Elena Orlando - Week 2 Blog Response

Art-making practices and social movements are connected through providing a place for responses to daily-life; both are life-affirming practices in which survival is collective and individual. Blackwell writes that Chicana feminism emerged "from diverse experiences, including labor participation, migration, and conditions of racial exclusion and poverty" (47). Both social movements and art-making practices reveal the inherently personal experience of oppression that at the same time cannot be disconnected from larger systems and structures. This is reflected in the life and work of Alice Bag who writes of growing up in East LA and her participation in protest as a young girl in her book Violence Girl. Bag writes of the coalescence of the personal and the political and the perspective gained through protest; that she "felt good about being part of something as powerful as the Chicano movement [and gained] the understanding that this group had enemies" (70). This experience is articulated in the protest song "White Justice," in which Bag uses art to respond to the constant violence against not only Chicanos, but all communities of color. The line "you say justice is colorblind" that Bag sings over footage of police attacks of peaceful protesters in the 1970s and 2000s, shows that race-neutral arguments of justice contradict with the lived-experiences of people of color (1:25 & 3:03). This song exemplifies the convergence of social movement and art; Alice Bag critics society through her art while showing the continued resistance to institutional violence.