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.
