Photo: Logan Phillips

for Gloria Anzaldúa

For the past fifteen years, six days a week, at half past eight,

Jorge has biked into my checkpoint station. He hawks

over his papers, allows me to examine his lunch box,

& then wheels off to his twelve hour shift at the pallet & crate

factory. I’m close to madness. I suspect

he’s been smuggling contraband, prescription or illegal.

He sports new toupees under a cap depicting an eagle

devouring a snake. He rides spit-shined bikes that I inspect

by taking them apart, checking inside the hollow

pipes, sometimes slicing open the tires, but so far nothing.

Jorge always remains calm, & doesn’t say a damn thing.

Yesterday, a few days from my retirement, I swallowed

my pride, & swore, if he told me the truth, to keep my lips tight.

The bastard smiled, & casually replied, I smuggle bikes.

*

INS transcript, Sofia: I kept my mother’s advice

to myself. Before crossing the Tijuana/San Diego border,

in a bathroom stall, I sprinkled gelatin powder

on my underwear. We slipped through a fence like mice,

& waited in a neighborhood park. Hourly, vans

arrived, & we were packed in, driven up river-wide asphalt

toward families, jobs. Sweat soaked our clothes, salted

our skin. We stopped on an isolated road. Bandits

stepped from the trees. The men were forced face down

in a ravine. The women were ordered to undress at gunpoint.

I unbuckled my belt, lowered my jeans. Sweat,

gelatin powder had stained my underwear a reddish brown.

I was one of ten women. Our mouths were taped.

I was spit on. I was slapped. The other women were raped.

*

Sapo & I wait for the cool of night under mesquite.

Three days in the desert & we’re still too close to Mexico,

still so far from God. Sapo’s lips so dry he swabs the pus leaking

from the ampollas on his toes across his mouth. I flip a peso.

Heads: we continue. Tails: we walk toward the highway,

thumb our way back to Nogales. The peso disappears into a nest

but the hard-on in Sapo’s jeans, slightly curved, points west.

I catch a cascabel & strip off its meat. Sapo mutters, No que no guey.

I bury its forked tongue: for one night our names won’t flower

in the devil’s throat. We’re Indios but no grin-

go will mistake us for Navajos. Above us, an owl grins

like Cantinflas. The arms of the saguaros strike down the hours

but the sun refuses to set. Sapo shits behind a cluster of nopales,

& shouts out our favorite joke, No tengo papeles!

Detail of poster by Presente.org

If you think the Grammys were just another glamorized orgy of music industry self-indulgence, catering to the tastes and interests of the 1% that owns them, well, then you’d be right. Mostly. But not entirely. There’s more to the story.

Over the last 40 years, there has been an epic battle for greater representation within the Grammy’s, to showcase the music of the people – roots music that emerges from our traditions and our movements. For many years, the Grammy’s have also been a platform to connect artists like these to the pop culture – given that the Grammys is one of the most important events in the music industry.

This battle recently entered a new phase.

This year’s Grammy Awards faced protest after 31 categories of music were ruthlessly cut by the producers of the event. And not just any categories. The fact that almost half of the categories that were cut were dominated by Latinos and other people of color is hard to ignore.

In the largest cuts in Grammy history, categories like Latin Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Zydeco, Cajun, Hawaiian, Polka, Native American, American roots music, and classical were slashed. Iconic artists like Etta James, who recently passed away on January 20th, received two of her last Grammy Awards in both the Traditional and Contemporary Blues categories, both of which were just eliminated.

The musical genrés targeted are not just ones that emerged from communities of color, but ones that were deeply linked to social movements that changed our society towards greater inclusion. Culture is what shapes who we are as a society—it’s this realm of art & storytelling where new identities are formed, and a deeper understanding of others can emerge. After the fight to enture that the music of communities of color is advanced, celebrated and recognized, we cannot allow it to once again be pushed to the margins. In a statement, Grammy-winner Carlos Santana, put it bluntly: “I think they’re racist. Period.”

There is another factor at work. Money. The increasing corporatization and consolidation within the music industry has meant privleging music that rakes in cash, rather than honoring music that exemplifies the highest in artistic acheivement. The cuts reflect the corporate music industry’s push to consolidate music under big umbrellas for the purposes of bigger profits.

The LA Times reported: “Some protesters see racial bias in the revisions, others see them as more economically based, still others consider the move a power play by corporate major labels against the smaller indie labels, whose artists often made up the nominees in the categories that have been eliminated or tucked under larger umbrellas.”

Jesse Jackson reported on these cuts in his radio show and explained, “these cuts occurred in mostly “ethnic categories” which are at the heart of the American experience. This decision has broad and devastating consequences, making it much harder for many talented artists to get attention for their work and the recognition they deserve.”

Photo courtesy of favianna.typepad.com

But really, should we care about the Grammy’s?

The protests around these cuts, begs the question: Should we place our faith in institutions that are run by the 1% and always will be?

A colleague and I got into a discussion about whether this battle was an important one. He argued that the Grammys are a ultra-commercial, ultra-corporate event that will never give a shit about being reflective of music that comes  from the “roots” of this country.

My position was that this decision made by the Grammy’s ultimately will affect hundreds of thousands of musicians in these genres, which are genres that in their entirety, reflect the musical traditions of the 99%. And, as artists who believe that our work is labor, these cuts ultimately affect the economic viability of musicians in these fields.

My friend, fellow Oaklander, and Grammy nominated musician, John Santos, explained:

“Their decree direly affects tens if not hundreds of thousands of musicians, producers, record labels, CD manufacturers, graphic designers, music festivals and presenters, night clubs, music schools, radio programmers, fans, teachers and students of the eliminated categories. Grammy affiliation is arguably our country’s highest musical recognition… current and future generations will feel the economic and cultural repercussions of this action.

Marginalizing the musical expression of these communities in this way also carries deeper repercussions than the immediate economic hits. Kids and youth who have spent years studying these types of music and have been properly taught to see music with a broad perspective are now confronted with the further invalidation of non-commercial music, narrowing their appreciation and understanding of music…it is obviously devastating to teachers who have spent our lives trying to give students rich alternatives to the top 40 mentality spoon-fed to them via mass media at every moment.”

In short, this is the music of the majority! And so my colleague and I agreed in the end: While we fight for our music rights and against the attacks on culture, we should also be building alternative spaces and institutions that reflect the vision of the type of culture we want to build. For example, as part of the protest at the Grammy’s, organizers pulled together a “Not Those Awards All-Star Latin Jazz Jam & Concert” that featured the same genre’s eliminated by the Grammy cuts, thereby creating a community space where this music was celebrated and embraced.

The role of visual artists in this fight

I want to take a moment to talk about the important role that visual graphics played in this campaign, given that I’m a visual artist myself. In my role as co-founder at Presente.org, a national online organization that exists to amplify the political power of Latinos, my primary role was to help develop a plan that would get thousands of petitions protesting the Grammy cuts. With the help of Presente, the original organizers at GrammyWatch.org incrased their petitions from 6,000 to more than 23,000. We also helped bring major visibility to the campaign.

In planning out the ground protest for the Grammy event and the delivery of the petitions, we knew we needed strong visuals and incos to get the attention of the media. As my friend, Gan Golan says, “A person with a sign is worth 10 people without.”

Fellow artivist, Julio Salgado and I, developed signage that symbolized the Grammy’s “whitening”, and the graphic made it into the LA Times, Hollywood’s iconic corporate outlet (see below). Not to mention, the signs helped unite the group of protestors at the event itself.

Favianna Rodriguez

CultureStrike coordinators Jeff Chang and Favianna Rodriguez recently say down with Adrienne Skye Roberts last month at Southern Exposure, where they participated in the Artists of the 99% event “Strategies for Artists in Social Justice Movements.” Here’s the Q&A, reprinted from SFMOMA’s Open Space:

Jeff Chang and Favianna Rodriguez are artist-organizers and the initiators of Culture Strike, an ongoing project that began in 2010 as a protest of Arizona’s SB 1070 law. Culture Strike aims to raise consciousness about immigration issues among artists. For the past two years, delegations of artists traveled to the US/Mexico border to learn first-hand about the struggles for migrant justice through witnessing legal procedures, meeting with grassroots organizers and visiting physical sites along the border. The hope is that the artists will then incorporate these lessons into their practice.

Jeff and Favianna are long-time collaborators with powerful practices of their own. Jeff is the author of “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” and a founding editor of the journal, Colorlines. Favianna is a prolific print-maker and new media artist. I am a long-time admirer of both their work and spoke with Jeff and Favianna at Southern Exposure on January 14th before they participated in the event, “Strategies for Artists in Social Justice Movements” organized by Artists of the 99%. We spoke about about Culture Strike, the Occupy Movement, and how artists and organizers desperately need each other.

Adrienne Skye Roberts: Can you describe the roots of Culture Strike and the political context that it emerged from?

Jeff Chang: When Arizona passed SB 1070, friends of mine in New York City organized Word Strike, which was a protest of the law by a group of writers. Word Strike was inspired by Sound Strike started by Zach De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. So, people reacted to this law first through culture. They said, “As artists we can show that this is not the kind of future we want to have.” It was exactly the right move to make because it was clear that resistance to anti-immigration sentiment was not going to be political movement. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 completely collapsed, the Obama administration said they would file an injunction against SB 1070 and then proceeded to be the biggest supporters of the legislation in history.

Favianna Rodriguez: A few years ago the anti-immigrant legislation such as Arizona’s SB 1070 law really started to shifted public sentiment more and more to the right and towards criminalization, there was a need to look at how culture plays into transforming the messages. Around that time Jeff and a few other cultural workers, printmakers and visual artists were questioning the role of culture after the Obama election; why were artists not getting the resources we need?

I went to Arizona with Sound Strike because there wasn’t a formal program for visual artists. As visual artists in Arizona, we experienced the same things that we are constantly fighting against in our own practices; we were being indirectly exploited, our art was used non-strategically and even though the organizations really valued our work they didn’t have the infrastructure to support it. And so, Culture Strike was born within this context and from a need to intersect these two issues: to educate artists about immigration and to inspire them to get engaged in movement work while also valuing artists as an integral part of society and resistance.

ASR: How did your backgrounds as artists and organizers lead you to organizing Culture Strike?

JC: I didn’t start out thinking I was an artist just in the same way that hip-hop didn’t start out thinking of itself as an art. I was a graffiti writer and a DJ. I got involved in anti-apartheid and anti-racist organizing as a student at UC Berkeley. The lines between art and organizing really started to blur for me in the late 1990s when a new breed of young organizers began calling themselves “hip-hop activists.” We were DJs or rappers or visual artists or poets—we all had an artistic practice. We’d all go out to a political rally and then we’d end up at a club afterward. Whereas, for the generation before us, you were either political or you were a cultural worker. It was hard for us to actually explain what was going on to older folks, to older activists, to older funders or supporters. It was a generational thing.

FR: As an artist I have always been involved with political organizing and have observed the best and worst parts of collaboration with grassroots organizations. Specifically, how artists are brought on at the end part of a campaign strategy or how we’re looked at as being somebody who is going to implement talking points. I felt that what artists could contribute in terms of vision, new ideas and experimentation, was not being fully maximized in movement work. It was very frustrating. Also, we were not viewed as fellow workers and our labor was often exploited. Overall, the contexts for engagement were limited.

At the same time, I am excited about movement work overall. My interest in founding Culture Strike, was to look at what were the best set of conditions and infrastructure that could exist so that artists could have a great and transformative experience in working with social justice groups in the movement; and visa versa. ASR: What are the political context that your work emerged from? Jeff, you became active through hip-hop. Can you describe how this hybrid practice emerged?

JC: Out of hip-hop we did a lot of electoral organizing. We made inroads to the popular culture through hip-hop but it was time for us to take political power. You literally had this whole generation of folks whose main issues were youth violence, gun violence, environmental justice or media justice asking, how do we organize our peers using culture? How do we help get them over their cynicism about the political process? From 2004 through 2008, there were huge leaps of voter registration amongst young voters of color—the folks who are most alienated from the process. When Barak Obama was elected, pretty much the entirety in the increase of youth voting happened amongst youth of color, which is a fact that no one recognized. That was the result of 4 or 5 years of dedicated organizing and that was what we were trying to rep—the infrastructure we built. The next steps were how do we theorize this in a big sense? Everybody was tired of being reactionary, everyone was tired of more propositions and laws to fight against. The question was what are we going to do now? As people started figuring out that art and organizing could be used together to educate people and bring them into a process that didn’t end but continued, we started asking the question, what does it look like if we actually win?

FR: My work emerges from my own experience as a woman of color, as a daughter of immigrants, as a woman who grew up in Oakland, one of the cities that has the highest homicides and violence rates in the country. Growing up I witnessed everything from gentrification, to the rise of the Internet, to the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, to the growing, hate-filled debate on immigration, which started when I was in high school with Prop 187. I also witnessed the expansion of the border and NAFTA. All of these events deeply affected my family and my community. For me, art was a way to speak about that reality. It was also a way for me to transform and critique it. Also, it served to document what was happening to me as a woman of color and to my community. I think that the political context is really that I did not see myself reflected in the art world. I felt that my story wasn’t being told. What was missing was as a pro-migrant, women-centered, people-of-color analysis of how the world was changing.

ASR: You both rely a lot on storytelling in your individual practices—Favianna, your posters describe movements of resistance through stories of individuals and communities and Jeff, your book is 500 pages of overlapping stories that illustrate the hip-hop generation. How was storytelling used as a strategy for Culture Strike? What other strategies did you use to reach artists in the delegations?

JC: The pro-immigration protests and rallies that happened in the late 1990s and 2000′s humanize people. They illustrated the stories they were actually going through and at the time, polls showed that the American public was overwhelming supportive of immigration reform. When SB 1070 passed, it completely changed the language of the debate, it made simply an issue of legality and criminality. It was no longer about the kids who lived next door or the people in the community that you knew, it wasn’t about the personal stories. It was about who was “illegal” or “legal.” We believe that we win a debate when we work in culture because culture is where ideas can shift, where empathy gets built, stories get told and where community begins.

The reality is that we build our identities and beliefs from all the different pieces of our cultures. If you go to a golf game on Saturday and then you go to church on Sunday—these are places where you can organize. The Right understands this. Many of us have never made a connection between what our values are and the place that people practice those values.

FR: I was thinking also about linguistics and messaging and how words set the tone of the debate. The right wing made illegal a very commonly used phrase. It is also framed as a Latino thing. In advertisements and visuals you would see a Mexican man running across the border into a truck. The other side adopted the slogan, “No Human Being is Illegal.” Everyone was saying it and it became a kind of empty statement. With these messages, the need for artists to get engaged was even more key.

The question then became how to engage the artists, what does it take for artists to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I get it and I’m so touched that I am going to include this in my work”? So, we took them to see 70 immigrants getting deported at the same time, we took them to the coroner’s office, we took then to the wall that runs along the border, we were engaging them in the stories.

ASR: The delegations of Culture Strike are diverse, some artists do overt political work and others do not. What are some of the challenges of engaging artists in movement work?

FR: There is an artist culture that sometimes doesn’t celebrate feedback or use research to truly understand your topic. We had to share the stories in an ethical way and not exploitative to the storyteller. At the same time, we didn’t want to bring an artist to Arizona to only teach workshops or to be used as instruments rather than as part of the organizing and bigger strategy of the movement.

Artists don’t fit into the goals of grassroots organizing like getting a good turnout of people to a rally or to vote. However, there is a case to be made for what an artist can produce that will make people feel something. Part of our work is also thinking about the intangible, the moment of inspiration someone really feels the story of four undocumented youth. How do you measure that? What are the metrics that are being used in the social justice world and the art world? In the art world the metrics is all about gallery representation, sales, going to art school…

ASR: …producing objects, producing them by yourself, getting a certain kind of recognition through a narrow idea of success.

FR: Yes and we want to redefine these metrics and also consider how we take the best practices of both the art world and organizing to create more effective movements.

JC: We had this joke: artists are from Venus and organizers are from Mars. There is a negotiation process that has to occur on a myriad of issues—how far can you pull the artists and how far can you pull the organizers to each other? We’re still thinking our way through it. What’s clear is that in the past there wasn’t even a language for them to speak to each other or if there was, it was, “Hey man, you want to make a poster for my rally? Can you come play a song at my rally?” The organizers would make the big decisions and once they were made, they would call artists to help. We were literally the cultural workers. I don’t like the term cultural worker because I want artists to be allowed into the political decision-making.

There is this notion that artists are floating above society, that they never work in context, that they never work in history—except within the narrow discipline of art history which is never occurring within larger history, for the most part. Culture Strike had issues where we would work with artists and they didn’t want to get down with community folks. They would listen to them and then go back and figure out what to do in isolation. Or folks would be like, “that is that kind of practice and not mine.”

ASR: To me that sentiment means that you’ve internalized those divisions; that you believe that there is no cross-pollination between artists and organizers. This scares me! It means you are also probably internalizing all these false divisions that are a result of capitalism and systems of oppression that are meant to keep people apart from one another.

FR: In the Occupy Movement, culture is not mentioned as a need. The first need is housing and tents and the infrastructure and not culture. The idea of the 99% is a cultural need and yet, within the bodies of decision-making culture is not a highly regarded thing. A lot of art projects that are emerging from Occupy are being funded through Kickstarter and so, once again, artists are having to resource themselves. This is a contradiction because the Occupy movements have a lot of money in their bank accounts! And artists still have to scrounge for money.

From the lessons learned from Culture Strike, I teamed up with the visual artist, Gan Golan and we launched Art Is My Occupation. This project looks at economic justice and tries to use some models we developed in Culture Strike by providing direct support to artists of the 99%. As an artist I am always looking out for other artists and I realize you have to push your practice and you have to do things that make organizers really uncomfortable and then you have to make artists really uncomfortable, so there is always an in-between space.

ASR: Can you describe some of those moments you mentioned where the artists were moved, when they “got it”?

JC: A number of the artists who came on the Culture Strike delegations said it changed their lives. There was a group of folks who went to the coroner’s office and looked at the remains of bodies found of folks trying to cross the desert. These are folks who are the collateral damage of the border policy because they are forced into the high desert and away from populated areas and are traveling across hundreds of miles of desert with no water. People were really moved by that. We also went to witness the “streamline” in the federal courts in Tucson where the judge literally takes 70 people who were picked up the day before and charges them all at once. We arranged for a question and answer meeting between with the federal magistrate judge who runs the streamline and the artists. The moments of inspiration were really visceral. That is what Culture Strike is all about. We can get back to the deep, emotional heart of what was happening in Arizona and convey that to people and make them feel it, too.

FR: It was so interesting because the writer’s in Culture Strike approached the meeting with the judge by saying, “This is such a Shakespearan moment, he is such a flawed character.” In their minds, they were in a story. An organizer would have been in there and trying to rally. The artists were enthralled in the moment and in the story. They were doing character development! And thinking of how to apply the experience to their craft. You can’t send them a policy paper and get the same reaction, that is why it was important to take them to the border.

ASR: When you dream big about a world where culture and politics are not divided, where artists are valued in political decision making, where the divisions between art and resistance dissolve, what does it look like? How is it already happening?

JC: It is already happening and we hope to give it a framework. People need to think about culture organizing and cultural strategizing. Cultural organizing means creating networks like Artists of the 99% and the Occupy Wall Street arts working group. Culture Strike needs to organize folks in the same way that we think about organizing people in neighborhoods. Once these networks are created then we have to be strategic about how we change culture—this is our cultural strategy.

In 10 years we’d love to see these words—cultural organizing and cultural strategy—as mantras for folks and organization, for example, Amnesty International or the California Coalition for Women Prisoners has a cultural organizer doing strategy work. Because here’s the weird thing, corporation have been talking about this stuff for years. They talk about how to change the culture of your company? How can you harness the power of culture in order to sell more stuff? It’s super hot and the corporate sector has been putting literally billions of dollars into this. So, we are playing catch-up in that respect. It’s ironic because we have hundreds and thousands of universities and art spaces that we intimately relate with community. We just never think about how to turn that into something that is strategic and organized. The one place where culture is not recognized or appreciated are the very places that purport to support culture.

FR: I imagine a kind of world where we no longer understand the art world as the institution we understand it to be today. I see art as a very highly decentralized and accessible form of participation to the point where we don’t even call it art anymore because it is such an ingrained part of how we do things. We as artists are very valued and central to movements. Of course I see movements and direct actions and protests and occupations and overall content that comes out of movement work to be much more engaged and creative and speaking to our hearts. I see a cultural transformation, meaning that I see change in how people are thinking about everything from immigration to economic justice. I also imagine a space where musicians and award-winning writers and artists that are in all kinds of shows and galleries and museums and public spaces, are actively speaking about politics. In other words, I don’t see it as something that just a certain kind of artist does. I see it as something that all kinds of artists do. That’s my big vision.

And it has been happening. Historically, artists have always been part of social movements, even if it was at the margins, sometimes we were central to those movements. So I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon, but I think that is not nearly as abundant as it should be. I also wish that in all the fields of the creative sector, from acting to programming to building online applications to performance, I wish there was more of a desire to address politics. I wish it was more normal instead of being the exception. I think it has always been happening, but the ways in which we do it keep us at a very small scale and we’re not able to touch huge amounts of people. It’s an exceptional case when we do.

Learn more about Artists of the 99% on their Facebook page.

Logan Phillips, "Costa Sonorense 2010"

Logan Phillips, an Arizona-based poet, multimedia artist and CultureStrike delegate, has been breaking new ground with his multimedia performance collective Verbo•bala. His work centers on gritty explorations of migrant identity, the crossing of boundaries of genre and culture, and a political consciousness steeped in the border landscape. He was recently award a 2012 Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Here Phillips shares his photography and a poem from his new collection, The Sonoran Strange.

Logan Phillips

Logan Phillips

Phillips – San Pedro WS

Read an interview with Phillips in the Tucson Weekly.

To learn more, visit dirtyverbs.com.

Melanie Cervantes, Dignidad Rebelde

Sometimes the medium is the message. Among the recent protest actions that have flared up across the country in defense of immigrants’ rights, some of the most inspiring statements have come from artists with a vision for justice. In an age of viral media, this is not your mom’s agitprop.

CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez depicts the crisis of capitalism:

Favianna Rodriguez

Julio Salgado at DREAMers Adrift has depicted the student activism that has risen up to challenge the crackdown on Mexican American Studies in Tucson.

Julio Salgado

Julio Salgado

Julio also took his pen to the frontlines of the brewing showdown in Washington over the ARMS Act, a particularly twisted incarnation of the DREAM Act. The bill would push undocumented youth into military service as a conditioning of gaining legal status (in other words, stripping away the educational provisions at the core of the DREAM Act and warning immigrant youth that their main value to the country derives not from investment in their minds, but from the exploitation of their bodies, either as cheap labor, or as weapons of war).

Julio Salgado

And the demands of the DREAMers are about more than just a college diploma…

Julio Salgado

Pioneering Chicano artist Lalo Alcaraz frames the ethnic studies crackdown in a legacy of persecution–a history lesson that’s either tragically lost on the state’s politicians or perversely nostalgic for them.

Lalo Alcaraz

Alcaraz has also been quietly making his way into the headlines with a dormant meme that the Republicans have resurrected for the election season.

Here’s a blast from the past from the New York Times‘ Opnionator:

As the radio program “This American Life” reminded its audience on Tuesday, there is an argument to be made that the term self-deportation was invented in 1994 by two Mexican-American satirists, Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. That year, “sickened” by a ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, which aimed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state-run hospitals and schools in California, the comedians began posing as conservative activists who backed the measure.

The two men started a satirical media campaign to support the initiative, faxing radio and television stations a fake news release that touted the benefits of “self-deportation centers” and invited reporters seeking more information to call a Latino Republican and “militant self-deportationist” named Daniel D. Portado. Eventually the men founded “Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover,” or Halto, and produced a mock radio ad, in which Portado claimed to support “California Gov. Pete Wilson’s self-deportation message.”

And 18 years on, it’s clear that not much has changed in politics, though this campaign season the GOP hopefuls seem to especially pride themselves on a stunning lack of irony. Just ask Mexican Mitt.

Politics and art always mix. The results can be comical, but often, with a little creative energy, the right image lets us imagine that other worlds are possible.

To view and download art for social justice, visit:

DignidadRebelde.com

Favianna.com

Justseeds.org

OccupyDesign

Above: “Somos el 99%” poster by Dignidad Rebelde.

Photo: Logan Phillips

After a storm saguaros glisten

                                            like mint trombones.

               Sometimes a coyote leaps

over creosote.

                         Hush.

The sand calls out for more footprints.

                                       A crack in a boulder

can never be an entrance

                                                      to a cathedral

but a mouse can be torn open

                                        like an orange.

Hush.

             The arroyo is the color of rust.

                                      Sometimes a gust of snow

floats across the water

                           as gracefully as a bride.

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow and winner of the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Photo: Brad Farwell, www.bradfarwell.com

Wafaa Bilal lives through a constantly shifting lens. The artist fled Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, abandoning his classes at Baghdad University and his family home near Najaf. He spent more than a year in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, then along with his brother got asylum in the U.S. He settled first in New Mexico, where he studied art at the University of New Mexico. He went on  to teach as an adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Today, Bilal is an assistant professor at New York University and has gained global attention for groundbreaking works. He became a target for public attention with “Domestic Tension/aka Shoot an Iraqi,” where he sequestered himself in a gallery for a month with a paintball gun people could shoot at him over the internet. He is also the brain behind the 3rdi project, in which a camera was implanted in the back of his scalp in order to transmit photos to a website once a minute for a year.

Bilal’s work has often crossed with controversy. For example, in the video project “Virtual Jihadi,” exhibited in Troy, New York in 2008, he inserted himself as a character in a video game that had originally been created by an American designer as “Hunt for Saddam,” and was later hacked by Al Qaeda to become “Night of Bush Capturing”—a pursuit of then-President George W. Bush (called ). Wafaa’s project, a rumination on double standards in foreign policy and public opinion, was decried as a call for terrorism by a local Republican elected official and others. Protesters carried openly violent and racist signs, and the independent gallery where the work was to be shown was suspiciously shut down over a year-old building code violation. In January, the city finally settled a lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

Journalist Kari Lydersen first met Wafaa reporting on his “Domestic Tension” project. The two co-authored the book Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, and  continue as partners and collaborators. Here they discuss Wafaa’s experience as an immigrant and refugee, and how he uses art to make sense of it all.

Kari Lydersen: People may think it odd that you seem to inflict pain on yourself in order to make an artistic statement – with the camera inserted in your head for “3rdi,” the paint balls shot at you for Shoot an Iraqi and all the tattoos for “…and counting.” Can you explain the intersection between your work and your attitude toward physical pain?

Wafaa Bilal: I’m dealing with these two zones – the comfort zone and the conflict zone. I need to find a way to engage my viewers in exploring these two zones, using a language other than rhetoric, other than the mental language. So I’m using the body, the corporal language. The pain that’s inflicted on me allows people to come closer to the issues I’m talking about, because their bodies viscerally identify with the pain I’m experiencing. And even if that doesn’t happen, at the very least it raises the question of what would motivate someone to inflict pain on oneself. With that question, hopefully people come to meaningful conclusions. There’s honesty about it – it’s a strategy to engage; it’s not for the love of pain!

KL: What would you say to people who might psychoanalyze you, saying the pain is a way to deal with your guilt at leaving Iraq or the trauma you’ve been through in war and as a refugee?

WB: Well yeah there is the survival guilt, that’s true too. But after a while you understand the guilt and then you don’t continue with it, you’re able to stop it. The use of pain in my work is really not about guilt, it really is a matter of engagement.

KL: How does the participation of viewers fit into your approach to installation art? What do you hope to accomplish by engaging people directly?

WB: What I’m calling my work is dynamic encounters. In dynamic encounters, the role of the artist changes from authoritarian, imposing one view, to being an initiator of a platform that the viewers are invited to use. Without the participation of the viewer, most of these art projects wouldn’t even exist. I’m trying to have active participants rather than passive participation.

KL: Do you think this dynamic, interactive aspect is even more important when you’re trying to reach people from a different country and different background than you?

WB: Yes, I would say so. And I am employing pop culture in these projects to cultivate active participation – mediums and symbols that people from this country can relate to. For example with “Shoot an Iraqi,” so many things employed in that project are so American – the game of paintball, the remote control weaponry and even the internet itself. By understanding the culture, one can have more impact through these art projects.

KL: Can you talk about your experience as a migrant – your movement from Iraq to the US, and your ongoing travels around the world as an artist? Do you consider yourself a refugee?

WB: The only time I feel like a refugee is when I’m at the airport, when I’m stopped and searched and re-searched three or four times. That reminds me always that no matter how long I stay here, I’m always a foreigner. But the issue of refugees, we can be refugees in our own countries. The issues of belonging… When I left Iraq I knew I wouldn’t find home, but I would find a place that I could call home. I think there’s a big difference between these two. When you are home, you don’t question whether you belong to it or not.

KL: So when you are in the place you call home, there’s still always the question of whether you really belong in the back of your mind?

WB: Absolutely – things as simple as people looking at you differently. You always have that in the back of your mind as a refugee.

KL: In terms of the idea of who “belongs” here and who is the “other,” I have to mention the situation in Troy, N.Y. when your video project “Virtual Jihadi” was censored, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where you were supposed to present the work, had ordered security not to let you in the building. The security guard mistook you for just another professor, told you about this possible terrorist, Wafaa Bilal, who would be visiting the school, and then let you in.

WB: I remember (a friend and professor at the school), when she heard about that, said, ‘You have to work on your uniform!’ Seriously, I’ve never felt the way I felt in Troy anywhere else. The only thing that comes close is the way I was afraid for my life in the refugee camp. It was an extremely intense, extremely isolated feeling. But now with the lawsuit finally settled, I’m really happy to see the people in Troy prevail. And hard as it was, overall the whole thing clearly raised awareness.

KL: In your early days in the U.S. did you encounter much discrimination or prejudice?

WB: The first days in New Mexico were difficult – and I don’t think I was aware how difficult it would be for immigrants. I was talking to everybody about Iraqi issues, and I think that agitated people because people weren’t really aware of what was going on overseas. Not everybody I met was open to talking about these things.

KL: When you were younger, you and your brother worked in jewelry factory in New Mexico that employed mostly immigrant workers. Your brother learned Spanish before he learned English. Did you feel a connection with Latino immigrants in New Mexico? As a refugee with legal status, did you think about how your situation differed from that of the undocumented workers?

WB: When I worked in the jewelry factory, I knew so many immigrants employed there were undocumented, Latinos and Asians, and also poor minorities and whites from the US. I found it strange to see how the country would both reject and use undocumented immigrants at the same time. Even today, we reject [and use] undocumented immigrants at the same time. They’re the ones picking the tomatoes and so many foods we eat on a daily basis. There has to be a better policy for immigration. People come for opportunities, and if the door is opened for them to be legalized they won’t be in a situation where they’re always afraid of authority.

KL: Can you relate to that experience of being afraid of authority, under Saddam?

WB: Definitely, in Iraq, and leaving Iraq and being in the refugee camp. I faced the same thing there even though I was a citizen, I was an oppressed citizen. I had to always carry an identity card to prove I belonged to that country.

KL: Did only Shia have to carry identity cards?

WB: No, everyone had to. But it was a metaphorical thing, a reminder that you were under the authority of the government, and we (Shia) were the ones oppressed by the government.

KL: I know you are really fascinated by pop culture, like Britney Spears, J-Lo, “The Family Guy,” etc. And I know you once said M.C. Hammer – and his style of pants – were popular in the slums of Baghdad when you were growing up. In general do you think the ubiquity of American pop culture around the world creates some kind of bridge or continuity for immigrants to the U.S.?

WB: Other cultures believe because the United States is open and free, these artists can flourish and project themselves the way they are, without censorship. So of course it’s being embraced by so many cultures as an example of openness and freedom of expression – whether it’s Britney Spears or Michael Jackson – they become idols around the world. They’re seen as symbols of openness and freedom, and as pushing the edge of entertainment.

KL: You’ve mentioned before that you’ve gotten disillusioned by much of the activism and activists you’ve met over the years in the US, from the people who sit in coffee shops talking all day without really do anything, to protesters who seem to just be shouting the same message over and over in a dogmatic way that doesn’t engage. And I’ve gotten the idea that sometimes you feel like these groups just want to use immigrants or refugees like you to bolster their cause or image, without truly wanting to hear what you have to say. How did these views evolve?

WB: When I arrived in this country, I embraced activism and I was on the street with many groups trying to raise awareness about Iraq and other issues and injustice in general. But I found out sometimes leftist groups can be self-defeating, because it’s not really about empowering [people], it’s about being down. Sometimes it’s alienating more than engaging. I find that I can do much more to engage people as an individual artist, rather than as part of a group. I’ve literally seen people on the street with groups I had worked with before, where they are getting in people’s faces and closing off the potential for dialogue [with people who are different], because they accuse others of being ignorant. I reject that idea of the “Other” being ignorant. Rather they are isolated and disengaged because of the machine that is behind that isolation. And people at coffee shops, especially the poets… not all of them, of course, but many…don’t really want to raise awareness; they want to isolate themselves. Perhaps because of a lack of creativity they paint themselves into a corner and see themselves as out there on the cutting edge, without wanting to relate to anyone else. To me, creativity is inspired by engaging with the public and reacting to what is going on out there. I don’t need to isolate myself to be creative, I need to engage to be creative.

KL: So do you really just not like poetry and poets?

WB: I love poetry, one of my favorites is Neruda – his words are amazing and it deals with politics as well. There are poets that make an amazing difference in politics – take Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet. He has inspired so many people in the Arab world and raised so much awareness about the issue of Palestine. His poem “I am an Arab,” talking about his ID card, his life, embracing who he is…

KL: You’ve been spending a lot of time on projects in the Arab world in the past year or two and you’ve mentioned wanting to work for an extended period in Doha or elsewhere in the Middle East. Is it hard to balance your connections to the US and the Arab world, and does it feel like a tension between the two?

WB: Whenever we cross that ocean we really still belong to both sides. To me I always embrace the best of any culture, and feel that I can equally embrace and belong to both of them. I don’t think it’s a struggle for me to be here or there. Wherever I am, I am nostalgic for the other. To me, sometimes it’s based on the project and the audience. I find myself in the last 20 years or so in the US, the audience is based here. But I also feel I could be in the Arab world and be able to do a project based on the culture and the heritage there.

KL: Have you been active with any immigration advocacy groups or campaigns? Have you tried to use artistic expression as a medium for raising issues of immigrants’ and migrants’ rights?

WB: Not yet, really. But I’m working on a project that will raise awareness about immigration and the border. Since it’s a sensitive plan, I can’t say anything more about it yet. It’s an issue I can’t ignore anymore, it’s come to be the forefront of the debate in the United States these days.

KL: Anything else you’d like to add?

WB: In terms of immigration and security, I just want to emphasize that whenever we build walls and fences, we fence ourselves in rather than keeping others out.

Ernesto Yerena: Ganas director (left) and Our True History (right).

Starting in Tunisia, spreading to Egypt and eventually everywhere, resistance to dictators, government policies and economic inequalities had such a global impact that Time magazine declared “The Protester” person of the year for 2011. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement, an idea conceived by the Canadian activists of Adbusters, mobilized on September 17, inspired by the Arab Spring protests.

One week earlier, in Arizona, a group of more than 50 artists, designers, writers, musicians, and activists gathered in Tucson to initiate the CultureStrike Coalition National Campaign against harsh immigration policies. I was part of this delegation, organized by Bay Area activist Favianna Rodriguez, writer Jeff Chang and others. They chose Arizona because of recent protest activity against its SB (Senate Bill) 1070 that put into place some of the most brutal methods of enforcing immigration restrictions to date. Arizona was the site of massive protests against SB 1070 and advocating passage of the Dream Act, which would allow conditional permanent residency for people brought to the U.S. as minors after they lived here five years.

By mid-October many members of the CultureStrike delegation were actively involved in Occupy Wall Street—protesting, making posters, writing, speaking, performing, and using social media. Protests against stricter immigration laws, massive deportations and economic inequality overlapped in their efforts to draw national attention to everyday practices that most affect the lower classes. One of the most resonant ideas in the Occupy Wall Street movement is the huge disparity in wealth controlled by one percent of the U.S. population compared to the amount held by the other 99 percent. The CultureStrike delegation wants to remind everyone that we are a nation of immigrants, but current economic conditions promote scapegoating undocumented workers and escalating deportations.

The catalyzing idea behind CultureStrike was that creative producers have power in disseminating information that might affect people’s attitudes on political and social issues, eventually resulting in meaningful change. Immigration issues and the economic inequalities driving the OWS movement are on the front burner of American politics as the 2012 election approaches. Several CultureStrike designers have been using their images to raise awareness about these and other issues for years.

Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and prolific designer and activist for more than 40 years, was among the group. His powerful posters have influenced many of the younger designers, including Ernesto Yerena, who recently moved to Arizona from California. Yerena created the campaign “Alto Arizona”—a call to action, asking artists and designers to create posters for a viral campaign, which were then published and sold to help fund the protests against SB1070. In addition to designing posters, Yerena creates multi-layered collages with silkscreens and/or stencils on top. His studio is called Hecho Con Ganas—“made with motivation, desire, passion.”

The CultureStrike designers use technology strategically to get their messages out quickly and virally. They conduct silkscreening workshops to teach young people how to cheaply produce a run of posters for a rally or demonstration. Using social media, they allow downloading of their posters for quick distribution. Yerena’s “Decolonize Wall Street” poster went viral on the internet, then appeared in multiples at Occupy Wall Street protests.

Dignidad Rebelde is a “collaborative graphic arts project that translates stories of struggle and resistance into artwork that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it.” Recently the collaboration between Oakland-based designers/activists Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes has turned its attention to the immigration and Occupy Wall Street initiatives. Barazza’s “99 Percent” poster is included in the Occupy Wall Street Journal folio along with one by Favianna Rodriguez, CultureStrike organizer and Bay Area activist. The newsprint folios are reminiscent of the Black Panther and other 1960s and ’70s radical tabloids that featured large images for posting. Produced in multiple languages, the posters are designed for specific communities.

The Arizona-protest designers knew their works would have a visible street presence when they were carried in protests and would reach an even wider audience across the internet, on news sites and blogs. The speed of media creates almost-instant iconographic images, like the one by D.C. artist César Maxit of Troy Davis, who was executed in spite of late-breaking evidence in his case and widespread protests. These designers are masters at fast and efficient reproduction for getting graphics out in the streets quickly. Favianna Rodriguez and Josh McPhee, who runs the organization JustSeeds, created a book of reproducible and copyright-free images for use in activist work.

Digital access and tools afford graphic designers the means to distribute images and ideas with unprecedented speed and production quality. Graphic design has always been part of social protest. The Occupy Wall Street Journal folio, for example, is a nostalgic throwback to cheaply printed newsprint posters from the mid- to late 20th century. Clear ideas expressed in poster slogans, combined with good design and striking images allow grassroots designers to compete with powerful corporate interests in capturing the public imagination. Designers like those in CultureStrike hope to use their power to influence opinion, raise consciousness, and encourage people to act for change.

Photo: Adrian Gonzalez

A few years back, Julio Salgado and his friends graduated from college and found themselves, like many of their peers, adrift: no good job prospects, hard-earned diplomas gathering dust under a slumped economy. But their drift was anchored by a heavy secret: they didn’t have papers, so every post-college hurdle that young people commonly face was thickened by the politics of a broken immigration system.

An epiphany came on the Day of the Dead, the Día de los Muertos that celebrates mortality and the afterlife. In the spirit of the holiday, Salgado and his colleagues, Jesus Iñiguez, Fernando Romero, and Deisy Hernandez, decided to create an altar in memory of their dreams. And the video they made of the mock memorial inspired them to keep going and see where their art would take them.

Today, the California-based team of four “DREAMers”--named for the thus far-failed DREAM Act legislation, which would provide legal status to undocumented immigrants who get a college education in the U.S.--run a nationwide media project devoted to telling stories about life as an undocumented youth.

Despite the name, DREAMers Adrift has a serious mission: to give voice and vision to an emergent political movement through media, ranging from spoken word to visual art to blogging. And despite their legal quagmires, they’ve made the plight of countless young people visible with a video series called “Undocumented and Awkward,” which whimsically depicts the absurdities of everyday life without papers.

The cringe-worthy moments depicted in the pithy YouTube skits range from the embarrassment of running into an old schoolmate while cleaning his hotel room; or getting stuck out in the cold on a blind date when the bouncer at the club demands an official driver’s license; or the humiliation of trying to make the most out of a miserable office job because, hey, it’s a “step up” from a vocation that involves “stabbing yourself with a kitchen knife or accidentally breathing poison.”

CultureStrike talked to Julio Salgado--whose videos and cartoons are informed by his nearly nine-year odyssey trying to go to school and support himself with odd jobs--on his project’s fusion of art and activism. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.

Michelle Chen: How did DREAMers Adrift start?

Julio Salgado: After college, the four of us undocumented college graduates, we felt a lot of the conversations within the DREAM Act; it’s about students, and people who are still in college. And there was no real conversation about what happens once you graduate from college, which is what’s going on with us. … And so it just so happened last year, right before the DREAM Act went into the last attempt in Congress, we created this video around the Day of the Dead, the Día de los Muertos. And we sort of wanted to pay homage to our dreams, and we all had these diplomas that we couldn’t really use--very dramatic, you know? We created this piece that was just our, literally, pouring our hearts in there, and how we were feeling at the time. Eventually, the dream Act didn’t pass, but it wasn’t even about the DA anymore. It was about putting our stories out there so that people could… see that there’s a voice out there that wasn’t the regular media telling us, “Oh, those illegal aliens…” but something that came from the heart.

MC: How is your situation, as a post-graduate DREAMer, different from the DREAMers we’ve seen in the news, who are still students?

JS: When we were in college, the thing was “Don’t tell anybody you’re undocumented. Don’t tell because you never know…” It was almost this underground network that we had of counselors and professors who were helping us. But this new generation of DREAMers are sort of like coming out and you know, all up in yo face, and getting arrested and doing all these things. So they were a huge, big-time inspiration for us to come out and sort of put our lives on the line for people to see. But I felt that, well, I’m not an organizer. I went to school to be a journalist, and I wanted to tell a story. But I couldn’t get a job with a newspaper. So we created our own platform in a very non-traditional way.

In some form or another, we’re all activists, because we go to the marches, we go to the rallies, and initially we were really pushing for the DREAM Act. But like I said, it’s gone beyond the DREAM Act. It’s not even about a piece of legislation, it’s about empowering ourselves for using this media, passing it on, saying to other students, “Hey, use this video and tell people.”

MC: What has been the response from viewers?

JS: For the most part it’s been positive, students, and people who are active, but also people who have actually have been deported, we’re talking about people who are just scared of going out and dealing with the police.

I mentioned some of the queer issues in the videos. And some of the comments, from people using, “Fag this, fag that.” I’m just like, woah, we still have a long way to go even as undocumented folks. … People think that if you’re part of an oppressed minority, you would try to understand other oppressed minorities. But what we’re seeing is that putting stuff online opens the door for a lot of negativity. But we try to focus on the positive. And we want to continue to do this work. I don’t know where it’s going to go. We’re just happy to be able to tell a story and do what we do.

MC: Was college the time that you first really understood the barriers you were facing?

JS: From the get go, it was really a struggle to pay for school. My parents never really saved up for me to go to college, so it was all up to me. I couldn’t get federal financial aid, and so that was a challenge. But I was like, “Nah, I’m not gonna let that stop me. I’m gonna keep washing dishes, keep doing construction work, and continue my education.” It took me eight and a half years to finish college.

MC: Did you ever feel like your status wasn’t just a financial setback, but might put you at risk of deportation?

JS: Yes. There were times where I had to risk driving without a license, and I didn’t know if a cop was going to arrest me and then eventually incarcerate me, and then eventually deportation. I was very, very careful. I think the reason why undocumented students, especially DREAMers are called “model” students is not because we want to be. We have to. We have to be super careful, because you can’t be getting in trouble. If you do, you have so much to lose. It’s not about just getting arrested, it’s the possibility of not seeing your family in a really long time. It was very unnerving. I was constantly thinking about it.

MC: What do you think of the DREAM Act and the politics surrounding it, especially with some saying that it’s shortsighted to push for just the DREAM Act without a comprehensive immigration reform bill as well?

JS: If you’re waiting for that perfect piece of legislation, while politicians are playing with us with a political game, we’re going to be undocumented forever. But now, I think that whole conversation last year, hopefully, openened the conversation to the bigger picture of immigration reform for all. It won’t stop anti-immigrant feelings, it won’t stop people from hating us. But it would try to fix something that has been broken for a really long time. Definitely, it was a very problematic bill. It created a lot of divides even between DREAMers who were being pulled from all kinds of sides. It’s sad, but it’s the truth. It’s a game that people are playing with us. And so by us fighting back and saying “Yo, no, I’m gonna tell my own story.” It’s almost a defense mechanism against this crazy, big political machine, that sometimes is more powerful than us. But they can’t take away our stories. They can’t take away what we really have to say.

Visit DREAMers Adrift to learn more about their work and their stories.

(Photo: Diane Ovalle)

Filmmaker Jason Michael Aragón and Pan Left Productions have been spreading the message of immigration justice around the country, especially to hot spots where the right has pushed anti-immigration legislation, modeled on Arizona’s infamous SB 1070. Their documentary “Under Arpaio” depicts not only the ugly politics behind Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s war on Latinos and immigrants, but also the grassroots resistance to the epidemic discrimination and brutality that these communities have faced.  The production team filed a dispatch from Atlanta, Georgia, where anti-immigrant legislation has emerged, and, as the public response to a screening shows, activists are fighting back:

The screening that night was graciously hosted by GLAHR (Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights in Atlanta) and we learned much about the important work they do. They have built a solid connection with migrant communities and effected areas in Atlanta and in rural Georgia that face racial profiling and intimidation. Their work has helped organize their own version of Comités de Defensa del Barrios in various areas around the city and in farming communities, and also organizing abuse documentation to help these communities advocate for their human and worker rights. On our visit there we were fortunate to be present for the first day of their brand new radio station 1310 AM in Atlanta that went live on air and promoted the Under Arpaio screening later that evening.

Throughout our visit it was clear that the fight in Arizona goes beyond state lines and into places like Atlanta. Audience members were energized about continuing to take on their own community challenges after seeing the film and hearing about experiences in Arizona from Puente Movement organizer, Diane Ovalle. It was on that day that the Department of Homeland Security terminated the 287g agreement with Sheriff Arpaio. A moment we were able to share with enthusiasm among our new friends and allies, but also and opportunity to learn about the next steps ahead for people in Arizona to continue to work toward the end 287g, Secure Communities, and senseless separation of families all over the country. New alliances were built that day. We were even more committed to make sure that Under Arpaio could be a resource for effected communities all over. A way to come together and join in a movement that respects humanity and ends injustices under U.S. immigration enforcement policy everywhere.

Read the original post and learn more about the film at UnderArpaio.com.