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“Womanism is to feminism
as purple is to lavender.”—Alice Walker
What do you see? I see Lake Street. What is Lake Street? Is it a
concrete road? Is it the cars, the trash, a broken clarinet? Is it the
crow’s crow or is it the crow that makes Lake Street Lake Street?
Here is a million dollars: How would you paint Lake Street?
I wanted to paint Lake Street. Mercado Central. I began by painting the
brightly colored walls, the windows, the doors, the exterior of the
building. And a man claiming to be Ronald Takaki said to me, “You forgot
to paint the people inside, their eyes, their hands, their hair being
braided. You forgot to paint how they are working in Minnesota in the
late 1800s. Can you see them after World War I in meat packing plants in
South Saint Paul? You forgot to paint the U.S. dollar and the mothers of
mothers of Mexican soldiers who fought in U.S. wars. What about the
border changing? What about the border lights? What about Taco Bell?
What about everything that came before Cortez? You forgot to paint their
gods. You forgot to paint their mathematicians and astrologers, their
medicine, their farmers and their families. There, they are praying and
giving birth. What about the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Olmecs, the birth
of the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars? And where may I ask is
God in your painting?
“You’re going to need a bigger canvas”, he said, “ and some red paint
because after the President ordered troops to ‘tame the wilderness’ and
push the Mexicans out of Texas in 1845, an American General admitted
that he and his troops ‘committed atrocities [that would] make heaven
weep and every American of Christian morals blush for his country.
Murder, robbery, and rape of mothers and daughters in the presence of
tied-up males of the families have been common all along the Rio
Grande.’
“After California was carved out of Mexico, Forty-niners flocked to the
gold rush state in search of wealth. Unlike miners who were given
citizenship, the Mexican and Chinese miners were charged an extra
‘foreign miners tax’. By 1870, the Chinese alone contributed more than
five million dollars to California in taxes. After the government
repealed this tax, they created the Chinese Exclusion Act—it’s really a
matter of giving with the left hand while taking with the right. Paint
the Chinese agricultural laborers organizing, protesting, and demanding
higher wages; and then you’ll need to paint the number of Mexican
agricultural laborers increasing and receiving lower wages than the
Chinese. The one thing the owners always feared was inter-racial
cooperation.
“It isn’t difficult to see: White America needed cheap labor after
slavery was abolished in 1865 to preserve their supervisor positions in
the caste. So in the South, African Americans became economic slaves
through Jim Crow, the convict-lease system, and the share cropping
system. Like African Americans, Mexicans worked as share-croppers and
were subjected to usury, which left them dependent upon a system that
kept them enslaved. This only happened after White ranchers were able to
buy the land from Mexican ranchers by manipulating tax laws and by
denying them access to loans. When the Mexican ranchers went broke, the
White ranchers bought their land for a real steal. Just as Nazis in
Germany manipulated laws so that everything in Auschwitz was legal,
America manipulated or broke laws for profit and for the preservation of
the caste; America governs by any means necessary but expects its
citizens and non-citizens to be ethical. And of course, this happened
after slaughter, broken treaties, and disease pushed Native Americans
onto reservations and out of the way of development. But that’s another
story.
“You’ll have to paint the Chinese laborers, too, and paint their wives
in China. Because unlike the Mexicans, most Chinese were not allowed to
bring their wives—if they did, how could the government convince them to
leave after they did so much of the most dangerous work excavating
mines, building the railroads, and clearing land for agriculture in the
Southwest?
“If you have any red left, you’ll need to paint ‘1890: Divide and
Conquer’ because by 1890 more layers to the caste were created as
European immigrants such as Jews, Italians, Irish and Poles needed to be
placed in the workforce. Like the influx of European immigrants, Mexican
immigrants came in hopes of escaping the injustice of usury, debt, and
the share cropping systems in their native lands. But unlike the Mexican
immigrants, White labor unions eventually protected the European
immigrants’ place in ‘skilled’ jobs and supervisor positions thus
contributing to America’s racially based caste system. In the 1920s a
Mexican worker said, ‘I have gone from one place to another working as a
laborer for I haven’t found anything else because the masons’ union
don’t want to admit Mexicans…But although I have worked as a laborer I
have always tried to learn everything that I could. I have worked in
cement, in a brick-yard, laying pipes...and have learned all that sort
of work, even how to make entrances and walks for a garage with an
incline. All that will do me some good in Mexico.’
“We haven’t even discussed the formation of Mexican workers’ unions or
their relationship to the U.S. government’s repatriation project that
sought to send Mexicans back to Mexico after the Great Depression in
order to create more jobs for White workers. White America wanted the
Chinese to leave after the work was done and they expected the Mexicans
to leave, too. But once the economy was restored White workers quickly
returned to supervisor positions and agents entered Mexico to bring back
a labor force for the owners because “The White people won’t do the work
and they won’t live as the Mexicans do on beans and tortillas and in one
room shacks.” The agents brought more workers than they had jobs for,
and the surplus of unemployed non-citizens allowed owners to hire the
workers who would work for the lowest wage. Because Mexican men, unlike
the Chinese, often brought their wives and children, many found
themselves working for next-to-nothing to ensure that their children’s
stomachs were kept full. Mexican women workers frequently carried a baby
on their back while working in the fields during the day and would cook,
clean, and tend to their children at night. Finding a job was not as
easy as picking up a phone or driving a car back then—this made it
difficult for Mexican workers who wanted to look for a better living.
Those who did have cars were routinely pulled over by the police, who
would fine them and place them back at their jobs to work off their
newly acquired debt.
Like the South, schools in the Southwest were also segregated. While
some dedicated and caring teachers did their best to give young Mexicans
a decent education that could help them break through the caste order;
others used school to re-produce an obedient work force. A Texan farmer
claimed, ‘If every Mexican child has a high school education…who will
labor? They would make more desirable citizens if they would stop about
the seventh grade.’
“How can you stand on Lake Street without its history? Without the love,
commitment, hard work, and struggle of Mexicans and Mexican Americans,
this street and even you do not exist here.” And then he quoted Octavio
Paz, a Mexican poet who said, “All is presence. All of the centuries are
present in this moment.”
Here I am with a paintbrush in my hand. Building with Asha Taylor’s
article on Frida Kahlo, Kindred, and Emily Dikinson. I believe that we
are trying to see how people across time and place relate as we
individually and collectively create our reality. I want to paint
Frida’s husband, Diego Rivera. The media loves to say that men of color
cheat on their wives. And the recent Hollywood version of her life (that
almost cast Madonna or JLo as Frida Kahlo) depicts Diego as a no-good
adulterer who loves to paint nude women -- including his wife’s sister.
But what don’t we see in this Selma Hayek film and in some of the
biographies that frame her life?
My eyes can only see so far, but I went to Mexico and saw many of
Diego’s murals and spoke with some Mexicans about the murals. Diego
didn’t start out painting murals. In 1906 he received money to study art
in Spain where he learned to paint portraits of the wealthy, bowls of
fruit, landscapes, virgins, and saints. He learned fresco and cubism.
But I saw these paintings and felt that his painting was painting his
painting, not his heart.
But when Diego returned from Europe and joined with other muralists such
as Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfero Siqueiros to support the
Revolution in the 1920s, he was not in the mood for bowls of fruit in
Spain, instead he exclaimed, “I want the murals to be a mirror of
Mexican life. I believe we need a revolutionary art that speaks to and
about the reality of our country.” Indeed, he believed that art does not
exist for art’s sake, but rather to create social and political change.
And did you know that he and other Mexican muralists went to Harlem in
the 1930s and worked with African American artists? There is a Rivera
mural in the Ford plant in Detroit.
Can you imagine the White House covered with murals, pictures of the
Pope with a bag of gold, images of prostitutes, pickpockets, and slave
labor, images of Aztec civilization coloring the White House walls? In
Mexico, it is so. Murals cover the walls of government buildings,
churches, libraries, universities, and museums, too. Rivera paints
grotesque pictures of skeletons dressed in rich clothes. He shows our
greed, war, and death, and offers ideas of how we can survive together
through cooperation in this modern industrial world. He paints the
soldier, the field worker, and the factory worker united. The field
workers wear sombreros that halo over their heads. He shows Mexicans
building community, cooperating, working, cooking, protecting each
another, men, women, children, and elders. The people he paints are
standing in places: factories, cornfields, ancient pyramids, parks,
street scenes, battlefields, rich people’s parties, revolutions, and
family dinners. In his paintings men help women and women help men carry
large burdens on their backs: baskets full of calla lilies.
In the middle of Figure 1 a baby is bundled on its mother’s back. The
baby is the hope; the baby is the future. But, next to the baby’s head
is a slaughtered pig. How is the baby like the pig? Once you can imagine
how a baby is like a slaughtered pig, can you imagine how those men in
the background are hanging from trees? What makes slave labor
thinkable—that man in the corner being branded or the ones who watch?
How is the brand related to those bags of gold? And why is a sword
pointed at the man who points the sword? Is the killer killed when the
killer kills? And up in the corner, that pregnant woman with a sword to
her belly and a bible to her ear—is it Jesus she’s being given or is it
a sword she is being asked to swallow?
What is the relationship between how we think abut time and how we think
about the woman? These murals that show how things across time and place
relate—that show that things do not exist in isolation—are these murals
not a womanist statement?
It is true that Rivera painted a nude picture of Kahlo’s sister and they
say that he slept with her, too. Should we not see that he paints Frida
as a revolutionary leader, in the center of one of his murals, just as
she paints his face in the center of her forehead? Should we forget that
he painted Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 16th Century Mexican nun and
intellectual who rebelled against the Catholic Church through her
reading and writing, her poetry and philosophy? She, like the woman who
is teaching (Fig. 2) fought for women’s rights to read, write, think,
and teach. Many see her rebellion as a catalyst for modern womanist
movements. She is one of many characters he portrays in his murals, his
histories, his five-hundred year maps—some going back much further than
that. Reading them is like reading Octavio Paz, who reminds us that
things do not exist in isolation. Everything, all of the centuries are
here, they are all part of this moment. What do you see?
Here is a million dollars: How would you paint Lake Street? |
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