http://jewell-armendariz.blogspot.com/2012/03/

http://jewell-armendariz.blogspot.com/2013/

http://jewell-armendariz.blogspot.com/2012/

http://jewell-armendariz.blogspot.com/2012/04/black-panthers-policing-police.html

Mr. Ford

All the men looked up to Mr. Ford.  Children watched him drive up in the ghettos with money, women and a sense of power over their destiny. He wore shiny shoes and always had a fast woman on his arm. He oozed money out of his pores and all the poor children ran around him when he arrived in an effort to catch a glimpse of the money he showered on everyone but his whores. His harem at home paid the bills and his fancy limousine on Saturday nights when he went collecting their rent for breathing in his shrine. Young men now sixty still remember Mr. Ford with a sensation in their groins just as when they were boys. Mr. Ford equaled a pussy power that they learned to adore because no other power would ever be available to poor brown and black boys from the ghettos.  They learned to love the whores the way they loved their mamas.  They learned to beat them the way Mr. Ford beat his women. Most of all they learned that women did not equal real humans and thus they were dispensable in their eyes.

Did you know the Octopus Has three hearts @ Jewell Medina

Did you know that the Octopus has three hearts. That is why he told me to bless my water with Hiroshimas Octopus water so that my heart would soften to love. He said to put passion on my list of wishes for us. He said that I needed to feel his water but what I really needed to feel was my own water and strength

 I wonder if I really did get better or if I would have been just the same without this. Is a conscious life really worth living? He set limits on his revolution. He stated some things weren’t possible. But my life had witnessed the impossible so I knew differently. Like Frida I created and painted my own reality. I transcended limitations. Run they told me and I walked. I packed leisurely. I took a shower, ate breakfast then planned my departure to my next adventure.

What role does protest art have in social justice?   Specifically I analyze the cultural production of protest art against HB 2281, the ethnic studies ban in Tucson, Arizona, and its role in cultural expression, identity and representation.

To situate myself in the research and why I am interested in this topic I give a brief analysis of my own art activism. 

My own art activism started as a young girl when I would design altar installations with my grandmothers and grow medicinal herbs in our gardens for healing.  As early as second grade with Ms. Martin I wrote an award winning testimony about my mother and grandmothers life growing up in Guadalupe Az. I was living with my parents and two sisters and a brother in a one bedroom home in Barrio Campito. El Campito was named the camp because this was once the outskirt of the city and city dwellers would see campfires out in this location because that is where the migrants lived.  The teacher told me I had a flare for writing. After this I wrote all our grief, pain, and suffering into the stories and design of installations in the forms of altars and cajitas. 

My grandmother lived in a house with no air conditioned in the heat of the Arizona desert. She carved a small room, she planted a healing herb garden, she hung cloths to darken the room. There she lived like an animal in a burro insulating herself as if we were covered with mud. I would run out and water the evaporative cooling.   It often would appear as if no one was home. They picked cotton in fields with no bathrooms and the whole family worked and it was necessary many times that they work rather than go to school . My mother picked cotton as a child laborer in the fields of Arizona.  My mother tells a story about water and how they walked to the end of the canal with a wagon for water. She tepidly splashed and washed because once she almost drowned in the canal.  They would boil the water for cooking.  These stories are only two of many that show up like old battle scars on my body. I carry my mothers battle scars on my own.  Inheritance or lived, If the story lives in the mother it continues as resonance from birth to her daughters. I never carried water across the town to boil and drink but my bodies cells remember the dis-eases transmitted, skips one generation and lives in my gut. When I sleep I see the snake rodents head enlarged threatening to eat me-eats at my vital nutrients, zaps away my force but I imagine a new story into being when I talk back to the old limiting reality and create a new art and story into existence.  In the new story I float in harmony with water and it becomes purified with the suns rays on my face as I become one with the lake, with all living beings, I coexist. I float still like my grandmother bunny in her burrow, limbs cool from the mud, one with the earth mother.  This story is my mothers story and her mothers story of resistance and survival through our activism and art.  Chicana/o studies is in the business of saving lives and not one day goes by as I walk the path to my classes in the ivy tower and step around almost dead bodies in the barrios that I do not forget.  In the art lies an activism that enables me and many other art activists to recreate ourselves new.