Resilience and Power: Learning with Communities through Art

But the role of imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected.

—Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change

On Sunday mornings in Tonala, Jalisco, Mexico, my parents would take my sister, Liliana, and me to the tianguis, an outdoor market where people from the surrounding area would come to buy and sell goods. We walked slowly through the narrow walkways as people navigated the bustling streets filled with temporary makeshift stands and boldly painted stucco-covered storefronts. Our senses were awakened by the immense array of bright colors found in handmade and factory textiles, rough earth-toned ceramics with smooth glazed patterns, and flower and landscape paintings. We had to pay close attention to our parents and not be distracted by mountains of salty fried potato chips, rich odors of food being seasoned, corn husks being grilled, or perfectly placed mango and watermelon cups with crushed chili peppers sprinkled in just the right places. We could hear the loud rhythmic and complex patterns composed by sellers announcing the latest specials and products available in their stands. This rich and immersive weekly experience at the tianguis continues to shape how I practice community engagement and community art.

I grew up in various working-poor, majority-nonwhite Chicago neighborhoods including Back of the Yards, Marquette Park, West Englewood, Chicago Lawn, Gage Park, West Lawn, and Bridgeport. As an adult working in Pilsen and Little Village,¹ I began to notice Brown and Black resilience. People came together to support, organize, and create alternative ways to respond to gentrification,² school closings,³ the expansion of the police force,⁴ and decades of disinvestment. When street vendors began to be targeted by the city,⁵ I began to see the mobile vendors selling “tamales,” “paletas,” “elotes,” and “churros,” and people selling individual chips and flavored shaved ice from their stoops, more critically. With the same colors, smells, and experiences, these street vendors were consistent with those I remembered from my childhood. The street vendors are cultural ambassadors, and they are keepers of knowledge, memories, objects, and experiences who sustain cultures and community relationships. As epitomized by the image of The Great City of Tenochtitlan fresco by Diego Rivera at the National Palace in Mexico City,⁶ street markets are part of a long history of people coming together to trade in the Americas and across the world. The street vendors directly connect me to historical places and shared cultural actions, even if temporarily.

Growing up in Chicago, I witnessed the misrepresentation and erasure of Brown and Black historical contributions, and specifically the erasure and distortion of our own stories. I experienced and witnessed how Black and Brown bodies were constantly policed and criminalized, and how our communities were starved of resources by design:⁷ community schools were destabilized and closed. The constant assault on people in disinvested communities is brutal, but from this also sparks dissent, activism, organizing, and alternative economies. Through witnessing the various ways our communities were being attacked, I began to see art making as a way of “learning to look through multiple perspectives, [where] young [and old alike] may be helped to build bridges among themselves; attending to a range of human stories, they may be provoked to heal and to transform.”⁸ The idea of coming together to heal and create, using art as a tool to reimagine our communities, was invigorating. To reimagine art, not as a luxury, but as a tool for organizing, mobilizing, building, and amplifying the stories and needs present in the community. To reclaim art as it has been used for decades within marginalized communities, as a form of celebration, representation, and resistance.

The idea for the Mobile Street Art Cart began in early 2000, when I was invited to do community workshops in Little Village to celebrate Day of the Dead, a two-day indigenous Aztec ritual and Catholic celebration honoring family and loved ones who have died. The free sugar skull–decorating...