Season 3 Episode 9: Collective Force: Chicano Artists and the United Farm Workers

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Carlos Almarez: …walking down the path someone yelled out to me to, "Come back, come back." And I said, "Why?" He says, "César wants to talk to you. He said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "Well, I want to do a big banner, very political, very like a big political cartoon, blown up, so that people can see." We're talking about farmworkers who don't read, you know, they do read some Spanish but not a lot. I said, "Let's get a picture across to them of their own struggle." So César loved that.

Barbara Carrasco:  I saw myself as an integral part of the UFW and not—I didn't think that I should be given special treatment because I'm an artist.

Ester Hernandez: And she said it was really important for me to stay on that path because people need to know the diversity and complexity and the multidimensional sort of mujeres that we are. We're not just this one monolith.

Toby Reiter: Hello and welcome to ARTiculated, I’m Toby Reiter and I work as an Information Technology Specialist here at the Archives of American Art. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Art and activism often work hand in hand, making history and conditions visible while envisioning new futures. In this episode, we'll hear from three artists whose work has advanced Latino and labor activism in California. These three artists—Barbara Carrasco, Carlos Almaraz, and Ester Hernandez—all worked with the United Farm Workers, a national union of agricultural laborers that formed in the mid 1960s through the merger of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association. The murals, banners, prints, and graphics created by these artists helped to galvanize support for workers’ rights during strikes and negotiations as they drew attention to the human labor required to feed and supply a nation.

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Toby Reiter: Barbara Carrasco was born in El Paso, Texas in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles by 1960 with her family. She came into her own as an artist in the 1970s and 80s as she created striking graphics to serve communal causes. For decades, Carrasco worked closely with César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the leaders of United Farm Workers, and she recounted meeting Chávez and his empowering influence in her 1999 oral history with Jeffery Rangel:

Barbara Carrasco: See, during that period while I was a student at UCLA too, almost immediately I was—I was nineteen years old when I met César Chávez. He came to UCLA to give a speech. Seriously, I thought he epitomized what every good Catholic should be about because he was dedicating his entire life to bettering the lives of the most exploited workers in America, which are farm workers. And I immediately volunteered my services to him. I said, "I would like to do anything for you. I draw really well. If you want me to go on a picket line, I'll do that." And I had no idea that I would work with him for fifteen years. Really, seriously I didn't think I would do that all those years but I did.

Jeffery Rangel: So you met him at UCLA?

Barbara Carrasco: Yeah, I was nineteen years old when I met him. I just became a student there. I mean, I wasn't even a student. My boyfriend was there. I was still at West L.A. College. But I was always doing stuff on the campus. And I was part of the welcoming committee that welcomed him onto the campus. So that drawing for the announcement that he was going to speak, the flyer that was done announcing his speech, is at Stanford right now. But I did a little ink drawing of César and he signed it. So that's the only drawing that's in that Stanford collection.

Jeffery Rangel: Did your figurative principles come through on that? Were you able to render the essence of Chávez in that?

Barbara Carrasco: Oh yeah. It looks exactly like him. It looks exactly like him. Yeah, thank God. Because I really thought he was…I still think he was a really great person. So when I started working with César, and actually I started doing small banners, like ten by fourteen feet was the first one I did. And that was in 1979 when they did the small ones. Anyway, but then, initially César had asked me to consult with him on what kind of images I'd come up with for a banner, for a convention. And the banners were always for conventions. And then later I would do some small banners for like specific rallies or demonstrations or in front of supermarkets. They were always on canvas. They were always different types of canvasses and different weights. But I noticed that because the UFW was not an arts organization,

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they didn't really treat the artwork really well. They a lot of times ruined a lot of really great banners that Carlos had done and that Magu [Gilbert "Magu" Luján] had done, by folding them instead of rolling them up. And then they put them in these storage rooms that had a lot of moisture in the air.

Jeffery Rangel: So once a banner was used for a convention or a rally or something, would it ever be brought back out?

Barbara Carrasco: Yeah, for other events. They used them a lot. The same banner several times. But it's just that it was kind of sad to see the way they were being stored and taken care of. So I decided to—César had asked me to do a really huge banner for a conference one year. He wanted a thirty by thirty-foot banner done. And he gave me such short notice on it, I think it was two weeks notice, to do something big like that. But I said yes, of course to it because he's asking. I wasn't going to say, "No, César, I won't do that." But I designed...I decided to do it on vinyl instead of canvas because of the way they stored the work. And Carlos Almaraz had—I mean actually it was Rich Duardo who suggested that I use these inks that are really good for vinyl, Nasdar inks. They're kind of toxic actually. And so I had a former nun, which is really good because she—that “born to suffer” mentality is there! And I had several people—

Jeffery Rangel: [laughs] She helped you out?

Barbara Carrasco: She helped me out. We had like less than two weeks to do this big huge banner. And we finished it right on time.

Jeffery Rangel: Where was the convention?

Barbara Carrasco: It was in Salinas. Or Delano. Salinas or Delano. One of those places. And it was about César's five-year plan. So I sat down with him. He told me what he thought he...how he'd like to see the banners look and what kind of images he wanted in them. So we would go—we had such short time that I would use people who were in the UFW as my models. Like César's daughter posed for me. His daughter Lu, who's married to the present President, Artie Rodriguez. Anyway, I made her pregnant because César was talking about the future and about consumers. So I had her holding a can and then a letter from the UFW talking about what kind of pesticides might be in that product.

​Toby Reiter: Carrasco goes on to discuss the importance of the cultural worker within the labor movement, and how her own idea of serving the community evolved over time. In the late 1990s, Carrasco created a widely celebrated portrait of Dolores Huerta, the famed negotiator for United Farm Workers who coined the slogan "Si se puede.” That portrait now lives at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Barbara Carrasco: Everyone in the union, whether it's someone on the picket line or someone who's cooking for the people in the picket line, or someone who's typing the flyers for a particular event publicizing the event, all those people, all those different types of people, they're treated exactly the same way. So I saw myself as an integral part of the UFW and not—I didn't think that I should be given special treatment because I'm an artist. And I remember being really criticized by actually Magu, he really got on my case one time, and said "There's got to be a limit to how much...how badly you're treated." And even a lot of people would say, "Well, why don't they pay you? Why don't they do this?" But everybody...I saw myself as a cultural worker. And that's why I continued to work with them for so many years. Because I just respected what César was doing.

Jeffery Rangel: Because you're an artist. The idea of being a cultural worker—how did you come to see yourself in that role? And do you still see yourself in that role?

Barbara Carrasco: Well, I think I became aware of that when I...during my conversations with César Chávez because he would say—It was really great to have these meetings with him all the time. But one time he told me that he thought that he was an artist also. And I thought that was really strange. I said, "You're an artist, César?" And he goes, "Well, don't you think it takes a certain amount of creativity to get so many people to work for so little? For practically nothing?" And I thought that was so great. When he said that to me, I said, "Well, yeah, I guess so because that's true." Because what people are getting out of it is helping other people. It's just the idea of being of service to other people, to other human beings. And I told him that I thought that what I had initially thought of him

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as just a real good Catholic. That he was a good Catholic. And he thought that was—

Jeffery Rangel: Jesus was an artist too!

Barbara Carrasco: Yeah. And so I guess, you know, but now it's so different now because I'm not that same person anymore. I'm not—Even some students recently asked me if I still work for the UFW. And I haven't done that for a really long time because so many things have happened. I took time off to go to CalArts. And I told César before I went to CalArts—In 1990—I told him that he wouldn't see me for a couple of years while I worked on my MFA. And he said, "What do you mean?" And I go," I'm actually going to devote all the entire two years to doing a good MFA program." And I wasn't going to do what I did at UCLA as an undergrad which was be a student and then do a million other things on the side and compromise my GPA. I was going to just do that. That was all I was going to do. And he said, "Well, go for it, Barbara. I think that's great you're going to do that." And so, and I think the work that I'm doing now, I don't see it so much as a cultural worker as much as I feel like now I just want to document people that are real important in our community, like Dolores Huerta. I just finished doing a four-color silk screen print of her. Did you see it?

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Toby Reiter: Carlos Alamaraz was a profoundly influential artist, especially as a leader in the Chicano art movement. Born in Mexico City in 1941, Almaraz moved to Los Angeles with his family in the early 1950s. He developed a prolific career across prints, paintings, and murals with raucous images of urban life including freeways, car crashes, and crowds of city characters.

He was a founding member of Los Four, a vital artistic collective in Los Angeles, and he was significantly involved with the United Farmworkers and César Chavez, which he recounts in his 1987 oral history with Margarita Nieto:

Carlos Almaraz: …casually suggested I should meet César Chavez. So I said, "Well, that's good. I'll do that." Within 24 hours I was in front of César Chavez. He's a hard man to know, hard man to get to meet. But I was astounded at myself for realizing that if you want something you have to go out and get it. You do it. Or you don't. So within 24 hours—and the way that was managed is that I left San Juan Battista, I drove down to La Paz, first to Delano. He was no longer there. They told me where he would be, I made a phone call, was introduced to the editor of [El Malcriado], which was Venustiano Orgin.

I said I want to do volunteer work for the farmworkers, and since I had done work in journalism before, I would like to do it for the union. I understood they had a newspaper. He said, "Fine, come on down. We'll meet you." I did, I went down, he met me, he liked me, and he said, "We're having a meeting with César right now concerning the 1972 convention that we're all going to be working on. Why don't you join us?" So I did. He led me into the big hall at the administration building in La Paz, and, as I say, within 24 hours I was in front of the man himself. And when it was time to speak on so-called decorations, they turned to me and I gave my announcement of what I had suggested to do, which is to paint a big banner, a la Diego Rivera, you know, some of the other Mexican painters, muralists. Well, César loved the idea. And he said, "However, we're not going to be ready to talk about decorations till later."

So I was a little insulted because he referred to my mural as decorations. So we left the meeting early. And I left it rather abruptly, because as we were walking down the path someone yelled out to me to, "Come back, come back." And I said, "Why?" He says, "César wants to talk to you. He wants to talk now about the decorations." [laughs] So we went back and sure enough, he said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "Well, I want to do a big banner, very political, very like a big political cartoon, blown up, so that people can see." We're talking about farmworkers who don't read, you know, they do read some Spanish but not a lot. I said, "Let's get a picture across to them of their own struggle." So César loved that, and he said, "Great. What do you need." And I told him what I needed. He says, "Well, we don't have any money, so I don't know if we can do it." So he left it at that.

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Then I stayed with the farmworkers, worked on El Macriado for the next week or so, then César came back to the office one day, and said, "Well, how much do you really need to do this banner?" And I told him I needed about $300 and some paint. So he got me some of the money for the banner, and then I went out myself and got a volunteer donation for the paint. And then we started, with the help of Mark Brian, we painted an enormous 64- by 32-foot banner, political cartoon, on this big piece of canvas. They rolled it up and for the convention, they rolled it out and hung it up on the wall, and it looked great, you know.

Margarita Nieto: Is it still in existence?

Carlos Almaraz: I don't know. I assume it is, but it's probably in real bad condition, because it was done with acrylic paint, and acrylic paint becomes moldy, and canvas rolled up, even anywhere, can become pretty moldy. It was later shown, and it's astounding to me, because I had never done that piece for any kind of museum recognition or any of the so-called high-art recognition. But it was shown two years later at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, Wilshire Boulevard, at one of my shows.

Toby Reiter:  Almaraz worked for the Union while he was in graduate school in California, and he talked about the friction between those two institutions during his development as an artist, as well as the rich history of muralism in Mexico and the United States that he learned along the way:

Margarita Nieto: ...[relation] ship was there between the work that you were doing with César Chavez and the United Farmworker's Union and the work you were doing at Otis/Parsons and working toward your master's degree.

Carlos Almaraz: Well, there was a tremendous clash there. And if it hadn't been for the sympathy and understanding of one teacher, Joe Mugnaini, who understood my politics and what I had to go through to come up with something new and different, I don't think I would have made it through the school. I presented the political banner that I did for the farmworkers as one of my presentations. You do a presentation every few months. I hung it on the outside of one of the buildings, and there it was, the neo-social-realistic painting of the farmworker's struggle. During a period of cerebral contemplation of art that was known as minimal art, or conceptual art. This is what all the students were doing. Well, it was totally offensive to the sensibility of the school, I heard through the grapevine. However, upfront, I received my degree and things went on. But the thing with me during that period is that although I was leaving the school and working for the farmworkers and had photos and work to show that I was working, I was far out- and I knew it distanced most of my colleagues at school. I was a little older than they were. I had more experience. I'd already lived in New York, I had returned, and my work there was tons of it. I was, and am still, tremendously prolific. So not only had I produced a 64-foot banner, I had done lots of, oh, paper on gouache, enormous murals on paper, I had portfolios of pastel drawings, I had, you know, an abundance of work. So no way could they really criticize me for not sticking to the rules. I had gone beyond the rules. I felt pretty confident in that.

Margarita Nieto: But that also belies another theory that's current among historians right now, and that is that the muralist in Los Angeles was a street artists' movement.

Carlos Almaraz: Well, yes it was, I think. It was not a muralist movement of the twenties and thirties in Mexico where you had the state actually supporting the murals.

Margarita Nieto: Right.

Carlos Almaraz: You did not have the institutions say of New York in the teens or in the thirties the WPA, who were also paying for murals. No, this was being originally sponsored by community groups, community organizations. My part was through the United Farmworkers, who sponsored some of this, not doing really much, giving me perhaps some money or some paint or some material. But mostly going out right to the community itself and asking for donations to do a piece of work. The first murals, there was no real salary. You got a tiny stipend, but there was no real salary. My first mural was totally free, in that I didn't get a penny, not even the Farmworkers gave me money for their first mural in the street. They didn't have it; they couldn't afford it. But the idea picked up that the struggle. . . To do a mural [as a popular statement means that] you need a cause. So there were several bandwagons you could get on: Farmworkers, the feminist cause, the cause to liberate certain groups of people, et cetera. Or the cause just to be an individual, to make that statement. So you kind of can break down the murals into these categories.

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Margarita Nieto: But you needed a collective force behind it.

Carlos Almaraz: Right. Plus at times you needed the collective money that a force like that could give you, to get your mural done. But I think ultimately most of the murals were paid through community money that had been used to redevelop a certain area, but this was only after 1975. Prior to that it was willy-nilly; wherever you can get some money for the mural, do it. And the artists were doing some crazy things to get some money to do a mural. Because that was the name of the game. Everybody especially on the east side everybody wanted to paint a mural. Now that movement has really subsided. There are still a few murals being done, but not the way it was being done in the seventies. That was a heyday for it, and it, as I say, it was the tail end of a national movement that started way back in the late sixties.

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Toby Reiter: Ester Hernandez is an artist, printmaker, and activist based in San Francisco, California. She was born in 1944 in the San Joaquin Valley as part of a family and community of agricultural workers. Throughout her work, Hernandez honors women’s contributions to culture, which she often highlights through savvy humor or sharp irony.

In her 2021 oral history with Melissa San Miguel, Hernandez described her early immersion in the arts and her first encounters with activism:

Ester Hernandez: The Mexican culture, like so many other cultures, we come from thousands of years of our traditions. So in between all the hard work and what have you, there was always time for self-expression. And it took so many different forms.

So I was totally surrounded by the arts. It sort of gave meaning to our lives. And my grandmother did this, like, embroidery that had like thousands of years of tradition wonderful gardening. And she was a magnificent dancer of folk music—Mexican folk—and she could also do the jitterbug or whatever.

My grandfather—maternal side—he was a master carpenter in Mexico. So when he came here, he built many houses as well as other structures. But also in his spare time, he created sculptures, religious and otherwise.

So my father's side—the Yaqui side— they were musicians and dancers also. So—and my father was into photography. So—but there was always time for a dance. Even if we worked 10 hours in the field or whatever, we'd come home and get dressed and—and go dance.

And even when we were in the fields, we were singing—and trying to make the best of very hard moments—singing and somebody maybe reciting a poem—or a passage from the Bible. There was all kinds of things—jokes, storytelling, and the magnificent storytelling, especially by the elders who had come from Mexico, talking about the revolution and what they experienced and their feelings about being here in the United States. So it's a very, very rich environment for a young—child—with a very—big imagination.

And I was doing a little bit of junior college in the area. And I was studying, like, business, because that's what we were forced to do, and art at the same time. And I have to say, the business skills really helped me [laughs] later on when I had to learn the business of art.

But anyway, so I was in school. And the farm workers were really becoming visible and becoming controversial. My father was one of the first people in our little barrio to join the union. And so—but there was a lot of fear among some people: communism, anti-Christ, the whole bit. But in general, most of us were supportive of it, union.

And so again, a very transformative time in that period of my life was the farm workers when they were making their famous pilgrimage to Sacramento

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where they were marching from Delano. And they marched to Sacramento, I think, to be there on Easter Sunday. It was something like that—so long ago.

But they came through my little hometown. They marched. And we—there was all kinds of—the newspapers, the TV, everything, the radio was pretty much telling us to stay away, because they were just a bunch of outside agitators—troublemakers, right? But that didn't stop us.

But the streets, the highways that—it was—they were marching to the little country roads. And they were coming down those little highways. And they were leading into our little town. And the streets were lined with Highway Patrol, marshals, FBI, state police, city police, everything. And they even had dogs, okay?

Okay? We went anyway. We went anyway. And we welcomed them. And then we had this great big sort of celebration at a little park in my hometown. And there were speeches and all of that.

But to me, that the one thing being the artist was—that seeing the Teatro Campesino. It was the first time in my life that I had ever seen artwork being used for social justice. They had—they were singing. They were dancing. They were doing theater. They were doing poetry.

And more for me, they had, like, all of these port—what I would call portable murals and banners. And they were always changing them around and this and that. It was a backdrop and all of that. So for me, I had never seen anything like that in my life. None of us had.

So that really stayed with me in terms of—probably giving me some sense of where I might fit in that world and in the civil rights, the Chicano civil rights movement, that was later to become, like, so much a part of my life.

I was fortunate that the first people that I met sort of connected me up right away with a college that was sort of super radical called Grove Street. It was very short-lived. It no longer exists.

But it was a school that was filled with a lot of social activism. And kind of the heart and soul of it were murals and printmaking. So I had this, this sort of natural—flow and connection into that community. Mm-hmm. I kind of found my place. Let's put it that way.

It kind of gave me my visual voice when I met up with muralism and being told at that point from people like Malaquías Montoya and other people that the murals and screen prints were very powerful, because then even as in now, we had no control of the media. We had no foot in the media. And so with murals, aside from our own personal work, we could create work that was public and talk about all kinds of issues or just to beautify our communities.

And with screen printing, it was another way to disseminate like, visual imagery and to share knowledge announce events of sorts, and again, to beautify our community. So that works like another medium—yeah—to share with a bigger community that didn't need a lot of money, that didn't need a lot of fancy equipment. Mm-hmm. So that's kind of what happened in terms of how—and then from there I just moved on to other colleges and universities eventually.

Toby Reiter: Sun Mad is one of Hernandez’s most recognizable works, and it encapsulates many of her artistic concerns. In the print, Hernandez has desiccated the eponymous Sun Maid of the California-based raisin brand into a skeleton, the bold-colored branding now bears the words “unnaturally grown” in reference to the industrial chemicals used in agriculture that endangered workers.

Toby Reiter: She talked about the inspiration behind the iconic parody:

Ester Hernandez: Well, I have to say that my Sun Mad was inspired by my mother. In 1979, I went to go visit my mom. And it was—in the San Joaquin valley in the summertime, it's like 110 degrees, et cetera. It's just brutal.

And I went—in the little house that my mother lived in, the little house I was raised in—made by my grandparents and my uncles and my father—in Chinatown—um, she was boiling water. And I couldn't think about boiling water. I've never seen her do that.

Well, it turned out, as she explained, that the water table in the little—in the barrio—had been contaminated. And it turned out from some research that had been done with some students from UC Berkeley

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that it had been contaminated with all of the chemicals that had been used, like, for, just—generations or, just—a long time—all the chemicals in the farming—the agribusiness around us—it had seeped into the water table.

As a result, the water table was shut down. So there was no water available at that point. You had to either buy it or boil it or—filter it in some way or another. And at that point, most people—what, filtering?—or bottled water was not even common, then, so much. So she was boiling water.

So she told me that story. And needless to say, I was horrified, because one of the reasons I seemed to be going back and forth so much was—was relatives who—who were suffering from cancer or dying from cancer.

So anyway, needless to say I mentally—I made this connection with the contamination of the water table and our being farm workers, all our lives—and that we were drinking it, we are bathing in it, we're—our life—we were totally enveloped in it—from the field: there was no way we were getting away from it.

So anyway, so I had these talks with my mother about that and all of that. And I still didn't know—I was really bothered. I didn't know what to do with it, what I was going to do. Like what most people were doing in that area, including the city governments and the state government is just to ignore it. We're just going to lower the standard and turn the water back on. That's what happened,—even to this day, I think.

Anyway, so—but I continued my dialogue with my mother. And—another time I was going to visit her again. And when I was driving down the little country roads—because it's surrounded by great fields, that whole area—most of the work we did was related to the raisin industry, picking the grapes, laying them out in the middle of the fields to dry—so, anyway—so driving down that road and I saw the Sun Maid—it was like a poster of the Sun Maid. Because it's really a cooperative of farmers who—they raise the grapes, and then they turn into raisins, and they send them to this cooperative where they're processed.

When I saw the Sun Maid—because in my back of my mind was still the water, the contamination of the land—I saw the Sun Maid. And I thought, there it is. There it is, okay?

And one of the things that I had always learned about my mom and my dad was kind of the dualities of nature—the dualities—not only the passing of time, the transitory nature, but—the duality. And I think those are very Mexican. They're a very Indigenous lot.

So anyway, so my mind started thinking about, What is the other side of—what is her other side? What is the other side of this story? And so that's kind of how I started sort of—in my mind—transforming her to tell the story about what was going on with her.

And I had numerous dialogues with my mother about this. And all the way through it she was supportive of me and really thought that I should tell the story, even though—even though, even to this day—my Sun Mad, which has been shown all over the world, published a million times in the Smithsonian, blah, blah, blah, has never been shown in that part of the San Joaquin Valley where I'm from. It's always been censored—when any—any time anybody's tried to put it in a little exhibit in some little town out that way or bigger city, it's always been censored.

But anyway, they stood behind me even though it's extremely controversial over there—even among the farm workers, because it shakes the ground of their well-being, of their lives. They're dependent on that type of work. So having that image around is just way too controversial.

Toby Reiter: Hernandez was a member of Las Mujeres Muralisas, an artist collective founded during the 1970s in San Francisco that focused on creating large-scale works that honored Latina women. She delves into that group dynamic and the histories they brought together, as well as the trajectory of public engagement and awareness that she's witnessed over her long career and her hopes for the future:

Ester Hernandez: Well, like I mentioned earlier, the printmaking and muralism were part of the Chicano Civil Rights art movement because that gave us access to the community because we had no control of the media in general. Not like now where there is social media, with Facebook and what have you. Back then there was none of that.

And so it was a way of engaging with the community. And it came to me; I didn't necessarily go look into it, but I was invited to participate in the murals. And I thought it was a magnificent idea, not only because it was a journey with the Mujeres Muralistas or my chance to work with them and sort of exchange all kinds of ideas and information, but it was a wonderful and rare opportunity.

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I mean, it was my first opportunity really to engage with the public on that level.

Up until then, I think most of us, the only murals that we had seen were like in public spaces or in churches. So this was a chance for us to really sort of honor and talk about different issues in a fresh, new way that was—there was no history. There were a few people who were creating murals, some of the guys, and they were making wonderful murals. But for the most part, they were copying—or interpreting, I should say—the Mexican masters.

And so I think what was really fresh about the Mujeres Muralistas—I think it was because of our diversity and because we were working as a collective, that all of our ideas came together with a feminist approach. And also because of the great diversity within the Mujeres—Caribbean women, South American, Chicanas, urban Latina, we all had a different—something different to say or a different—yeah, a different message, we should say.

And so that was very fertile and crazy and wild and fun.

As you can imagine. But in a lot of ways it felt like I was just sort of dealing with family, with my sisters. We worked with different issues and problems, and you know at the end want to do something positive or come out with something that engages a community. So aside from all of the dialogue and back and forth and what have you, we kind of all knew that we wanted to do something positive for the community so that we'd still work together to come up with a mural idea that in some way would inspire and maybe educate the community.

In particular, I think we are really interested in diversity and intergenerational—making presence the fact that—that the Latino presence, especially in the mission, was just not—it was not monocultural. It was—there were South Americans. There were Afro-Americans. There were—acknowledging our native blood, our urban existence, our farm-worker backgrounds, all of that. And that was really fresh, and I think that was what really was exciting for the community—and for us, too. We sort of created a new dialogue, I should say.

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Ester Hernandez: I wanted to honor, portray the strength and dignity of these women that I was meeting who inspired me in so many different ways. I wanted to give them life.

I wanted to be able to share them—the beauty. And also—okay, I'll just back it up a tiny bit here.At one point in my life, too, I had a chance to spend time with Dolores Huerta, okay, who was a great supporter of the arts. She is a closet poet. Anyway, she loves jazz, and she's always been supportive of the arts.

And I remember one time having a dialogue with her, but we were talking something about art and the role of Chicana artists and all of that. And she—because she knew that I love portraiture—and she said it was really important for me to stay on that path because people need to know the diversity and complexity and the multidimensional sort of mujeres that we are. We're not just this one monolith. We're—because in general, she said, the only time that we would see Latinas—on the media, whatever—newspapers, whatever—we were either to be feared or pitied.

So we never really had an opportunity to see women who are dancers, who are curanderas, who are truck drivers, who are—what have you. So that kind of added to me and sort of gave me a sense of purpose, and it sort of inspired me to continue on my path no matter what, no matter—with whatever—with the general art history, which I could have cared less; it didn't matter. It's not part—

It is changing now thanks to people like yourself. It's changing now in the museums, the Smithsonian, all of that. The face is changing; and there's more inclusiveness; there's more interest in a lot of the younger generation of curators and what have you. It's changing, and I'm very grateful to that—Our allies—I mean, it's opening up. We have something to say that resonates with a lot of people that I never would have thought.

[Outro music plays through end]

Toby Reiter: This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman at the Archives of American Art.

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It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio

Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.

For show notes, work cited, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.bIf you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it.

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.

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