Week 2 Blog Response

The most clear connection between social movements and art are the Alice Bag’s White Justice music video, and her accompanying piece, Chicano Power! Her experience as a young girl witnessing police brutality at a Chicano anti-war march directly shaped her artivist music. While her lyrics focused on the brutality against the Chicano people, her music video included imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement illustrating the universal oppression of white justice against minorities (Bag, 3:12). I thought that this was compelling imagery that shows the strength of Chicana feminism’s message of unity. Bag also described the pride she felt for the Chicano people, describing the Brown Berets who, “had a paramilitary look, with boots and uniforms, and even had some female members” (Bag, 69). This ties into the Blackwell piece which argued that the Chicano cultural nationalism, “was used to legitimize the patriarchal abuse of power and authoritarianism,” (Blackwell, 94). I found her statement on feminine docility to be poignant, in that it was leveraged to strengthen the male nationalist movement. This is particularly provocative as it is an “insurgent voice” that goes against “the rigid binaries of them versus us,” (Blackwell, 94).