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Unsettling Global Midwests: A Special Issue of the American Studies Journal

2023; American studies; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2023.a913944

2153-6856

Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, M. Bianet Castellanos, Christopher Perreira,

Environmental Justice and Health Disparities

Unsettling Global MidwestsA Special Issue of the American Studies Journal Thomas Xavier Sarmiento (bio), M. Bianet Castellanos (bio), and Christopher Perreira (bio), Guest Editors The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, sparked social protests across the United States and the world, but as Walter R. Jacobs, Wendy Thompson Taiwo, and Amy August’s edited collection Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion reveals, the local and regional particularities of race and racism in the Twin Cities and Midwest emerge from systemic anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.1 Maria Cristina Tavera’s billboard “The Connection” (2021), featured on this issue’s cover, provides an evocative image of this complicated history (Fig. 1 and 2). Located on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue South, where Floyd was tragically killed, the billboard formed part of the Social Justice Billboard Project (SJBP), created in 2020 by the NE Sculpture I Gallery Factory to “elevate BIPOC voices and artwork” in Minneapolis.2 Based on her screen print “The Connection: Atzquetzali” (2021), Tavera depicts a young Indigenous woman sitting before a switchboard with long braids circling symbolic references to the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity, and social protests against police violence. Tavera explains, “I wanted to offer artwork which related directly to the historical space of George Floyd Square (38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota). In a sense, the violent act of the police using deadly force on George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in the Minneapolis Powderhorn neighborhood, combined with storing centuries of racial inequity, detonated [End Page 7] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1 and 2. Maria Cristina Tavera, “The Connection: Atquetzali” billboard on the left. Social Justice Billboard Project by NE SCULPTURE I Gallery Factory. Photo credit: Xavier Tavera [End Page 8] a demand for justice. The unprecedented scale of chaos resulted due to the pandemic-driven unemployment, chronic poverty, food insecurity, and the civil unrest.” For Tavera, the switchboard operator foregrounds the diasporic ties that shape Minneapolis. She goes on to explain, “I selected the switchboard as a visual image of communicating and physically connecting. When I was a child, we could not afford to call family in Mexico very often. We would all gather around the landline and one of us would dial ‘O’ for the operator. The emotions were high as often the connection would fail. Other times, we were elated when we recognized the voice of the family member who answered the phone.” The switchboard evokes this desire for intimate connection, a feeling that was rampant during the start of the pandemic. “Following the days in the wake of George Floyd’s death,” Tavera elaborates, “networks were created through word of mouth and social media to organize persistent protests [and] volunteer-driven pop-up food shelves and [to] promote health guidelines to reduce COVID-19 outbreaks. These connections relied heavily on people’s ability and dedication to mobilize during the crisis by communicating needs of resources and sharing sources of distribution.”3 Located next to Tavera’s billboard is Patience Zalanga’s photograph “untitled” of a young Black man tenderly holding a toddler-age child while he reads a children’s board book. The warmth and intimacy of this photograph, paired with the social solidarity of “The Connection,” remind us that the violence that took place on the street below—marked by the graffiti signs “Stop the Violence” and “Black Lives Matter”—cannot tear apart the sense of community and reciprocity flourishing in the Powder-horn neighborhood, one of Minneapolis’s more culturally heterogenous neighborhoods south of downtown. Placing an Indigenous woman at the center of this connectivity acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land. It is clear that the murder of George Floyd initiated and continues to activate both the intimate community and global responses at the heart of Tavera’s switchboard. Connection needs nuanced modes of communication, presumes care and compassion, demands more robust stories of justice and survival, and requires expanded conceptions of global community. On one hand, the case of Floyd seems exceptional in part because of the persistent conflation of Whiteness and the Midwest as well...