Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Signs of Solidarity: The Work of Dignidad Rebelde

2018; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asa.2018.0012

2381-4721

Jesus Barraza,

Latin American Urban Studies

Signs of Solidarity:The Work of Dignidad Rebelde Jesus Barraza (bio) As an artist, my practice goes back to the 1990s, when I started working as a graphic designer in the emerging world of desktop publishing. Back in those days, when design stations had 16 megabytes of RAM and a color screen—yeah, not just 256 shades of gray, but millions of colors. Back then, I was designing flyers, postcards, and the occasional poster; it was enough to get me a design job at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, California. This was the home of Mission Grafica, the serigraphy studio that produced hundreds of prints and posters during the 1980s in an effort to raise the voice of the community. I was inspired by the archive of work that had been created there, a mix of fine art print and posters that pushed the medium, but most importantly, made work that was meant to exist on the streets at protests as well as in galleries. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Malaquías Montoya, Empujando Tinta—Taller Tupac Amaru: Ten Years of Collaborative Activism (2013). Screen Print. Printed by Dignidad Rebelde. Image courtesy of the artist. This methodology was the inspiration for the first studio I set up with Favianna Rodriguez in 2003, the Taller Tupac Amaru. The TTA was a space created to produce our screen-printed posters designed for community organizations. It was also where I perfected my craft, spending all my free time printing posters and collaborating with artists to help them produce their work. Soon enough, I was working with established artists to produce fine art editions; I was lucky to work with Malaquías [End Page 208] Montoya and reproduce one of his posters from the 1980s for a portfolio published by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. Working with Montoya was amazing; he became not only a friend but also a mentor, and over the years, I have worked with him on several editions and have learned so much from him. The mid-2000s was a very productive period for our studio and was full of great opportunities. The most exciting was my first two-person exhibition at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco with my mentor Juan R. Fuentes. It was also during this period that I met my future partner, Melanie Cervantes. It was in 2005 that I first met Melanie, but it took a year for me to ask her out on a date in which we attended the Chicano Visions exhibit at the de Young Museum. This was the beginning of our artistic collaboration. Melanie helped me learn to paint banners and cut multicolored stencils, and I helped her continue her screen printing education. This was the beginning of what became Dignidad Rebelde (Rebel Dignity), a collaborative project that creates art as an empowering reflection of community struggles, dreams, and visions. Often this means collaborating with organizations to create posters of their organizing efforts or donating posters to help them fund-raise for their projects. Guiding the work we do are the principles of Xicanisma and Zapatismo: we create work that amplifies people's stories of struggle and resilience into a radical visual language that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Jesus Barraza, Dignidad Rebelde (2002). Screen Print. Image courtesy of the artist. These principles are shaped by Xicanas such as Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga, who defined an Indigenista perspective in their writings that helped us in turn to develop a consciousness recognizing women's central role in the struggle for liberation from systems of oppression.1 As Ana Castillo writes, "It is our task as Xicanistas, to not only reclaim our indigenismo—but also to reinsert the forsaken feminine into our consciousness."2 For us, this means reflecting a Xicanisma [End Page 209] saying from the 1990s in our artwork—"Sisters at the Center"—as a way of understanding a matriarchal future, something for which we can look to our indigenous roots...