The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano Movement announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States.

Chicano activist artists created vivid, eye-catching posters with domestic and global politics in mind.

They channeled social activism in support of farm workers’ rights, civil rights, labor equity, anti-war, and, later, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements into assertive aesthetic statements in the graphic arts.

By the 1970s, self-identified Chicana artists challenged the overwhelming representation of men in defining the Movement.

Artists such as Ester Hernandez, Yolanda López, and Yreina D. Cervántez sought to challenge ways of conceiving community, aesthetics, and politics that were patriarchal and silenced LGBTQ voices.

Often in the face of hostility, they ushered in new imagery and conceptual frameworks that centered on women’s lives, feminist changemakers, spirituality, and paved the way for future examinations of identity, including Indigeneity.

Exploring the mentor-mentee relationships that have sustained the field is an illuminating look into the Chicanx artistic community. There is a through-line of direct relationships leading from the founders of the movement to printmakers who are active today.

Chicanx artists and institutions welcomed, nurtured, and supported each other, as well as other cross-cultural collaborators. The artworks map a dense matrix of relationships that reveal the importance of intergenerational support structures and far-reaching networks.

The broad network that resulted includes Latinx artists with links to other Latin American nations, white allies, card-carrying Chicano activists, or recent Mexican immigrants who may or may not identify as Chicanx.

Included in this broad category of Chicanx graphics are works by more recent Mexican immigrants such as Juan de Dios Mora, whose prints delve into the contemporary nuances of the transnational border space that is South Texas.

The legacy of Chicanx graphics establishes how interracial and cross-cultural solidarity was and remains an important element of Chicanx print networks.

"Justice for Our Lives" is an online and public social justice artwork. Using original photographs, artist Oree Originol creates black-and-white digital portraits of men, women, and children killed during altercations with law enforcement.

The long legacy of the activism by Chicanx graphics artists can be seen in the iconic work of Ester Hernandez, who explores the social justice issues facing the community in 1982 and that persist almost 30 years later.

In her 1982 print, "Sun Mad," Hernandez reconfigures the cheerful branding of the Sun-Maid raisin company into a grim warning, a response to her family’s exposure to polluted water and pesticides in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Twenty-six years later, she reimagines her classic poster as a condemnation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She outfits the calavera (skeleton) with an ICE wrist monitor and a huipil, a traditional indigenous garment.

The powerful socially-minded artistic legacy forged by activist Chicano artists working in the Movement and passed through Chicanx mentorship networks, remains visible in the art of printmakers working today.

View a selection of iconic and innovative Chicanx graphics from "Printing the Revolution."