Week 2 Blog Response - Pavithra Prabhu

My name is Pavithra Prabhu.

Both Alice Bag and Maylei Blackwell showcased how art-making is intertwined with social movements. In Alice Bag’s passage of “Chicano Power” from the book Violence Girl depicted her first encounter of police brutality and the ongoing struggles her minority group faces with higher authorities. While her passage was a powerful enough statement, accompanying it with her song ‘White Justice’ invokes stronger emotions in the viewers. The song’s visual aids of police brutality, such as a news clip of the infamous “Chokehold Investigation” (3:09 – 3:15, ‘White Justice’), along with powerful lyrics such as “You say justice is colorblind, I know you’re lying” (1:22 – 1:30), emphasizes the difficulties her minority group, the Chicanos, are facing on a regular basis.

While Alice Bag’s work strengthens the connection of art-making with sending a social message, Maylei Blackwell shows how the people on the receiving end of art can feel. She talks about her club, Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, and how the club’s leader, Nieto Gomez, found a collection of literary works that depicted women before them who had the same vision as them. She talked about how reading their works was inspiring and how “more difficult it would have been for [their] self-validation” (Chapter 3, Pg.104) if they didn’t come across those pieces of literature. Maylei Blackwell later went back in history and explained how Chicana print culture began, which further emphasized the importance of art in social movements.