As we reflect on the year so far and think forward to November, political art has never been more important. The Latinx community, which has a long history of “artivism,” has brought power to racial struggles for decades and helped unite Chicago and capture the fervent energy this summer. In a culturally rich and diverse but segregated city, Latinx artivism shows there is power in community, especially in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately hits Black and Brown Chicagoans the worst.
Unsatisfied with just about everything in his life, he went back to school, earning a degree in architecture. He then scored his first job at a firm.
The response to his sketches has been overwhelmingly positive. Rather than considering him a copycat or a plagiarizer, photographers have been impressed by his interpretations of their work. At the beginning of October, he published his second zine, this time watercolor sketches of nature scenes. Money from each issue sold will be donated to Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, a group that has been organizing around environmental justice issues in La Villita, a neighborhood burdened by toxic industry since 1994.
“As Latinos, we have a lot of work to do,” she says. “I felt like our community kept hiding behind, ‘We are minorities too,’ but no, we can also be complicit in anti-Blackness. I felt this need to put it out on the wall.”
His goal is always to connect with the community and create with intention. Delgado’s project does this by shining a light on the immigrant struggles and showing solidarity with Afro-Latinxs, Central American immigrants, and others who aren’t as tokenized in the immigrant narrative as Mexicans are.
“I feel like the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been able to explore my heritage, or where I come from, in my art,” Rebel Betty says. “I didn’t necessarily, as someone living in the diaspora, have a full understanding of what it meant to be Puerto Rican on the mainland.”
