Political Activists

"tus dos manos ya no vuelvan a alzarme/a recoger del cielo su cosecha de estrellas"

"General Rafael, Trujillo General,/que tu nombre sea un eco eterno de cadáveres...Dictador de ese hermoso pueblo dominicano/masacrado en tus ansias y dormido en sus iras,/¿de qué llevas tu cetro? ¿De qué sol te alimentas?"

"tu que sientes los gemidos de la patria que respira esclavitud"

"la masa explotada despierta."

"la verdad respiraba del pulmón de la tierra"

"Es en ti (los pueblos hispanos de America) donde canta mi canción, donde grita/libre grito mi voz iniciada en montañas."

"Altamira del mundo por donde los instantes/ruedan como latidos del mundo de mañana."

"¿Dónde rueda la risa que adornaba mi vida/cuando tu corazón recogía mis tristezas?"

"yo soy toda soledad/en un corazon rebelde"

"Somos de la voz nueva, alargada, instintiva/que en idioma de avances habrá de estremecerse."

"Humanamente, y libre,/y distante, y materia/que allá abajo muy hondo/rimaré una canción."

"la palabra amor/se alzará de la tierra/en volcán inocente/que renueva universos"

"Ya no es canción./Es grito./Grito de fuerza viva,/de hombres que luchan,/de mentes que se libertan,/de brazos sueltos/prestos a no caer./Las masas rugen./Piensan./Son."

"Soy tu raíz oculta entre peñas y abrojos"

"La sombra del mañana me vigila la vida"

"La que juzga mi alma por la piel que me arropa/ni siquiera se extiende lo que alcanza su voz."

"He sabido la inmensidad del cielo alto sobre las rosas"

"ya que no tuve nunca un mundo entre los vivos,/un mundo entre los muertos ofrecedme, soldados!"

"Le diste corazón al universo/que se ocultaba en mí"

"¡Mira que el rico se afianza/donde tu pena se inicia"

"Iba fiel la tormenta sobre mi alma cansada/cuando te apareciste con ternura de estrella."

"Hacia el alma es muy largo el camino que andar"

"Yo, fatalista,/mirando la vida llegándose y alejándose/de mis semejantes...Yo, dentro de mí misma,/siempre en espera de algo/que no acierta mi mente."

"¡Obreros! Picad el miedo./Vuestra es la tierra desnuda./Saltad el hambre y la muerte/por sobre la honda laguna,/y uníos a los campesinos,/y a los que en caña se anudan./¡Rómpanse un millón de puños/contra moral tan injusta!/¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos!"

"Cantemos desde ahora, que la vida se va"

"Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan."

"Sólo dejarme, como estoy, soñando/a ser lucero enamorando al sol"

"¡Qué inmenso es ser al creerse muerto!"

"A cada paso adelantado en mi ruta hacia el frente/rasgaba mis espaldas el aleteo desesperado/de los troncos viejos."

"¡Y aún me piden canciones por palabras,/no conciben mi pulso sin poemas"

"All the flowers… are open, awaiting my arrival, and they clothe beaches of the most beautiful blue, to receive my life, whole and healthy like before. I want to spend days by the sea, burning myself in the sun like we did in our juvenile days, and to be able to return and see my river, with the same tranquil and yearning eyes as I did when I was its bride."

"Carry yourself seriously but speak with a sweet voice. Humiliate no one, since, as you know, adolescence is characterized by unbridled self-love, and when a teacher shines light on the good qualities of a child, it does much more than focusing on their vices."

"The narrative we need is to respect all life, including all human beings. How do we build our reconnection to each other as human beings? Because that’s what’s going to transition us away from an extractive economy and solve the climate crisis."

"Favianna Rodriguez is one of the first people I met who brought up sex in a public context with no attempt at mass seduction. She was incredibly matter-of-fact about her truth that, as an artist, as an organizer, her pleasure and her freedom are part of her larger radical creative path."

"To save something beautiful you must destroy it, so it does not fall, limp and degraded, from our miserable human hands."

"Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil,/la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta,/de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa/la tragedia sin par de la existencia."

"I really long for a time when I can look at art and listen to music and watch films that remind me of my relationship to nature, that help connect me to all of the beautiful animals that we share this planet with, the ocean, the forest. That relationship has been broken. It has been altered and severed. That is the effects of white supremacy and colonialism. This is why in so many movements, there is a demand to return land to Indigenous communities and to center Indigenous voices because Indigenous people continue to be the ones who are most protecting our world’s biodiversity. And if you look at culture from an Indigenous perspective, they are very different kinds of stories. They are stories about being stewards of the Earth, stories about protecting the salmon."

"The power of art is that it can help us heal our relationship to nature and help us as human beings understand that we can move away from an extractive relationship toward a regenerative one. Culture can do that, but we have to do it by replacing the old fairy tales. Greta Thunberg called them “fairy tales of endless extraction” because, in reality, they are fairy tales. They are stories. They are a form of culture that has gotten us here—and largely a culture of colonialism that deemed some life could be exploited for the benefit of other life."

"Yo fui la más callada./La voz casi sin eco./La conciencia tendida en sílaba de angustia,/desparramada y tierna, por todos los silencios...Yo fui la más callada./La que saltó/saltó la tierra sin más arma que un verso./¡Y aquí me veís, estrellas,/desparramada y tierna, con su amor en mi pecho!"

"en la noche callada dejé perder un verso."

"I’ve been tremendously inspired by artists like Judy Baca, who is a muralist in Los Angeles who has transformed what murals mean in our communities and has also built her own institution. Artists like Nina Simone and James Baldwin, who were able to create work that really spoke about the conditions facing Black people and work that would remain universal contributions to culture—something that would continue to shape generations. I’m inspired by people like Víctor Jara, who was a musician in Chile during the very oppressive government. He was actually killed by the government, but nevertheless, his music continues to inspire generations today. I was also inspired by Frida Kahlo. She was the only Latina artist I was exposed to in high school, so she was a role model because she was the only one I studied when I was younger."

"I started calling myself an artist when I was 18 years old and attending UC Berkeley. I had been an activist for a few years, and a lot of the ways I would contribute to social justice movements would be through my art. I would design the posters and flyers. I would bring art activity to the people. I met a woman through my Chicano studies class. Her name was Yreina Cervantez, and she was and continues to be a very well-known Chicana artist. She saw my work and told me that I was very talented and connected me to Self Help Graphics in Los Angeles, which was one of the first institutions in which I really was able to produce my first body of work. So although I did not go to art school, I took on my own artistic learning, and I haven’t stopped ever since."

"I have always been committed to opening doors for other artists of color, and I’ve always been committed to justice. Largely, that’s because I grew up in Oakland during the era of the War on Drugs, and I experienced hip hop. I experienced the remnants of the Black Panthers, so I’ve always been shaped by the idea that culture is not only something very healing, but it is truly what gets us through the hardest time. Art and culture give us the language to talk about what we are experiencing as oppressed people."

"As a movement who cares about climate justice and justice overall, we need to better leverage the power of culture because culture is what transforms the imagination—culture shows us what’s possible. And we can do that by including artists and culture makers in our organizing work. We can train and educate artists on what are the key issues we’re facing in climate. We can pass the mic to artists of color when it comes to climate change. So many people think of white men as the primary spokespeople around climate, but that needs to shift. We need to ensure that it’s BIPOC artists who are speaking about the true impact of the climate crisis. We need people of color and especially culture makers of color to be sharing the stories of what’s happening in our community."

"We need to actually tell the stories in a way that helps people understand both what the problem is as well as the solution. Because I don’t think it’s just about being reactive. It’s about putting forward a solution — and I can assure you that the right wing is definitely already doing this. They are already helping people imagine."

"I advocate for a lot of issues around food security because I grew up in a community that had only fast food. And when I recognized that not only were we getting sick from what we ate, but that we are part of the gears of the machine, whether it’s on the farm picking food or killing animals — because remember that it is the beef industry that is destroying the lungs of the planet — who works in this industry? It’s overwhelmingly Latinx people, overwhelming immigrants."

"We need to be able to have writers in television rooms write about the Black children who are getting asthma, the Latinx farmworkers who are working in extreme heat. All of these stories exist. They’re happening, but we need to find the bridge so that these stories can be transformed into cultural content that will move audiences."

"together as a global community, we are recognizing the failures of the system. It is so clear. People are upset. People are seeing, like, ‘Wow, our governments are not set up to take care of us, even though we have all this wealth and even though people work so hard. We don’t have the infrastructure, whether it’s the health infrastructure or economic infrastructure, to truly be resilient."

"When the Chicano movement began, we saw Chicanas and others in New Mexico working to get back land lost with the 1846-48 US war, thousands walking out of high schools to protest the racism, and many putting on Brown Berets to defend their communities. We joined the United Farm Workers as campesinas and boycott supporters. Thousands of us marched against the Vietnam war on August 29, 1970, only to be chased and struck down by tear-gassing police who also killed three Chicanos that day"

"In the provocation and shaping of that consciousness, Chicana artists and writers have had great influence. We would not be as far along as we are today without the heretical work of painters Yolanda López and Ester Hernández, whose militant transformations of the Virgin of Guadalupe offer a liberation never before available. We would not be this far along without painter Juana Alicia's images of Latina women as strong survivors. We would not be this far along without some biting poems from Sandra Cisneros, the multifaceted work of feminist writer Ana Castillo, the beautifully bold writing of lesbian authors Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa mentioned above. Not to mention the performance art of lesbian comedians like Marga Gómez and Monica Palacios. So many more names could be set down; all have nurtured the feminist impulse of young Chicanas, especially those in their upper teens and early twenties."