Art in all its forms has always been a critical element and expression of social change movements. In recent years, from the rise of the immigrant rights movement, to the advent of the Occupy Movement, artists and musicians have played an instrumental role in building and sustaining those movements. Some forty-+ years ago, a revolutionary movement of artists and art collectives grew out of a nearly forgotten government massacre in Mexico. That movement -- which reverberates today -- has inspired countless artists on both sides of the border.
For much of the world, the most iconic image of the 1968 Mexico Olympics still remains the raising of black-gloved fists by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the medal award ceremony after they won gold and bronze medals respectively in the 200-meter dash. At the time, Smith and Carlos were part of a movement of athletes called the Olympic Project for Human Rights. For their action, Smith and Carlos were ridiculed by many in the mainstream media, and condemned and sent home by the United States Olympic Committee.
Nearly lost to history is a one-sided battle that occurred just prior to those Games; the Tlatelolco massacre. On the evening of October 2, 1968 – just ten days before the Olympics were to begin -- the Mexican government slaughtered hundreds of student and civilian protesters, and bystanders, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City.
Out of that turbulent period came a movement of Mexican and Chicano artists and art collectives whose work would reverberate over the next three decades and beyond.
As Edward J. McCaughan, author of Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán (Duke University Press, 2012), recently told the San Francisco Examiner, the artists “created visual discourses that allowed people to imagine themselves differently — as empowered citizens or feminist women ... as people with rights who could stand up to their government.”
“Artists helped shape the politics and identities of an international generation of social movement activists forged in the protests of 1968 that shook cities across the globe, from Paris, Prague, and Tokyo to Mexico City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco,” McCaughan writes in his new book.
McCaughan’s book focuses on three movements that grew out of that period: “in Mexico City, the student movement of 1968 and a closely associated network of activist art collectives”; “in Oaxaca, a political and cultural struggle rooted in the region’s Zapotec communities”; “and in California, the Chicano civil rights movement.”
The role of art in society has been debated for centuries. The 19th century French slogan, ''l'art pour l'art'' ("art for art's sake") – art exists and it needs neither justification nor a moral purpose – has historically contended with social realism – art as a moral flare or political beacon.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a 19th century American-born, British-based artist wrote that “Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.”
Time and place, however, often defines art’s purpose: postcolonial African writer Leopold Senghor argued that, "art is functional" and that "in black Africa, 'art for art's sake' does not exist." In his collection of essays and criticism entitled Morning Yet on Creation Day, Chinua Achebe puts it more colorfully, writing: "art for art's sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit."
(Full disclosure: McCaughan and I worked together on the Olga Talamante Defense Committee and with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in the 1970s.)
In a series of e-mails, McCaughan answered questions about the synthesis of art and social movements.
Bill Berkowitz: How did you come to focus on the three movements that you address in your book?
Edward J. McCaughan: I wanted to identify specific social movements in which a critical mass of visual artists had been actively involved. I started thinking about movements I already knew about, either because I had written about them or had been involved with them in some way.
I ended up selecting the Mexico City-based student movement from 1968, which produced vibrant graphic art and the closely associated movement of artists collectives that was active throughout the 1970s and 80s; the California Chicano movement which produced an entire Chicano art movement (which I came of age with as a college student and activist in the 60s and 70s); and, although I was less familiar with it, I chose the Zapotec/COCEI (Coalición Obrera-Campesina-Estudiantil del Istmo-Worker-Peasant-Student Coalition of the Isthmus) movement in Oaxaca, which Peter Baird and I had written about it in our 1979 book, Beyond the Border: Mexico and the U.S. Today.
These three movements arose during the same historical period, shared a common generational experience, and contained many common elements of Mexican culture and politics. The fact that they were from three quite different locations with quite different social bases clarified for me how important local conditions and local history are in mediating the experience and artistic expression of social movements.
BB: What role did the 1968 government massacre of students in Tlatelolco play?
EM: The government massacre was pivotal to the three movements themselves, as well as to my own politicization. The student movement in Mexico City would likely never have developed into a massive movement with national and international impact had the Mexican government not been so brutal in its response. Government repression became one of the key themes explored over and over again by the movement’s graphic artists.
And there was a direct relationship between the government repression in 1968 and the movement in Oaxaca — both because university students and artists in Oaxaca mobilized in response to what was happening in Mexico City, and because some students fled to Oaxaca to escape the repression. Internationally renowned artist Francisco Toledo, who was key to the emergence of the Zapotec/COCEI movement, offered his home as a refuge to some of the students who fled Mexico City. And I remember clearly that many of the Chicano activists at the UC Santa Cruz, where I began my undergraduate studies in 1968, were very much aware of the repression in Mexico City.
BB: What was it about the art itself (the images, style, composition, color choices, format, etc.) during the periods you discuss that made it resonate not only with movement activists, but also the general public? How did it differ from early politically/socially conscious art?
EM: The art really helped to define the countercultural zeitgeist of that whole generation. It delighted in breaking all the rules — the rules of the “establishment” -- whether you’re talking about the dominant institutions and discourses of the art world or the political and cultural elites of the era. A generation of youth who were dissatisfied with the world as we knew it saw our rebellious, irreverent, nonconformist selves represented in the work produced by activist artists.
For example, when Luis Echeverría — the man alleged to have ordered the massacre of students in 1968 — ran for President of Mexico in 1970, his campaign slogan was “arriba y adelante” (“upwards and onwards”). Artist Felipe Ehrenberg, who had fled to London to escape the repression in Mexico, responded by producing an irreverent and formally innovative piece for a group exhibition of politically engaged artists in Mexico City. Inspired by pop art and comics, he mailed 200 postcards to the organizers of the exhibition, with only a dot on each and a code for assembling them. When the cards were put together properly, they revealed a naked Madonna, breasts thrust “arriba y adelante,” holding a soccer ball that read “World Cup Mexico 1970.” He used wicked humor rather than didactic sloganeering to expose the irony of the future President’s campaign slogan and of Mexico once again hosting a major international event only two years after the October 2 massacre. And formally, it broke all the rules of the art world. Ehrenberg’s piece was so much of the moment.
When women in the Mexico City art collectives began to take on sexism in the movement, Maris Bustamante responded with a performance piece in which she skewered Freud’s theory of penis envy while wearing a prosthetic penis on her nose. Bustamante’s humor, sexual irreverence, and genre-breaking performance helped to define a generation’s new approach to politics and art.
Here in California, a similar phenomenon can be seen in the way feminist Chicana artists re-made the Virgin of Guadalupe, and in the process, Chicano culture. Imagine Pattsi Valdez parading down Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles, representing the Virgin in glittering black and silver with an aluminum foil calavera (skull) on her head. This was part of the collective Asco’s “walking mural” on Christmas Eve in 1972 — breaking all the rules of religious dogma, nationalist assumptions about Chicano cultural identity, female sexuality, and muralism.
All of these examples stand in sharp contrast to the typically solemn, didactic, social realism of the graphic art and murals that characterized so much of Mexican and U.S. political art in the first half of the twentieth century.
BB: Tell us a little about your background and how you got into the work you're doing?
EM: I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz in 1968, when I first learned about the repression of the students in Mexico City. That event, and the response of my fellow students and professors at UCSC directly led to my decision to study social movements in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and to get involved in the U.S.-based Latin America solidarity movement. I earned a Masters degree in Latin American Studies at Stanford University before working for several years at NACLA (the North American Congress on Latin America), an activist research collective. While at NACLA, Peter Baird and I wrote a series of research reports about the relationship between the economic integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies, social class formation, and social movements.
After a 15-year period of activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, I returned to graduate school and wrote my doctoral dissertation about the crisis and potential renovation of the revolutionary Left in Cuba and Mexico. I’m now a professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, where I continue to teach and write about Mexican social movements.
My next research project is a comparative study of four U.S-born women artist-activists who ended up making Mexico their personal, professional and political home — two of them in the 1940s and two of them in the 1970s.
BB: How does the growth of social media expand or limit politically activist art?
EM: These days, movement artists have vastly expanded opportunities to make their work seen. When student artists were producing silk-screen graphics for the demonstrations in 1968, the number of images they could physically print and distribute by hand — wheat pasting them on buildings and buses, for example -- limited them. Today, while young street artists in Oaxaca are still producing political art by hand -- especially stencil art that covers the streets in Oaxaca -- they now simultaneously create digital art and circulate it widely on the Internet. I still see graphics that Rini Templeton produced in the 1970s and 1980s being used in picket signs and banners at Occupy marches in Oakland. But at the same time, Oakland-based artists like Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza make extensive use of social media to circulate their politically and aesthetically powerful work.