The emotional experience of living as an immigrant is one of the hardest things to put into words, but sometimes easier to depict through art. Alberto Ledesma, an educator, activist and former undocumented student, uses graphic storytelling as a teaching tool to document the fears and hopes of the undocumented.

As a “practitioner of the doodle,” Ledesma’s Diary of a Dreamer tells immigrant stories with a style that bounces between loose-leaf sketches of awkward cultural clashes, and cerebral explorations of  the social fissures of identity, youth and liminality.

–Michelle Chen

Diary of a Dreamer

Alberto Ledesma

It was in the midst of a midterm I was administering at University of California at Berkeley two summers ago that I came up with the idea of writing and drawing my Diary of a Dreamer. The term was almost over and I still wanted to lecture about the emergent immigrant student movement and their pursuit of the Dream Act, especially given that I, too, had been an undocumented undergrad in the late 1980s. I considered sharing some of the stories, essays, and poems I had published about my experience. But there was so little time left left in the term and there was still so much else to cover. How could I get the students interested in what was happening without asking them to read so much? As the students finished their exams I scribbled on the back of my notebook a quick sketch about my dilemma. And then it hit me, why not use visual vignettes to convey the teachable points I was trying to make? Thus was born Diary of a Dreamer.

As an artist, I have long been a practitioner of the doodle. Comic books were the main tools with which I learned American culture when I was a an undocumented immigrant kid living in East Oakland. Now, they are what influence my art. That, and a compulsion to dig deeply into what the undocumented immigrant student story has entailed for me over all these years.

You can read more about Ledesma’s own experience as an immigrant father at New America Media. 

From BET, an interview with Marybeth Onyeukwu, who came as a toddler from Nigeria and now lives “at the intersection of the black experience and immigration.”

To learn more about that intersection and how communities are confronting and working within it, check out the Color of Change’s campaign to demand immigration reform that addresses police abuse, racial profiling, and the insidious efforts in Washington to “pit Black and brown communities against each other and use divide-and-conquer power politics to continue pushing decades of failed policy that harms us all.”

Also read Aziz Rana’s piece on the intersection of the black and immigrant communities and their shared struggles for rights and justice.

A short video about, by and for undocumented youth on “the cost of failed immigration policies and the need for comprehensive, more humane immigration reform.”

Created by Hunter College’s Amnesty International + DREAM Team at Hunter College for Campus MovieFest.

Creators:
Angel Sutjipto – Captain
Rachel T. Zamora – Participant
Abraham Gutman – Participant

For more information, visit www.campusmoviefest.com

A review of State out of the Union by Jeff Biggers, originally published in the February 2013 issue of The Progressive.

Arizona holds a curious place in America’s public imagination. Recent media headlines out of the state depict witch hunts of ethnic studies teachers, military-style crackdowns on Latino immigrants, and a Tea Partier ethos that lies somewhere between Remember the Alamo and Morning in America. Frightening yet comical.

The title of Jeff Biggers’s sweeping chronicle of Arizona, State Out of the Union, fittingly evokes Lincoln’s ominous words at the outset of the Civil War. Best known for his reporting on Appalachian coal country, Biggers reveals an Arizona that is a cesspool of  dysfunctional politics, where guns are turned on public officials and immigrants are hunted as fugitives. He also illuminates a segregated cultural landscape strafed by strip malls and vestiges of Manifest Destiny.

Biggers draws on interviews, blog posts, historical texts, and media reports to construct a conversation across communities,  languages, and heritages. The temporal leaps often make the chronology difficult to follow, since the compression of anecdotes spanning three centuries within a few pages sometimes seems strained. But the structural discombobulation reflects Arizona’s tortuous plotline.

While the media relish the bizarre and often paranoid antics of hard-right Arizonan politicians, the state has an equally powerful tradition of grassroots progressive movements. In fact, Biggers points out that for every community of evangelical zealots or border militants, there are organizations and movements that find creative ways of defending democracy and cultural pluralism.

Arizona was a rogue state before it even joined the union. During the territory’s infancy in the mid-nineteenth century, Arizonans were embroiled in power struggles that anticipated future tension over local autonomy, racial politics, corporate plundering of natural resources, and the exploitation of migrants.

In the early days, Arizonan pioneers, who included embattled Mormons and white ethnic laborers, confronted and bristled at powerful “outsiders,” including carpetbagger politicians and absentee corporate bosses. But the most vicious backlash was reserved for indigenous people and Mexican Americans, whom many white settlers periodically demonized as aliens or invaders of their God-given dominion. That sentiment has been echoed more recently in militant nativist movements such as the Minute Men border vigilantes.

Nonetheless, one hundred years ago, the state’s constitution was praised as a model of progressivism (and condemned for its socialist leanings). Its recall provision would prove scathingly effective at deposing unpopular politicians, most recently the far-right state senator Russell Pearce. In an interview I did with Biggers a few months ago, he remarked that Pearce’s defeat “reflected the political power of a new bipartisan movement that is fed up with such extremist policies and ready to take their organizational momentum into electoral politics.” The breakthrough of the Latino vote in November suggested that for Arizona and the nation, a real reckoning may yet be on the horizon.

At the cusp of the twentieth century, clashes between Mexican American mine workers and industry behemoths portended the immigration debate today, which is, at its core, about the exploitation of an “illegal” underclass. Biggers notes that in Clifton in 1903, “The future state’s first and defining major labor rebellion was ‘Mexican made’ ”—a major uprising led by a multiracial coalition of non-unionized Latino and Italian immigrant mine workers.

Today, cross-racial organizing has again helped stave off a new anti-immigrant crackdown, with immigrants’ rights becoming an issue of racial and economic justice. As legendary activist and Representative John Lewis of Georgia put it, the oppression of Latino communities has made immigration “the new civil rights movement.”

I first met Biggers in Arizona in the fall of 2011, when he joined a delegation of artists and writers, hosted by an organization I work with, CultureStrike, that visited the U.S.-Mexico border to learn about immigration policy issues. At that point, the infamous SB 1070 bill had become national news and provoked a high-profile boycott of Arizona businesses. It had also energized efforts by conservatives in other states to pass various “copycat” anti-immigrant bills.

By the time State Out of the Union hit the bookstores this past fall, there had been a plot twist. Immigrant rights’ activists had campaigned successfully to force both mainstream Presidential candidates to give the previously moribund issue of immigration reform a second look. A grassroots movement for undocumented students seeking immigration relief, known as the DREAMers, had given the issue a new sympathetic face.

Biggers follows the trajectory of the immigration debate by tracking the controversy surrounding SB 1070, a law enacted in 2010 that opened the door for rampant racial profiling and criminalization of undocumented immigrants. It was initially a hit with conservative ideologues who hoped to make Arizona “the ground zero of illegal immigration,” in the words of one of the political advisers behind the law, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer seized on SB 1070 as an opportunity to brand her otherwise unremarkable political career. Her posturing against Washington’s supposed assault on “states’ rights” evoked Arizona’s tradition of bridling against federal authority. “That fight over states’ rights never ended,” Biggers argues, though in practice it’s absurdly unrealistic; Arizona’s budget is utterly dependent on federal spending. But there was money behind the bill, too. The private prison lobby, writes Biggers, stood to profit from the mass incarceration of people who, while posing no actual threat to public safety, would be easily roped into the immigration-enforcement dragnet.

Another champion of the legislation was the American Legislative Exchange Council, the shadowy state-level rightwing think tank. Nonetheless, SB 1070—which was partially suspended by the Supreme Court—provided progressives a platform for challenging the rabid racism looming over the statehouse.

Biggers depicts the activists, bloggers, and educators who formed a powerful coalition to oppose SB 1070 and the state’s celebrity sheriff, the famously bigoted Joe Arpaio. Biggers compares the grassroots, multiethnic mobilization to the movement spurred by Arizona-born César Chávez, who decades earlier had built a human rights campaign around some of the country’s most profoundly disenfranchised workers.

The same energy has fueled a new generation of young Arizonan rebels. As the battle over SB 1070 intensified, students created a parallel youth movement aimed at defending the Tucson school district’s ethnic studies program. The Mexican American studies curriculum had been hailed as an innovative approach to the humanities, focusing on socially conscious texts ranging from The Tempest to Rethinking Columbus. The program’s students had a consistent track record of academic performance that defied the statistics for “at risk” Latino youth. State officials vilified ethnic studies as radical propaganda and moved to shut it down, removing the books from schools.

Students responded with protests, walkouts, and sit-ins. Their direct actions gained national attention when they enlisted some of the censored writers in a campaign to restore Tucson’s “banned books.” Putting their lessons into practice, the kids demonstrated that, with or without their books, they could teach their communities by example, as living embodiments of a rebel history.

Biggers’s lesson for his readers is that throughout its century of turmoil, Arizona’s cycles of conflict move in a progressive trajectory. While many political movements have put down roots in the state, the paths their struggles collectively blaze for the country ultimately point toward emancipation. While the state’s rightwingers hole themselves up in a bygone era, they’re becoming steadily eclipsed by more enlightened students of the past, who learn from history in order to make it.

Read an interview with author Jeff Biggers.

At Dreamers Adrift, a multimedia project focused on the stories of undocumented youth, Yosimar Reyes reflects on the evolving definition of his identity as a migrant, an undocumented aspiring American, a grandson separated from an older generation of border-crossers and yet sharing their struggle. This narrative is not the triumphant immigrant “striver” story you hear in the news. Rather, it’s an expression of the ambivalence of having to live in a constant state of displacement, liminality, and becoming–all the while in search of “a place more beautiful than this.”

“We were more than the lack of a social security number,” is one rebuttal to hateful rhetoric, but the deeper question youth activists must wrestle with now is, “Who are we, then?”

–Michelle Chen

Pete Yahnke Railand, Justseeds Artists' Cooperative (migrationnow.com)

On a recent Friday in the nation’s capital, visitors to the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and other white-walled centers of global power dotting the National Mall stood beneath sunny autumn skies papered with colorful dreams. Literally. Thanks to a collaboration between artists and DREAM Act activists (aka “DREAMers”), images of faces representing millions of undocumented youth gleamed on kites in the upper echelons of Washington. Their stories have come to the forefront of a national immigration debate that, until recently, excluded them.

Writing in the same unequivocal tone that forced President Obama to grant DREAMers a temporary, but historic, stay of deportation, the organizers of the Dream Kites project declared its simple objective: “to highlight a flawed system and request that we turn our attention onto the current state of inadequate immigration reform.” With the help of artist Miguel Luciano and Culture Strike, an organization bringing artists and activists together in the U.S. immigration debate, images of Dream Kites glided onto the front page of the Washington Post, along with the stories behind them.

The kite action reflects how the wings of artistic and political imagination are helping the immigrant rights movement grow beyond the multimillion-dollar policy designs of national immigrant rights groups. The latter have remained largely uncritical of President Obama, even as he has deported 1.4 million immigrants (including many DREAMers), a record for a single term in office. On the eve of another national debate about immigration reform, artist-enabled people power has found new ways to soar above the money-enabled Powers from Above.

My current understanding of the role of culture and cultural workers in immigrant rights and other social movements has its roots in Latin America, the source of most human and butterfly migration to the U.S. It was in El Salvador—the tropical, forested land of my parents—that, after graduating college, I first came to know the Tree of the (Cultural) Knowledge of Good and Evil. Slowly, my time in El Salvador withered away my former college radical’s cold aversion to protest songs, to poetry, to the delicate stencils of the talleres culturales (“cultural workshops”) there as no more than the work of revolucionarios de escritorio (“desktop revolutionaries”). I developed an altogether different sense of the political and the cultural—and the transformative, silken space between them. I learned how words could be liberating, but also dangerous. After government, media or right-wing civil society groups eviscerated the humanity of nuns, priests, peasants or students by labeling them comunistas or subversivos, they sometimes ended up being persecuted or killed.

Cesar Maxit, 2011

Cultural struggles to preserve, protect and promote the humanity of all—like those of the butterfly-bearing activists—have been and remain paramount to disrupting the violence of state and non-state actors: psychological violence, physical violence and the violence of bad policy. In the face of such abuse, artists have often been the earliest adopters of the call by rights activists to see immigrants for what they are: human. It was novelist and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a conservative, who gave the Central American refugee movement what became the international slogan of immigrant rights: “No Human Being Is Illegal.” Since he spoke these words, more left-leaning artists have reproduced “No Human Being Is Illegal” and other pro-migrant memes and messages in rap lyrics, digital images, t-shirts, posters, poems, films, chalk drawings and many other media.

Some 25 years and several local, national and global campaigns after I made the “hard” distinction between the “concrete” work of “real” political organizing and what I saw as the more ancillary work of artists, creative interventions like the kite action have turned me into a cultural believer. Of special note is the symbol of the butterfly, a new face for the immigrant rights movement. As a bearer of beauty symbolizing the life force (the Greek word for butterfly is “Psyche,” also meaning “soul”), the butterfly appeals to everyone’s humanity at a time when the dehumanization of immigrants fuels multimillion-dollar industries in lobbying, media, electoral politics, prison construction, border and other security industries.

I recently witnessed the symbolic flight of the political butterfly during a misty exam week at UC Berkeley. Students rushing in and out of the Life Sciences building were momentarily startled out of their concentration by an image of a blue and white butterfly with the word “MIGRANT,” and the phrases “All Humans Have a Right to Migrate” and “All Migrants Have Human Rights,” drawn in chalk. “Don’t step on it! It’s art,” said one student to her classmates. Another student, a 20-year-old political science major named Andrea Lahey, said: “You can’t really argue with the message because being human is not controversial—we’re all human.” Hours later, the DREAMer butterfly was washed away by evening rain. But, like the colored dust left by the pollen-covered wings of a butterfly, the DREAMers’ image had already made its mark, turning the prosaic activity of walking to and from science class into a poetico-political act.

Photo by Roberto Lovato.

Forcing the country to face social issues through cultural interventions is especially critical for a grassroots U.S. immigrant rights movement, given that none of the “leaders” of the Washington-based immigrant rights groups with national media clout is an immigrant. That’s right: none. This is one reason why it is so important to stage protests with powerful images of immigrants and symbols of migration: for example, displaying digitized DREAMer posters that depict butterflies yelling “Our Voices Will Not Go Unheard” into a megaphone, or more directly, getting undocumented writer José Antonio Vargas, undocumented artist Julio Salgado and other DREAMers on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “We Are Americans.”

Artists will need precisely this kind of political imagination to confront the extraordinary and unprecedented challenges facing immigrants. By working together, artists and activists have exposed Barack Obama as the worst U.S. president ever in terms of persecuting, jailing and deporting—and, I would argue, terrorizing—mostly innocent immigrants, including children. Washington-based artist César Maxit’s powerful image of a sinister-looking Obama accompanying the message “1,000,000 Deportations. Ya Basta! No More! Obama: Stop the Deportations” took big risks that paid off. The image became iconic, appearing in national newscasts, mass protests, online videos and other media as it went viral, despite disapproval from Obama’s powerful allies within the immigrant rights movement. In the process of putting potent and uncompromising images before the public, DREAMer and other immigrant activists and artists have redefined the relationship between Latinos and both major parties.

As we enter a super storm of intersecting and rapidly growing global crises—economic decline, food shortages, climate change, etc.—that are leading migrants to embark on their often-breathtaking journeys, the truth-telling work of artists and cultural activists has taken a definitive turn. Foregrounding immigrant beauty, immigrant freedom and immigrant solidarity in order to disarticulate the myths manufactured by the anti-immigrant industries, as the Dream Kites and butterflies do, is still vitally important. But, because of the astonishing confluence and complexity of these crises, engaged artists must not only fight dehumanization but also craft a constructive path towards the social equilibrium necessary to decimate anti-immigrant hatred everywhere. Through the storm, the perilous flight to freedom continues.

Originally published on Creative Time Reports.

Hear our voices – Formerly detained children present at the UN from End Child Detention.

We like to think we do everything in our power to protect our children from harm. But for a particular community of children, the government has decided that these kids are the ones we need protection from–so they place them in detention, supposedly for their own good.

This video was produced by an international campaign to end child immigration detention. Arbitrary or unjust incarceration of children caught in the immigration system is a problem found not just in the U.S. but in many other destination countries for migrants) explores the complex and often psychologically devastating experiences of youth in immigration detention. As part of a presentation before the United Nations, formerly detained youth used art to tell their stories, expressing through visual media what they could not put into words, voicing the unspeakable through imaginative vision.

As one interviewee says as he displays photographs of desperate detainee children “And what have they committed wrong to be like this behind fences? They are still kids.”

There are many conversations going on around the country about society’s responsibility to protect the most innocent from tragedy, from mass shootings to child abuse, and how to balance rights with safety. The dialogue should also be conscious of the institutions that criminalize youth by design. Between the realm of innocence and protection, and the realm of violence and “security”, why do some children fall on one side of the line and not the other? Who draws the boundaries of that invisible cage?

–Michelle Chen

A description of the film from End Immigration Detention of Children:

“The world was dark for me. I felt broken. I felt I was nobody. In a detention centre you are so broken that you think you are nobody.”

“Hear our voices” was a creative presentation delivered by six youngsters with immigration detention experience in front of States, UN agencies and NGOs at the Day of General Discussion on September 28 2012. The script of the presentation is made up of the actual words of the participating youth with detention experience, which ranges from six weeks to six years. The theatre presentation is the result of a one week residential workshop in which the formerly detained children used creative art techniques to tell their stories.

During the Day, the Committee underlined that article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which also applies in migration situations and is legally binding for its 193 States parties, explicitly states that “no child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily” and the “arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”

Read more child immigrant detention stories on the group’s website.

Today, the longest-serving U.S. Senator, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, died at age 88.  For about half a century, Inouye broke new ground as a Japanese American in national politics. He also boldly spoke out about the injustices he experienced during World War II. Though he did volunteer with the military, and won distinction for his service, he was conscious of the deep and hypocritical mistreatment of Japanese Americans during the war.

In this video, he talks about the vilification of Japanese Americans, including both immigrants and native-born, as “enemy aliens,” which led to the internment of tens of thousands of civilians in concentration camps under horrific conditions. It was a massive human rights abuse for which the government did not even begin to atone until several decades later. “I was angered to realize that my government felt that I was disloyal, and part of the enemy,” he said, which steeled his commitment to demonstrate patriotism through military service. Inouye went on to establish himself as a liberal pillar of the Senate during the turbulence of Watergate Era, as well as a representative of the fraught duality of Nisei identity.

We live in a different world today, in which the military, immigrants’ struggles toward “becoming American,” and the ramifications of U.S. foreign policy are interwoven in increasingly complex and politically explosive ways.  But while our debates over U.S. militarism deepen, Inouye’s career remains a living embodiment of all those paradoxes: the extraordinary resilience of the Japanese American community, as well as the dangers inherent in the militarization of society, the passion for “American” ideals, and the ugly barbarism and inhumanity that war evokes, no matter how democratic a nation claims to be. And now it’s up to the newest generations of Americans to help bring reality and aspiration closer together.

Undocubus protesters demonstrating at the Democratic National Convention (Chandra Narcia via Facebook)

Immigration has been catapulted to the front lines of the presidential race in recent months, thanks to a groundswell of grassroots organizing, mass mobilization by a charismatic movement of undocumented youth, and high profile media coverage of some of the immigrant rights movement’s most dramatic struggles (not to mention its ugliest opponents). Add to that the changing complexion of the electorate, with the expansion of Latinos as a major voting bloc, culture wars over politically conscious public education, and the nationwide right-wing backlash that has spawned critical civil rights debates over fair elections and voter suppression.

Here are some dispatches from the pre-election political fray. Though the election may influence the dialogue or the prospects for certain policies, these issues will continue to burn long after November 6, no matter who gets elected.

CultureStriker Jeff Biggers, a longtime chronicler of Arizona politics and author of State Out of the Union, blogs about the browning of the American electorate in ground zero of the immigration battle:

When 20-year Phoenix resident and businesswoman Maria Maqueada turned in her emergency ballot today at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, thanks to the assertive efforts of Citizens for a Better Arizona, one more vote was cast in what observers are already calling a record Latino vote in Arizona.

Whether such a grassroots surge in the Latino vote will be able to overcome out-of-state contributions and Republican hijinks, including the latest report today on misleading robocalls to Arizona Democrats on polling stations by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Flake, a determined network of Latino and community groups galvanized by citizens fed up with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notorious reign and the state’s SB 1070 “papers, please” immigration policy has already shifted the political landscape in tomorrow’s election — and beyond.

The reversal of the Arizonification of America is in full force.

Meanwhile, Latino youth have led grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts, hoping that the community members who are fortunate enough to have the vote will champion immigrants’ rights issues on their behalf at the ballot box. Feet in Two Worlds describes a statewide mobilization across Arizona that stemmed from the public disgust over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notorious cruelty toward immigrant communities:

Outrage over Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s crackdowns on undocumented workers has spurred an energetic grassroots movement to oust him. Called “Adios Arpaio” or “goodbye Arpaio,” the movement has attracted hundreds of young people to knock on doors and register new voters.

According to Fernandez, many of the youth who started out by protesting the SB 1070 law have now transformed their activism into “greater civic engagement to provoke change.”

Team Awesome began as a group of young people in Phoenix going door-to-door to register voters on behalf of Daniel Valenzuela, a Latino candidate for the Phoenix City Council. Following Valenzuela’s election last year the group has gone statewide, increasing its membership and backing Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Richard Carmona, who is in a tight race against the Republican candidate Congressman Jeff Flake.

The multimedia advocacy network Cuéntame has produced a series of videos highlighting the many ingenious ways conservative politicians have militated to restrict ballot access, and what voters can do to protect their civil rights.

In the long run, Latinos, including vast numbers of immigrants as well as “second-generation” kids, are destined to become a critical pillar of the electorate. But sadly, activists are coming to the realization that the next president, regardless of which candidate enters the White House (to varying degrees, both Obama and Romney have taken dismal, draconian positions on immigration policy), will face fierce resistance in Congress toward meaningful immigration reform. But Feet in Two Worlds producer John Rudolph predicts that the right-wing obstruction won’t last as long as the population, and eventually, the political arena, continue to diversify:

Whatever the election’s outcome, immigrants, whether they are Hispanic or Asian, are vitally important to the future of both political parties. More and more candidates from immigrant communities are running for office and the ranks of immigrant voters are growing dramatically in states across the country. These are trends that the next president can’t afford to ignore. My guess is he won’t.

Months, years, even a generation of protests and advocacy may be needed before the white-dominated political establishment wakes up to the inevitabilities of demography and history. For now, the question that lies immediately before immigrant communities is whether policy changes will come too late for those who are everyday threatened with deportation and separation from their loved ones. The countless youth who have campaigned tirelessly for the DREAM Act for years have been both inspired and profoundly disappointed by the Obama presidency. Having won a limited temporary reprieve, their struggle now is merely to stay put in the only country they’ve ever called home.

Meanwhile, the most stunning irony behind all this election drama, of course, is that much of the debate centers on people who are by definition shut out of the electorate–non-citizens, undocumented workers and their children–people who are denied everyday the benefits of citizenship in a country that where they’ve worked, raised families, or in many cases, spent nearly their entire lives. If the role of immigrants in electoral politics this year has contributed anything, it’s the realization that the vote itself is not the locus of political power or mass mobilization.

The activists who boldly traversed the country in the Undocubus knew that, as people without papers, neither mainstream presidential candidate had a good reason to pay attention to their protests as he made his political calculations on the campaign trail. And yet there they were in the streets, making themselves heard, visible, and impossible to ignore. To be present in the political system isn’t an issue of checking off a box; it’s putting your body on the line. The language of resistance is recognized universally and understood globally, and well outside the polls and the legislative chambers, it still comes through loud and clear.

It is our right to know what we put inside our bodies. It’s our right to know WHAT we eat. We’re not just talking about looking at a restaurant menu or reading the nutritional values of your cereal.

We’re talking about knowing when we are eating foods that have been genetically modified (GMO). That is exactly what California’s Proposition 37 ballot initiative is aiming to do.

Julio Salgado

When something is genetically modified it means that it’s DNA has been altered. Much of the rest of the world – including Japan, Australia, the European Union and China – requires that GE foods be clearly labeled. GMO’s are about the corporate control of our food systems. The “Big 6” pesticide companies – Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Bayer AG, BASF & Syngenta – are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that YOU don’t know what is in your food, so that they can make higher profits from GMO foods.

According to the Pesticide Action Network, 99% of genetically engineered crops are designed to either contain an insecticide or go
through various applications of herbicides. Immigrant farm workers and rural communities are constantly at an increased health risk connected to their exposure to pesticide in the air, water and food.

The fight against GMOs is one that intersects with food justice, food security, migrant rights, worker rights, and climate change. That’s
why it’s an important issue for artists to take one. CultureStrikers Favianna Rodriguez, Oree Originol and Julio Salgado have created a series of posters making reference to the importance of GMO labeling.

Voice of Art, a YouTube art series, also followed street artists Nuclear Winter and Crevis as they wheat-paste their own Yes On Prop. 37 campaigns throughout the state.

Oree Originol

Favianna Rodriguez