Author of several celebrated novels, among other acclaimed collections of poetry, essays and stories, and a well-known artist, Castillo also earned a doctorate in American Studies. Former Tucson novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote in the LA Times that Castillo’s So Far From God novel ranked alongside the work of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and was “delightful.”
In an email response to the TUSD debacle, Castillo noted:
My own world as a child opened through my love of reading. The greatest void was never finding books remotely reflecting my life, culture or experiences. I always tell young writers and poets I don’t care what you read just read, read, read. Read what you love and read out of your comfort zone. This is how our minds grow and how we connect with the world. Humanity has much more in common than not. I will add that with my last novel (The Guardians, Random House, 2008) a story that deals with the disappearance of a man crossing without papers, I have experienced ongoing antagonism. I believe that people fixed on their prejudices and political agendas resisted the humanity in the story.
“Castillo’s importance to Latina letters cannot be overstated,” publisher and poet Bryce Milligan noted, whose fellow author Carmen Tafolla was recently appointed San Antonio’s poet laureate. Castillo’s “poetry,” according to Milligan, “often seems more about healing those very wounds that invigorate her fiction.”
In a reign of censorship and blatant racism carried out by TUSD superintendent John Pedicone, TUSD’s extraordinary purge of Mexican American literature, on the other hand, has turned the once vibrant literary town into an Orwellian mess. Along with the nationally denounced confiscation and banishment of Mexican American literature and history textbooks, TUSD officials also attempted to derail the annual Cesar Chavez March, fired Mexican American Studies director Sean Arce at a nearly 3-hour school board meeting where an array of speakers spoke on his behalf and the importance of respecting the city’s diverse literature and heritages.
In fact, in the face of TUSD’s latest crackdown, the Tucson community rallied in support of Castillo’s unique offer.
Acosta noted:
I am pleased to say that where TUSD failed to appreciate the opportunity for an American Book Award winning writer to teach and share her own writing expertise with our students, our community has not faltered. Save Ethnic Studies, Tucson-Pima Public Libraries, Casa Libre, Antigone Books, and other community members have been busy creating a wonderful literary experience for our students and all of Tucson for Cinco de Mayo weekend.On Friday May 4, students will get to meet with Dr. Castillo privately receive books paid for by local sponsors. This will be followed by a free public reading and Q & A at 6:30pm with Ana Castillo at the John Valenzuela Youth Center 1550 South 6th Avenue, South Tucson.
Save Ethnic Studies will be having a private reception at 8:30pm that evening following the reading to raise funds for our continued legal challenge of HB2281 and to revive Mexican American Studies.
On Cinco de Mayo, there will be another opportunity for people interested in supporting Mexican American Studies, the lawsuit, and the student-plaintiffs. We will be having a casual breakfast and meet-and-greet with Ana Castillo from 9am-10:30am at Raices Taller before Dr. Castillo presents a private workshop for students and teachers who have been sponsored by donors for a three hour writing experience focusing on memoirs of school days.
This is an affirmation that TUSD has it wrong and that this community is firmly behind MAS and there should be no shame in our history, our culture, our stories, or our writers and artists.
“Once innocence — an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists — encounters experience, it is transformed,” Castillo wrote in her short story collection Loverboys. “If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.”
Perhaps TUSD will one day embrace such wisdom instead of fear and censorship for their own students and community.
Here’s a dispatch from CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez on her latest printmaking project with Justseeds and other artist/activists, first published last month, with a preview of some work that we’ll be featuring here at CultureStrike in the near future. Also check out her upcoming event, UndocuNation.
Detail of linocut. Raoul Deal.
I’ve been busy launching an art print portfolio project addressing the immigration crisis. This project is a collaboration between CultureStrike and Justseeds Artist Cooperative. The portfolio consists of more than 40 visual art pieces about migration. The artists share a vision that immigration is one of the most important human rights crisis of our time. Ranging from street artists, to puppeteers, to painters, to cartoonists – the artists explore the complexities around migration, and depict issues from a local, national and international lens.
Above: Close up of Ray Hernandez’s image. “Education is Our Liberation.” Three-color letterpress print.
Above: Close up of Pete Yahnke Railand’s image. Three color letterpress print.
Some of the issues in the art pieces include the unjust detention of migrants, the deportation and separation of families, exploitation and profiteering from the jailing of migrants, the criminalization of undocumented youth, the demand for legalization, and the economic and ecological brutality that results from militarized border policies.
Our goal is to launch a pro-migrant creative intervention into the national and global debate surroung migration – to educate and inspire people, tell stories, and illustrate the struggle of migrants from all walks of life.
The works are being be hand-printed as a limited edition run at a newly opened studion in San Francisco, founded by master printer Paul Mullowney. The portfolio features notable artists such as former Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas; author and posters artist, Josh MacPhee; pro-migrant printmaker power duo, Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza; cartoonist and performance artist, Lalo Alcaraz; UndocuQueer artist activist, Julio Salgado, and many many more.
Above: Close up of Art Hazelwood’s image. Two color letterpress print, printed from linoblocks.
Here are some pics from the portfolio in progress. We have started out with letterpress prints, and are fortunate to be working with an awesome printer from Portland named Patrick Cruzan.
Stay tuned for more info on how you can get a hold of one of these killer portfolios. A portion of these print portfolios will be donated to immigrant rights groups around the country who will support the project by curating small pop-up art exhibits.
About the Organizers
CultureStrike is an artist-led initiative whose mission is to cultivate innovative and urgent collaborations between artists, writers, musicians, and other cultural workers to shift the national imagination on immigration. Responsive to what’s happening in the moment, our model begins with raising the consciousness of key artists, so their cultural production will inspire others.
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 26 artists committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. We believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action.
Above: Close up of Santiago Armengold’s image. Four-color letterpress print.
Above: Patrick Cruzan, letterpress printer. We are printing on a Vandercook.
Above: Me carving my block. That’s my alien.
Why Immigration?
When it comes to immigration, the messages we get are dominated by criminality and punishment. In 2010 alone, 250 anti-immigrant laws and resolutions modeled on Arizona’s SB1070 were passed.
2011 yielded devastating state laws in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Utah. Even more troubling is the ongoing trauma caused by family separation and deportation after the Obama Administration made Secure Communities (S-COMM) a mandatory program.
In this climate, the arts can help play a key role in telling the stories of how people are affected by these laws. Artists can go to the root of the immigration problem and help shift public perception of the issues.
