San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chicano artists draw from the past
Movement against police brutality inspires new wave of expression.
The summer of 2014 saw a nation in turmoil.
That July, Eric Garner died moments after a New York City police officer placed the 43yearold Black man in a choke hold. A month later, 18yearold Michael Brown was fatally shot by an officer in Ferguson, Mo.
The Black Lives Matter movement, born in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed 17yearold Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in 2012, captivated the national media with protests and riots against racist violence targeting the Black community.
Like the rest of the country, Broobs watched it all unfold.
“I just felt really hopeless,” the San Francisco artist, who uses genderneutral pronouns and also goes by Ruby, told The Chronicle. “It’s always really heavy, seeing these videos or hearing these stories . ... It’s hard not to carry that with you.”
Back then, the queer collage artist’s photography and digital pieces were introspective. But the unrest of that summer in 2014 — preceded in March by the killing of Alex Nieto by San Francisco police — compelled Broobs to use their art to support social movements.
Since then, the 29yearold has centered on the humanity of marginalized people. Broobs’ tributes and political posters attempt to sanctify fallen members of the queer, Black and Latino communities, and to visually correct narratives that can distort their legacies.
“I’m highlighting the person’s life in what I think is a beautiful way,” they said. “The media tends to dehumanize a lot of these people.”
As demonstrations memorialize another Black man killed by police, George Floyd, Chicano protest art is experiencing a new wave in the Bay Area, where the movement has deep roots. While its elders used industrial prints as a loudspeaker to call for strengthening labor rights and ending the Vietnam War, the next generation is responding to causes such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline on social media, and Chicano art is being recalled to amplify new liberation movements.
In the late 1960s, a clique of Mexican American art students in the East Bay were discovering their political identity.
“It was a time of awakening ... and (many of us found) that we came from a long, beautiful history and culture that most of us didn’t know anything about,” said Malaquías Montoya, a forefather in the Chicano art movement.
Montoya joined with Manuel Hernandez, Royal Chicano Air Force founder Esteban Villa and Galeria de la Raza founder Rene Yañez to form the shortlived Mexican American Liberation Art Front in 1969 and held what is thought to be the first exhibit of Chicano art in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. They called it “New Symbols for La Nueva Raza.”
“The main discussion was, what do we do in support of the struggles that were taking place at that time?” Montoya said.
Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Larry Ito were leading the farmworkers’ struggle, local schools were demanding better and fairer access to education for their students, and thousands of young men were dying in the Vietnam War. The collective decided that their art would speak on those issues, and that they would say it where the people were — on the streets, not in galleries or museums.
“Art ... should be something that identifies what it is that keeps us oppressed and somehow gives us a light on how we free ourselves from that oppression,” Montoya said.
For Juan R. Fuentes, a painter turned print maker, using his artistry for the movements was enticing. He marched in antiwar demonstrations and supported the United Farm Workers Union as a young Chicano who had grown up in immigrant labor camps in Watsonville and Salinas. But a class with artist Rupert Garcia and a workshop with Montoya opened a new door.
“I had to transform from a visual artist that was drawing and painting to an artist that’s basically (doing) graphic design,” Fuentes said. “You gotta have
an image and text, and the things have to work together. And they have to be able to be read on the street when people see them, and they have to resonate with folks.”
It did resonate. The artists saw their art displayed in marches, in local businesses such as taquerias and panaderias, and in people’s homes.
Some pieces were statements of solidarity, such as Fuentes’ 1977 poster that read, “Zionism Is Racism.” Others were more like advertisements. One of Montoya’s early posters promoted a health care workshop by the nowdefunct Third World Women’s Alliance. In it, doctors in white coats tend to patients, with a couple holding a torch and baby above, and a distinctly 1970s sans serif font below. The posters were art that served a public function, and they were inexpensive enough to produce to be given away.
“We were empowering ourselves and our communities because we were able to showcase the work for ourselves,” Fuentes said. “The mainstream galleries weren’t really interested in our work.” Fuentes’ first exhibit was at the Mission’s Galeria de la Raza in 1975.
Without social media, the posters became a necessary way to disseminate information about where actions were taking place and what causes needed support, and to raise public awareness about the global connection between the movements — that Palestinian liberation or the end of South African apartheid mattered to the Bay Area, too.
“It became a global effort to change the world, not only here, but everywhere,” he said.
“Art ... should be something that identifies what ... keeps us oppressed and somehow gives us a light on how we free ourselves.”
Malaquías Montoya, artist
Broobs remembers waking up the morning after Nia Wilson was killed. At around 3 a.m. on July 23, 2018, they
scrolled through their phone to read the news.
On a platform at the MacArthur BART Station in Oakland, the 18yearold Black woman had been slashed to death by a convicted felon named John Lee Cowell. Wilson’s sister, Letifah, was stabbed but survived.
Some news outlets published a photo of Wilson posing with a cell phone case that was shaped like a gun. For Broobs and others in marginalized communities, it was a familiar pattern: the media suggesting criminality toward a Black victim of violence, marring their legacy after death.
Broobs’ tribute was meant to challenge that. They chose a photo of
Wilson with a radiant smile, placing calathea plants at her feet and a string of roses around her head. They stayed up that morning to finish the piece.
“I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t seen in any other light other than that her life mattered, and that it was beautiful,” Broobs said.
Broobs has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, and their tribute to Wilson was printed and displayed at marches and protests. Through their art, Broobs hopes to incite action against systemic oppression. Their pieces pay tribute to everyone from singer Dolly Parton (“a unifier in a strange way,” Broobs said) to civil rights activist Audre Lorde, trans rights activist Lorena Borjas (who died in March from coronavirus) and recently Sean Monterrosa — a San Francisco resident killed by Vallejo police on June 2 during a night of protests against police brutality.
Fifty years after the Mexican American Liberation Art Front, Chicano artists are turning to political posters to advocate for liberation in various forms. The images created by Dignidad Rebelde — an Oakland graphic arts collective run by Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza — pop
up in the windows of Bay Area businesses and in the hands of marchers. Their posters have threaded together movements from Palestinian liberation to Standing Rock, with an emphasis on the rights of all people to access land, water and liberty safely.
“We’re always thinking about how to work in solidarity with these different communities,” Barraza told The Chronicle. “We’re not just artists working in a vacuum.”
Global thinking is embedded in the Bay Area’s cultural fabric, said Barraza, who was a student of Fuentes in the early 2000s. He said the notion of “Third World solidarity” has held strong in the region since the formation of the Third World Liberation Front, a student coalition that held a fivemonth strike in 1968 over lack of diversity in courses, faculty and admissions at what is now San Francisco State University. After the strike, the university and UC Berkeley both opened ethnic studies programs for the first time.
Barraza recalled seeing muralist Ester Hernandez’ 1982 “Sun Mad” poster about the impact of pesticide use on farmworkers for the first time (a play on the SunMaid raisin box, except using a skeleton mascot) and Yolanda Lopez’ Virgen de Guadalupe series, which merged the religious icon with everyday Mexican women. “When we make posters, we want the people to see them and feel inspired, and see themselves as powerful,” Barraza said.
In the weeks since the killing of George Floyd, Broobs lined their Instagram feed with bright, botanical tributes to victims of police violence and calls for justice for Black trans people such as Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Riah Milton and Dominique Fells, all of whom were recently killed.
“Black liberation means liberation for literally everybody,” Broobs said.
Even if others aren’t ready to receive it. Broobs recalled uploading a 2017 poster to Instagram that read “white complicity nourishes white supremacy,” Negative responses flooded in quickly. “I got a lot of hate, and a few death threats,” they said.
At the end of May, Broobs uploaded it again. This time, the poster was shared widely on Instagram, with comments including, “Where is the lie?”
“Maybe we weren’t just there yet as a society,” Broobs said. “And now we are because it was mostly white people (who would) talk to me. And now I think they realize like, ‘Oh, maybe I do play a part in the system.’ ”
Fuentes stood with his family near the Bayview Opera House a few blocks from home. On a recent Thursday, they were there to support hundreds of students who planned to march to the Embarcadero police station in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
“It all came back,” Fuentes said. “Normally I would have been out there as well. I would have been marching.”
At 70 years old, Fuentes said he would “run out of gas after a few blocks.” But he thought back to when he began making political posters. Then, the Black Panthers also called for an end to systemic racism and violent policing of Black Americans. The American Indian Movement fought for sovereignty and an end to civil rights violations. Palestinians were fighting against displacement. Housing and employment inequities remained a struggle.
Demand for protest art began to dwindle beginning in the 1980s, Fuentes said. The causes shifted from the Vietnam War to apartheid in South Africa and revolutions throughout Latin America — and so did the technology: Organizations that once contracted the artists were printing their own posters inhouse.
But the movements have endured, Fuentes said.
“A lot of these advances that we made in the ’60s and ’70s, they started to get chopped up in the ’80s and ’90s, for women and men and for workers,” Fuentes said. “I think people are just fed up.”
Montoya teaches art classes at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a collaborative he cofounded in Woodland (Yolo County) in 2009. He has been a professor emeritus at UC Davis since 2008, and in March 2018, the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery in the Mission District hosted a retrospective of Montoya’s political posters.
Though Fuentes isn’t creating many political posters, he continues to respond to social issues through art. He recently completed a piece for the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of a series thanking health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic. His poster features a brown woman and a pair of hands holding another hand that is Black, with text in English and Spanish.
“With mine, I really tried to (create a poster) that’s really directed to people of color,” he said.
The conditions that provoked the movements Fuentes, Montoya and many other Chicano artists supported have persisted.
“It’s amazing how we’ve made a full circle, and we’ve come back around again,” Fuentes said.
“When we make posters, we want the people to see them and feel inspired, and see themselves as powerful.”
Jesus Barraza, cofounder of Dignidad Rebelde