Favianna Rodriguez: A Model of Engagement

Activist and artist Favianna Rodriquez. Photo: Hossam el-Hamalawy

In the early morning hours of May 30, 2009, Raul “Junior” Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, were shot and killed in their Arizona home. Raul’s wife, Gina Gonzales, was also wounded, but survived. Like many crimes committed against minorities in the United States, this ruthless attack, carried out by members of the anti-illegal immigration group Minutemen American Defense, went largely unreported by mainstream media.

In the midst of this mass silence, artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez chose to respond in the best way she knows how—with her artwork. The “Justice for Brisenia” poster was distributed as part of a campaign launched by Presente.org, a national online organizing network focused on Latinos that Rodriguez helped found in 2009.

Miss Rodriguez is truly one of the most inspiring artivists at work today, blending creative passion with community organizing and political action on a national scale. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rodriguez developed her craft under the tutelage of progressive artists within her community, including the former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas. Finding inspiration in the work of he and other artists like Malaquias Montoya, Ester Hernandez, and Rini Templeton, Rodriguez quickly learned to adapt her creative skill set to addressing issues of social and political significance.

“These were people witnessing climactic social times,” she says, “and they were making art to support those causes. They weren’t just spectators, they were participants in these movements, and working as artists closely along side these movements. This was a big influence to me.”

One issue that Rodriguez was eager to address early on was the lack of cultural spaces within her predominantly immigrant community.

“In my neighborhood, you would go blocks and blocks and not see any kind of cultural centers. And yet, you would go to more affluent neighborhoods—mostly white—and they would have theatres, and all kinds of places to interact with culture. But in my community, we didn’t have that.”

Faced with working in continued isolation, Rodriguez met with other artists of color, who together launched an initiative to secure state funding to support the purchase of a building and the establishment of a creative space for people of color. The EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) was established in 2000, and the EastSide Cultural Center opened its doors in the San Antonio district of Oakland in 2005, offering live/work space, studios, performance areas, and an education center.

Community is an integral part of Rodriguez’s mission and work.

“I’m participating as more than an artist; I’m very invested in the movement. I’m a woman of color. My parents were immigrants. Were it not for some of these fights being fought on the behalf of immigrants, my family would be in really bad shape. So, it’s not that I’m an artist that kind of parachutes in. The topics that I’m getting involved in, at the end, are going to improve my quality of life directly.”

Much like her poster for the “Justice for Brisenia” campaign, Rodriguez’s work often deals with issues of immigrant hate and abuse, in addition to broader topics of the social, cultural, and economic impacts of globalization. For example, her poster “Los Campesinos del Mundo Aplastaran La Globalizacion” features Korean farmer and activist Lee Kyung Hae, who died after stabbing himself in the heart during a protest at the 2003 World Trade Organization meeting in Mexico. In “Undocumented, Unafraid” and “We Can’t Wait, We Won’t Be Criminalized,” Rodriguez calls our attention to a campaign against Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which brought into law some of the strictest immigration legislation in the country and legalized racial profiling.

Images courtesy of the artist. © Favianna Rodriguez.

The representation of women of color and the redefining of strong, positive female role models is also of critical importance to Rodriguez. When training as an artist, she says became frustrated by the lack of female artists, especially female artists of color.

“Even with all of the role models that I had,” she says, “very few of them were women of color. In fact, most of them are men. And to this day, it’s hard to find women of color, so I’m very much aware of that.”

The one exception to this was Frida Khalo, though Rodriguez says she did not learn of her work until her late teens. As a result, Rodriguez has made it her personal mission to move women, and especially women of color, to the forefront of her work.

The women featured in Rodriguez’s work are strong and empowered, with fists punching holes in the sky and mouths emptying into megaphones. They are defiant, willful, and prepared to fight for their communities, and for other women. This year Rodriguez worked in collaboration with Syracuse Cultural Workers to design a poster in honor of International Women’s Day. The poster features a Latina organizer rallying a crowd, while a symbol of Mother Earth stands strongly behind her.

“People are so tired of seeing us in a negative light, that when you see us in a positive light or when you see us actually doing something empowering and not being exploited or dehumanized or objectified, it’s such a positive reinforcement.”

In addition to her own creative work, Rodriguez also regularly participates in speaking engagements, panel discussions, and youth training programs.

“I try to train youth—youth of color, immigrant youth, queer youth—so that they know that part of what we have to do is expand our field. So that when you have that young, five-year-old Latina girl who wants to be an artist, she can look at not just Frida, she can look at me; she can look at at least five or six other women that reflect where she wants to go.”

And Rodriguez is definitely a woman going places. She’s dedicating the next two years to work on a graphic novel about the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition, she is planning a new project aimed at mobilizing her fellow artists to create art that speaks to the country’s most critical social issues. Dubbed “The Art Strike, ” the project will take 30 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers to the most effected areas of the United States, including Arizona.

In a time when our cultural, economic, social and political apparatuses are in the clutches of profit-driven multi-national corporations, we are sorely in need of strong, creative, politically aware role models. Not just as artists, but as models of how we as people engage with each other and our communities. I know who I’ll be watching.

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