Christine Hong
Abstract:
On October 19, 2025, the artist and longtime cultural worker Juan Fuentes sat down with Christine Hong of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) in his San Francisco studio. On the wall behind him were posters drawn from a powerful repertoire of political art, stretching back nearly half a century, that Fuentes created in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. In 1977, on the second anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, he made the earliest poster in his Palestine portfolio, Zionism Is Racism, at the request of the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s chapter of the Organization of Arab Students in the U.S. and Canada (OAS). For this inaugural foray into Palestine solidarity artwork, students supplied the image and message, and Fuentes, combining type, text, and image, created the political art. Featuring defiant Palestinian youth being arrested by Israeli forces, this poster was followed by another, again featuring the message “Zionism Is Racism,” created in collaboration with the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS).
The child of migrant farmworkers who worked in the fields of Pajaro Valley, Fuentes attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the aftermath of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike. In this interview, which has been compressed and edited for clarity, he explains how the anti-imperialist, solidaristic concept of the “Third World,” which he was first exposed to at SF State, has informed his political art.
“Everybody worked in the fields”: Pajaro Origins
C: Thank you for making time to speak with us. I’m part of an organization called the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ). Could you, for our audience, introduce yourself?
J: My name is Juan Fuentes. I’m a longtime social activist and a Chicano artist. We used to be called “cultural workers.” I came out of the Chicano movement and some of the social movements that were going on in the 1970s. I live in San Francisco.
I was born in New Mexico. Both of my parents are Mexican but were born close to the Rio Grande. There was a lot of discrimination when they were growing up. Neither got to go to school. Neither could read or write. They migrated to Marfa, Texas, and then from Marfa to New Mexico, and then from New Mexico, where I was born, they settled in Monterey County on California’s Central Coast to work in the fields. I’m one of eleven children. I pretty much grew up in the farm labor camps around Monterey County. From age two until third or fourth grade, we were in labor camps until my family bought a small home outside of Watsonville, a little community called Las Lomas at that time. I graduated from Watsonville High School and ended up at San Francisco State.
So that’s my folks’ background. Everybody worked in the fields. We all harvested crops for the growers. I didn’t have to start working until I was seven or eight years old. We were in the field helping. I have four sisters and six brothers, so there’s a lot of us. I loved the fields, and I loved the camp because we were kids, and there were a lot of kids. So living in the camp, I just remember it was a lot of fun. Everybody played outside and ran around and pretended we were soldiers and all that. That was the 1950s so it was probably during the Korean War. There was a war going on for most of my life.
My dad passed away when I was probably in seventh grade. He had respiratory problems. I didn’t find out till later, but apparently, they were supposed to spray DDT into the fields. It’s hitting me. [pauses, overcome with sorrow] The men had to go out into the field and irrigate the strawberry fields. All they wore was a little bandana [over their mouths and noses]. I blame that, because they were out there doing that in the fields.
There were braceros working right beside my family in the fields. Sometimes they needed extra help so we kids worked alongside them. I tried to work, but I was horrible at it. I ate more strawberries than I picked. I was always behind. My brothers and sisters were always after me. So I found other things to do in the fields to help. I got to learn how to drive a tractor really young, and I also irrigated the field.
One of the braceros, one day, was carving a piece of wood. He was carving a block of wood, and I was just mesmerized by what he was doing and what he made. I don’t remember what he ended up carving. I think it was a little animal, but I don’t remember what it was. I just know that he made something out of nothing. I didn’t think it had any impact on me, but apparently it did because it stuck in my brain. The only other influence that I had, in terms of people making things, was my mom and other women in my family. My sisters and my grandma were always making things for the house and sewing and making quilts. I credit them for my love of art.
“Police on the campus”: Third World Political Postermaking at SF State
C: Could you speak about coming to San Francisco and becoming a cultural worker? What was happening at the time?
J: I graduated from high school in 1969 and had no intention of going to college. I wanted to be a carpenter. I took wood shop in high school. Most Chicano kids didn’t take art classes. We were railroaded into taking wood shop, agricultural courses, auto mechanics, and industrial stuff, so I was thinking I could be a carpenter. I didn’t want to work in the fields. I already knew that. My sisters and brother-in-law worked in the canneries in Watsonville. There was no way I was going to work in the cannery. Also at that time, people were getting drafted into the Vietnam War. Fortunately, my good friend’s family was helping to recruit students for the Educational Opportunity Program at San Francisco State. So I was one of four students that got recruited, and they also recruited Victoria Mercado, another activist, who was very active in Angela Davis’s case. There were four of us that came from Watsonville, and there were students that were recruited from all over—from Salinas, from Sacramento, from Fresno, from Pittsburg. We all ended up at San Francisco State.
Because of the strike, a strike to institute a department of ethnic studies, when I got to the campus in ‘69, there were still police on the campus. It hadn’t ended yet. Sometimes we had to go through the police to get to our classes. Well, for me, it was the beginning of an education in terms of what was going on and why they were there.
There were also heavily policed demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time I started attending. That was the beginning of my understanding a little bit about what the role of the U.S. was in the world. It was because of the counselors and assistance that we got through [the] ethnic studies [struggle] that I was able to navigate a degree.
It was by chance that I just happened to walk into the Art Department. I was on my way back from class, back to the dormitory, and I heard this banging. It was a sculpture class, and I [was] trying to figure out the sounds. So, I decided to walk in, and the first classroom [was] printmaking. I looked around. People were working, doing things. I went into the textile [section]. Then I went upstairs. They had painting and ceramics. Well, I just went through the whole thing, and I don’t know what it was, but I was like, I can do this, you know? So I took a class by a professor, Ralph Putzker, [who] just made art come alive for me. It opened up my eyes in terms of seeing the world in a new way.
First of all, I had to learn how to draw. I had to learn how to paint. Painting and drawing: that’s what I got my degree in. And, you know, I struggled. I spent a lot of time in the library researching art and what it was. Who are these artists that they’re talking about? I had no idea who anybody was so I had to catch up as much as I could. I started drawing like crazy, and then I found that I could draw.
I had my moments with professors where they just didn’t understand what I was doing. They even would tell me it was “ethnic art.” They didn’t know how to evaluate it, basically. It was people of color that I drew, and I guess they weren’t used to seeing it. One of the professors told me that I was wasting my time there. That just gave me more inspiration. In Spanish, ganas–you know, more will to do what you’re going to do. And I said, “Well, now that you told me that, I’m not going to leave and I am going to do what I’m doing.”
Because of the struggle that was going on campus and [in] the world—I mean, the Black Panther Party students were on campus. They were in our dormitory. They were friends. The United Farm Workers’ union was happening. That struggle for me just totally made sense. I mean, my parents and family worked in the fields so it was very easy for me to tie into that. Because of the struggles that were going on, I was empowered and emboldened to push for what I wanted. And I wasn’t going to let anybody get in my way.
C: Can I ask you about what it was like coming onto campus during the latter part of the Third World Liberation Front strike? This was one of the longest student strikes in U.S. history. It lasted five months. There was a tactical SFPD squad trained in military counterinsurgency techniques drawn from the U.S. war in Southeast Asia that were being applied to strikers. At that time, the fight wasn’t necessarily for ethnic studies but for a Third World college. How did you understand President S. I. Hayakawa’s willingness to deploy militarized police against students? What was the threat these students posed in calling for a Third World college?
J: Well, for me, it was difficult to understand. I just didn’t know what was going on. But my understanding deepened as I got to know other students that were much sharper and knew what was going on. We would learn from the other students that were there, the other struggles that were there, the fact that there were Black Panthers on the campus. And people from the Brown Berets, the Chicano movement, were there, as well. So, you know, it was all a combination of all of that that helped me see what it was that was going on. And coming from a community like Watsonville, I had seen discrimination. I had seen how my uncles were treated in the streets by the police. My own brothers had been beaten up by the police. So it wasn’t new to me.
“How can I serve the community?”: International Solidarity in the Mission
C: We see vibrant examples of your artwork in your studio. In one of the images directly behind you, we can see a connection between struggles over there, so to speak, and struggles here. That unjust war the United States was waging in Southeast Asia, police brutality, the untimely premature death of your father—structurally, these are all part of the same world order. That term, “Third World,” encapsulated an analysis of the world that I see expressed in your artwork.
J: I was able to take a class at SF State with Rupert Garcia, a Chicano poster-maker. His class was a screen-printing class, and he was a political poster-maker. And I’m like “What is a ‘political poster-maker’?” But it just resonated with me. Rupert and I became good friends, and Rupert introduced me to another Chicano artist, Malaquias Montoya, [who] was teaching a poster workshop at UC Berkeley. Because of them, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make posters as well. [Since] I had a degree in painting and drawing, I’m like “What am I going to do with this? How can I serve the community? Can I do it just [by] being an artist and working in my studio?” It just was a connection for me to make art that people could use.
Through posters, I could make images that could resonate with more people. I ended up producing posters and, like you say, it came out of the concept of the Third World. Rupert was making posters that represented the Third World. He did one of the first Third World strike posters. I got involved with the Mission community and one of the concepts that came out of ethnic studies was “get a degree and then empower your community with that.” It resonated with me. You know, now that I have an art degree, what can I do with it? So, once I connected with the Mission community, I got involved with the Tecolote newspaper [a free bilingual newspaper covering the Mission District that emerged out of SF State student organizing]. I said, “Well, how can I help the newspaper?” I thought, “Well, I have these skills,” so I helped with the paper for ten years and became very close with that collective of people that were putting out the paper. The newspaper just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. I did posters for the organization. I did backdrops for a concert they do every year called Encuentro del Canto Popular. It’s all related to the music called Nueva Trova, or New Song Movement, that came out of Cuba and Chile.
Because of Rupert, I made connections with community organizations like Galería de la Raza, and I had my first exhibit with him [there]. We also had an exhibit at the Kearney Street workshop in Chinatown. [That] exposed me to other people of color who were doing work. The concept of the Third World just kind of connected [it all] for me.
In 1974, I believe, I ended up going on the Venceremos Brigade in order to learn about the changes Cubans were making to their own society and to learn about socialism. That was pivotal for me because I saw firsthand how art was being used to promote social change in education and agriculture. I mean, there was a lot of art in general. I saw huge billboards. There was also an organization called OSPAAAL [Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America], which represented Asia, Africa, and Latin America—the Third World. They published a magazine called Tricontinental. I found some of those magazines when I was in Cuba. Inside were articles around the struggle in South Africa or the Middle East and or Latin America. Along with the articles, there were images. That’s all I needed. I mean, like how can I tie into this concept of the Third World, right?
It wasn’t a big stretch for me because the Mission community was very diverse in terms of Latinos. I consider myself Chicano or Mexican. I didn’t know what a Latino was until I came here. Then I realized Nicaraguans, Salvadoreans, Puerto Ricans, Chileans, all of these people, were here in the Mission, and we all connected somehow. I ended up doing posters for the Nicaraguan struggle because of contacts in the Mission. People were supporting the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. Roberto Vargas, one of the founders of the Mission Cultural Center, asked me to do a poster for some of the poetry readings that they were doing to support Nicaragua. So, I did at least two, maybe three posters of Sandino, and it was all connected to the poetry. All the major poets in San Francisco at the time were reading—Ferlinghetti, for instance, Janice Mirikatani, Roberto Vargas, Alejandro Murguia. I got to do the posters for [the Sandinista struggle], and that was my connection to that part of the world. I also did some posters on El Salvador.
I ended up joining an organization connected to the American Indian Movement, the Native American Defense Committee, and just really connected to that because of the Native Americans and the way that they were approaching doing their work, and also because it has an issue of land and what’s been taken. So, I did posters for the Native American struggle for many years.
My partner, Michelle Mouton, was part of a women’s organization called the Third World Women’s Alliance. I did some posters for them for International Women’s Day. I also ended up doing a poster for them for the World Women’s Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, which they took with them. They also used it as a fundraiser. It was a really beautiful poster, connected to the [anti-]apartheid movement. I also did images around Nelson Mandela, [who] was still in prison at that time. It gave me an international perspective I didn’t have. I was also part of a little collective that wasn’t around for very long: the Third World Coalition Against the War.
C: You mentioned you had these teachers who tried to dismiss your work as “ethnic art.” At the same time, you spoke about having two mentors, Rupert Garcia and Malaquias Montoya, describing Rupert as a kind of movement elder to you.
But SF State also had ties to an earlier formation, another trajectory of political art. You did a poster featuring Frida Kahlo and Emmy Lou Packard who was with the Graphic Arts Workshop in San Francisco. In the 1950s, people from SF State were also involved with the Graphic Arts Workshop, including the artist and teacher Frank Rowe who refused to sign the anticommunist loyalty oath, lost his job at the university, and was not reinstated for decades. Depoliticized art, which was presented as the norm, was a product of Cold War political design. During a time of McCarthyism, the Graphic Arts Workshop insisted on realism and at times on message-based art. Later on, it would come to light that the CIA, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was funding abstract expressionism. In his memoir, Rowe described abstract expressionism as the aesthetic expression of anticommunism.
J: I was not aware at the time that artists like Frank Rowe had rejected abstract expressionism and its ties to the CIA.
When I graduated from SF State, it did influence me [that artists there] were connected to the school of photorealism. The painters were doing these images and some of the professors, that’s what they were working from. So, I learned how to do that. I could draw your photorealistic image but I never wanted to paint like that. It just didn’t resonate with me. Taking the image and abstracting the image and doing it my own way is what was important to me. I mean, the images that I saw didn’t have any soul to them. It’s like, okay, you just did something that looks exactly like the photograph. I mean, technically you’re a master, but it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s all technique and there’s no soul to it. It wasn’t for me.
There was a mural movement going on, and people were painting murals in the Mission. All these things were going on. But I didn’t really want to paint murals. I don’t like heights so I stayed away from that.
But works on paper and posters, it just was magic for me. I was really moved by the political posters in Cuba, and I have a collection [of them]. I helped to organize some of the early exhibits of political posters from Cuba that we showed here in San Francisco. Another activist, Susan Adelman, [also] collected some of these posters. In 1974, we had an exhibit of Cuban posters at the Legion of Honor. I then took those posters to New Mexico where they were exhibited in Albuquerque.
“Zionism Is Racism”: Forty-eight Years of Solidarity Art for Palestine
C: Was there anything during your time in Cuba and in your reading of the Tricontinental that exposed you to an anti-imperialist critique of Zionism? How did you come about to create this body of work, which is both a profound expression of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and a very sharp critique of Zionism?
J: I got educated about what was going on in the world through the Venceremos Brigade because they took up international issues. There was a reason why we were going to Cuba. I really didn’t know much about Palestine when I started. I heard about it, and it resonated with me that these people’s land was being taken. Growing up in Watsonville, [though,] I didn’t really have a sense of what Zionism meant or was.
My education came through working with different organizations [and doing] political posters [for them]. I was approached by one of the organizations at UC Berkeley, the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada and the General Union of Palestinian Students. Both organizations contacted me at different times and asked me if I would do a poster for them. The first poster that I did on Palestine was [on] Zionism, and when I worked with them, they said, “This is what we want the poster to have on it.” At that point, I was just like “I’m going to do it. Whatever you want.” And I ended up doing the Zionism is Racism [see fig. 2] poster for them. That was in 1977.
And then it just kind of grew from there. I ended up being asked several times to do these posters for the Palestinian struggle. And I’m learning more about it because I’m doing it. And I have not stopped. I’ve basically been supporting that struggle since the mid-1970s. I created some of my most powerful images for the Palestinian liberation movement. As a printmaker and as a designer, you have to work with graphic design elements to make posters, but I had no degree in graphic design. One of the things that we did as Chicanos to make posters is learn through other poster-makers, Cuban poster-makers. You know, you take an image and you try to make it as strong as possible using type, text, and image. What are you trying to say? I think some of the strongest posters that I did came out of the Palestinian movement because they would give me these images. They said, “Here’s an image that you could use.” They gave me different things to work with. And then it was up to me to put it together. And they just let me do it. They didn’t really get in my way in terms of how I designed it. I guess they were happy with them because I never had any issues. And I did them, and I continued to do them.
C: You’re talking about two posters, the first which you made in 1977 and the second in 1980 [see fig. 3], that both state, “Zionism is racism.” You did these at the request of these student organizations. I wanted to ask you about both these. How did they circulate? Where were they posted? What kind of life did they have after you created them?
J: That’s a difficult question for me because once I give them to the organization, my hands are clear of it. I know people use them and they got them all over the place, but I don’t know how they got used, to be honest with you. My job was just to create it and support the organization that way. In terms of distributing and all that, I had no responsibility for that. The only place where I might have done some of that was when I worked with El Tecolote. We did posters for cultural events in the Mission. Then we would make sure they were posted in community organizations and mom-and-pop stores. We showed them that way, but otherwise I never had to post them. It was just my responsibility to create it.
C: The 1975 UN Resolution 3379 stating that Zionism is racism was essentially gutted sixteen years after it was passed because of political pressure by Israel. “Zionism is racism” seems as pertinent today as it ever was. Could you just speak about how you understand Zionism to be racism?
J: How can I break that down? Basically, it was something that was created to ensure that one group of people can dominate or take what another group has. It’s an ideology to take what someone else has. For me, it’s like the idea of Manifest Destiny that you come here and then you just take as you move through the land—you take what’s there because you’re entitled to it. I don’t know how else to describe it except that it’s created for a purpose that’s repressive. It’s going to benefit someone, but someone else is going to suffer as a result of it. I just know that in terms of how I feel, I know something’s not right. And I’m going to express it as an artist. And that’s what I do.
At the time, I didn’t have a deep understanding of Zionism. However, as a Chicano, I had firsthand experience of racism and settler colonialism.
C: Was there a moment where you saw a kind of convergence? You spoke about doing Native American defense work, and seeing in the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinian people something that felt very familiar to the history of the United States, also as a settler colony. Was there also reception to your work on Palestine within the Chicano movement? Did you have any awareness of that?
J: As much as I supported the Chicano movement and felt I was a part of it, sometimes I felt like I wasn’t a part of it because of the images I was doing. There was an exhibition here at SFMoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, that was the first exhibition of Chicano art. I submitted some international work for that exhibition, but those posters weren’t selected. They selected one of my pieces on cholos and gang violence. That was the only thing they selected. But I had submitted posters on South Africa. I had submitted things on Palestine. And as a Chicano artist, I guess naively I was thinking it’s Chicano art because I’m a Chicano. But apparently they weren’t looking for those kind of images. I did not create images of lowriders and Virgens de Guadalupe. I could have given them images of farmworkers. Maybe [those] would have gotten in. But, because of my international stance on things, they didn’t put them in. It was just the time. I think this exhibit was sometime in the mid- or early 80s. And it traveled around. They did a big catalog for it and all that.
But those works [that were rejected] didn’t get recognized until later on [when] there was another exhibit, this time at the Smithsonian called “Printing the Revolution: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics,” that incorporated the work I’ve done internationally as part of the Chicano art movement.
C: You spoke about the Brown Berets. The Brown Berets organized a Chicano moratorium against the Vietnam War. The police violence that’s visited on urban areas is fundamentally tied to military technology used against oppressed peoples around the world. We, in the United States, are located in the belly of the beast. You spoke about meeting Latinos dispossessed because of U.S.-backed genocide and wars in Central America in the Mission.
J: You know, there’s always been this division between political art and fine arts, you know, museum kind of art or gallery art. Sometimes we were pigeonholed into “They’re just political artists. This is all they do.” But we also make art. It’s [just] not showcased because it’s not fine art. It’s fine enough for me. But maybe it’s just the prejudice or ignorance around what art is supposed to be or not be.
C: The expectation of that ‘80s exhibit was that you had to depict certain kinds of subjects in order for your work to be classified as Chicano art. But your work expresses a relationship to the world. In your two earliest pieces on “Zionism is racism,” you depict what is potentially a moment of arrest, a moment of police violence. There are similar dimensions to both political images. You have the Israeli soldiers, and you have Palestinians. In one, a Palestinian woman is cowering, and in the other, there is an image of youthful defiance. I wonder if you could speak about what your intention was for these images.
J: One of the things that’s happened over my learning how to make art and how to make posters is that you learn how to define images. I see things now and know automatically I can do something with them. Because I was given such strong, pictorial information by these international Palestinian organizations, it wasn’t a stretch for me to be able to create something as strong as it was, because it was already there. I just had to pull it out and put it in the context of a poster and a message. How do I do that? That’s where my skill came in, because they obviously knew what they wanted. And all I had to do was put it together for them.
I was able to do that pretty concretely because I learned from other artists, and we don’t work in a vacuum. We learn from everybody. Especially with posters, we look at the poster movement that came out of Cuba and the poster movement that came out of even the Russian poster-makers. I mean, we take from whatever, and we make it our own. There’s a really strong movement of political and poster work that came out of Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico, and all of those have influenced what we do. What we have to do to make an image that’s as strong as possible.
C: You have a poster you created for a rally around the time Israel invaded southern Lebanon. You have another one from 1980 called Forward to Palestine, Not Backward to Settlement.
J: You know, and that Forward to Palestine [see fig. 4] image came directly from them [Palestinians]. It was actually an image that had been used as a poster in the Middle East. So they gave me that image. I made some changes and redesigned it, but it came directly from something they had done already.
C: In the stories you’re sharing with us, we can see profound solidarity at work. You have another poster from 2001, the beginning of the so-called war on terror, called Palestine. You have spoken about the combination of text, image, and message. Here you have the message, “Stop U.S.-Financed Genocide in the Middle East” [see fig. 5].
People have not sufficiently understood the Zionist investment in U.S. war in the Middle East. In September 2002, Netanyahu testified before the House Oversight Committee. He described U.S. regime change in Iraq as having enormous positive reverberations on the region. In 2008, in Haaretz, he stated that Israel was benefiting from one thing, “the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq.” Last month [September 2025], he came to New York and spoke before the UN General Assembly. A lot of nations chose not to be there because he was speaking. He compared giving Palestinians a state to “giving al-Qaeda a state one mile from New York City after 9/11.”
There’s so much about this poster you made in 2001 that is prescient, in other words. Could you speak to us about this?
J: I wasn’t doing any posters at this point for political organizations or student organizations. At this point, I just started putting out my own ideas about Palestine and what’s going on. I did this one basically in support of the Palestinian struggle. I was thinking of the role that the U.S. plays in the Middle East. And I just put what I thought needed to be said in the poster: The genocide is being financed by the U.S. They’re part of that. And I have another one that I did that also speaks to the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. That wasn’t a stretch for me. You know, there’s a connection there. I don’t spend a lot of time figuring out the theoretical part of it. It’s more the emotional part of it in terms of what I can do and how I can express it.
C: Who is your intended audience for this? It’s a belly-of-the-beast poster in a way. Isn’t it, in part, Americans?
J: Yeah, definitely the U.S. because they [Americans] don’t know what’s going on. People over here don’t need to know, but they should. It’s definitely for people here to see, to be aware of what’s going on in Palestine.
C: And to have a Palestinian looking out at the viewer and to have this image of injustice be a testament to something that we’re complicit in, right?
J: You know, for me, it’s also like the barbed wire represents the Mexican border, as well, where there’s always this crossing that has to happen. And there’s several images where I’ve used barbed wire. It represents a division of people from one side and the other.
C: Could you speak about a 2006 image called Intifada? Do you have that on hand?
J: Sure, it’s a linocut. The actual linocut is larger than this [holding up the image], but we reduced it. These are silkscreen, because we can give them out. The line prints take a while to cut. But once I cut them, it can’t [be] mass produced, and they’re just too labor intensive. They’re not really made for posting. So we take the image and then we reproduce it and silkscreen it for a broader audience. Basically, it says, “Support the intifada,” in Arabic. In creating this, I wanted to commemorate the first intifada and by doing so to highlight the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As you can see, it’s two women embracing.
C: The term “apartheid” clarifies the fact that Palestinians are subjected to an entirely different and unequal political system of rights and privileges from that reserved for Jewish Israelis. But your image reminds us that Palestinians are also a partitioned people. Against this backdrop, this image registers and resonates on an emotional level.
You call this image from 2014, after Israel invaded Gaza, killing over 2,000 people, Triple Thread, playing on “triple threat” and discerning in targets of imperialism a natural line of solidarity [see fig. 7]. The same year you created this, Comandante Tacho, at the First Exchange of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico with the Zapatista Peoples meeting in Chiapas, condemned Israel’s “war of extermination” against the people of Gaza, stating, “Our heart and our gaze goes to the Palestinian people. We hear and read what they say about ‘the conflict in Gaza,’ as if there were two equal forces confronting each other, and as if saying ‘conflict’ would hide the death and destruction such that death would not kill and destruction would not destroy. But as the Indigenous people that we are, we know that what is happening there is not a ‘conflict’ but a massacre, that the government of Israel is carrying out a war of extermination upon the Palestinian people. Everything else is just words to try to hide reality. But we also know, as the Indigenous people that we are, that the Palestinian people will resist and will rise again, that they will once again begin to walk and that they will know then that, although we are far away on the map, the Zapatista peoples embrace them today as we have before, as we always do, with our collective heart. And here on our map, the power of money’s machine of war is without a brain, without memory, wicked, like a savage animal unleashed against our indigenous peoples of Mexico.”
So this artwork connects the Zapatista struggle of Indigenous peoples not only to the Palestinian liberation struggle, again of an Indigenous people, but also to the local farmworkers’ struggle, with migrant farmworkers often being Indigenous peoples, as well. Why did you link the thread of the one to the other to the other?
J: That was part of a portfolio of prints. A friend of mine asked me to be a part of it, another Chicano artist and printmaker, Emmanuel Montoya. It was pretty open to what we wanted to do. At that point, I was thinking how do I connect Chicano identity with what’s going on right now? And what was going on was the struggle in Palestine and the struggle of the Zapatistas. And I was thinking of not [only] the keffiyeh covering your face, but also the bandanas used by the Zapatistas to cover their faces, and also the farmworkers cover their faces when they’re working for protection. So I just started putting the idea together, trying to connect the three things, like how can I do it? And it was because of what they were wearing basically. That’s what it came down to. Just the solidarity of the groups.
C: There’s solidarity behind your work, too. It’s implied. It’s part of the process. It’s students reaching out to you and asking you to visualize something in poster form. But you also have literal depictions of solidarity here.
There’s another expression of solidarity from the Zapatista struggle that I would like to read because it makes me think about the solidarity your artwork conveys to the Palestinian people. In 2009, Subcomandante Marcos, speaking about the Palestine liberation struggle at the tail-end of an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza that left over 1400 Palestinians dead, stated, “I don’t know how to explain it, but it turns out that, yes, words from afar may not be able to stop a bomb, but they are as if a crack opened in the black room of death, and a little light slipped in.”
J: That’s deep. I did a print of one of the Zapatistas, a young woman for the 10th anniversary of the celebration of the Zapatistas, and I did a print, a linocut of a woman.
C: Would you speak about some of your poster art behind you?
J: The We Stand with Gaza [see fig. 8] I did right when they started bombing Gaza. [Here, he leafs through posters from his Palestine solidarity collection including Free Palestine. Exist. Resist. Return and many others.] I mean, I’ve just been doing [these posters] and we printed these at [an] event that they had for the Middle East Children’s Alliance. Basically, I give them to them to raise money for the organization.
Can you hand me that one there? I wanted to show you this one poster here. So this one I did in solidarity with [Shadia Mansour]. In 2010, I was invited to go to Lebanon by a professor at the American University in Beirut to come and do a [revolutionary arts] workshop on linoleum cutting or relief printing. I did this print when I came back. This young woman is a rapper. She lives in London. She’s Palestinian. Her name is Shadia Mansour. I met her when I was in Lebanon.
I got invited to a Palestinian [refugee] camp while I was there. And I went there to do a workshop with young women and young men, mostly young girls that were there. They were maybe high school age, maybe a little bit older. They were living at the camp there. So anyway, I started doing the workshop, and, you know, I learned some things about Lebanon and the Middle East. I got to hear those fucking jets fly overhead, and I asked, “What is that?” And they were just like, “Well, that’s just the Israelis letting us know that they’re here.”
C: Linoleum cuts have a long proletarian history and have a place within leftist struggle and cultural workers working in linoleum. How accessible would linoleum have been as material for these young Palestinians?
J: You know, I’m really not sure. When I went there, we didn’t do linoleum cutting. I did silkscreen. I brought images and screens [so] that they could print themselves. I even took shirts to give out. I didn’t know I was going to be doing this, but they asked me to come and do this workshop. The students didn’t speak English. Everything was translated for me while I was there. When I first got there, everybody was really quiet as they introduced me. And the women were really shy and quiet. So, I just started talking to them about my family and the Mexican-U.S. border and how my family was divided and growing up in the work camps. It just basically resonated with them and they opened up.
One of the things they told me was that some of the guys there were rappers. I said, “I want to hear it,” so they rapped. After that, the young women started showing me some of their drawings. I showed them how to print their own t-shirts. The people that were running the organization there with the youth asked me, “Are you going to come back next week?” I felt really bad because I’m like, “No, I’m leaving in two days.” I was pretty much done with my workshop and, but I had come there. I didn’t realize the Lebanese students had never been there either. This was the introduction to them coming to work with the Palestinians, doing these classes with them. So, I helped introduce that while I was there. It was crazy and kind of intense. Part of the building that I saw there had been bombed. There were bullet holes and mortar holes and all that stuff around. I forget which war it was, but it was when the Israelis bombed Lebanon.
C: How do you feel about the fact that artwork that you produced half a century ago is as relevant today as it was then?
J: I wish it wasn’t. How long has it been that we’ve been doing these things? It’s really painful. I can’t imagine the suffering that people are going through. It’s horrible, you know. It’s insane. But, I get to express it through the art, and I think that’s important.
C: I’m part of Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice, a coalition of organizations fighting for ethnic studies in your hometown of Watsonville. We have been part of a local struggle against Zionist repression in K-12 schools. In September 2023, three people from Aptos [a mid-county town north of Watsonville], whose demographics skew white and wealthy, went down to a school board meeting in a 90% Latinx school district and charged the ethnic studies consultant with being an antisemite for the “crime” of having included Palestine in an ethnic studies curriculum. For almost two years, we had to fight against these baseless charges of antisemitism. It was a very hard struggle. We ended up doing our own freedom schools. But in the midst of this, some allies in Watsonville said, “Well, Palestine is not a local issue. This has nothing to do with us.” What would you say to that?
J: I’ve heard that before as well. Other artists have responded to my work and said, “This is not our struggle. It’s somebody else’s struggle. It’s not going to affect us.” But the way I see it is that it does. It’s going to impact everybody. Capitalism is going to impact everybody. I mean, it’s the wars that take our resources and our money—our taxes. How could it not impact you on some level economically, materially? One of your kids may end up having to go to one of those wars.
You know, it’s a really difficult question because there’s so much that you can and can’t say right now without being attacked for [being] antisemitic. I mean, that would be true for all of my posters. When I was doing an art residency in North Carolina, [at] the first open house we had for the community to come and see the artists’ work, I had a wall of posters. I put up at least 5 or 6 of my Palestinian posters. I was given this residency because of my social activism. During the evening, people came in and out. I had really nice conversations with people that came into my studio. I drew a Confederate flag and put it on the floor so people had to walk over it to get into my studio. One guy jumped over it. A young woman almost cried because [her] father has a Confederate flag in front of their house, and she just doesn’t talk to [her parents]. But I did it. I said, “Well, let me see what kind of flack I get for doing this.”
But there was a young Palestinian woman that came, and she was very emotional when she saw my posters. I didn’t know that there was a [local] community of Palestinians. But later in the evening, I was talking to this Latino guy that was a musician, and we were talking about the music scene in San Francisco in the Mission. We were having a really nice comradely conversation when this couple came in, and this woman was looking at my work, and I could tell she was really nervous about what she was looking at. And then they disappeared. I looked at the guy that was next to me, and I’m like, “What? What was that?” And about two minutes later, she came back and took a picture and then ran out. And I’m like, “What the hell?” So I went after her, and I said, “What are you doing? Nobody gave you permission to come in here and take photographs.”
The next day, people from the administration came to talk to me about the posters because they wanted to put a disclaimer on my door. I said, “Well, then put a disclaimer on all the artists’ work, not just mine.” So they ended up putting [a disclaimer] in front of their building. And I said, “I’m going to leave my posters up for the entire residency,” which was three months. I said, “I’ve already made contact with the Palestinian community here. They’re going to come, and we’re going to march in front of this place.” They left me alone after that. But basically I was like “You invited me here because I’m a social activist, and this is what I do. Now you’re going to take it away from me?”
In fact, my Palestine posters have always been met with repression. In the 1980s, René Yañez, director of Galería de la Raza at the time, submitted one of my Zionism Is Racism posters for an Arts Commission exhibit on Chicano art downtown on Grove Street. The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] went after Rene for it. He had to meet with people from the NEA who had a fit. Because of my poster, he almost lost their funding.
Also, in the 1990s or early 2000s, at an exhibit at the Capitol Building that one of my friends organized, I also got phone calls from people who actually wanted to speak with me about one of my posters on Zionism.
C: Could you speak about the response to your work recently, in the past two years?
J: You know, I just continue to do my posters. You know about the poster archive [Palestine Poster Project Archives]? I’m not sure the person’s name who does it. Anyway, he contacted me because one of my posters got used by this rightwing organization in Washington, DC. They posted that and changed the text on it from “Forward to Palestine.” [Instead,] it was like, “Death to America.” I was kind of freaked out about it. I’m like, “What are they going to do with this thing?” so I actually wrote a letter to them, but I’ve never heard anything back. It’s some kind of rightwing think tank in Washington, DC, and it’s probably just one person. But they took my poster and just switched what I was saying.
Everything’s been twisted so that you don’t know what you can and can’t say what is antisemitic and what [isn’t]. At this point, the way that’s been interpreted doesn’t give you much room to say anything, but I continue to do my work.
The End the Genocide poster [see fig. 9]—I posted some of these in the neighborhood. Some of them stayed up for a while. Some of them they took down, but there’s a couple of Palestinian owners of these stores here. There’s one about two blocks from here. It’s still in the window there. I just give them out.
C: Thank you.
J: Yeah. I’m glad that I’m able to do this kind of work.
C: You have been fighting from the trenches of the anti-imperialist cultural front. For half a century, your movement art has given us courage. It continues to give everyone courage.
J: We need to see positive images of our struggle. These times are dangerous, you know? It’s scary, but we have to fight back.
