Abstract
How do young people embody activism and artistic praxis as they commit to community-based participatory action research for social change? We consider how the arts might provide a social and shared context for challenging racialized characterizations. Our analysis draws upon arts-based participatory action research projects conducted by the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (https://maacollective.org), a social justice think tank led by the urgent concerns of young people of color. Specifically, we engage the arts as integral to the research process—an epistemological move that opens up new ways of understanding and knowing our world and representing ourselves.
Gabriel and Miguel walk from high school to the coffee house where they join the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (MAA) twice a week. More than once they have arrived late because they have been detained and harassed by police officers, falsely accused of carrying aerosol paint cans and forced to open their backpacks. Gabriel and Miguel are both artists who formed a crew they call “136” which stands for Art Creates Freedom.
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Because they are minors, it is illegal for them to possess or purchase aerosol paint cans or permanent ink markers. Sometimes they prefer to run or hide rather than be harassed by the police. Miguel describes it this way:
They (police officers) ruin my day!
We didn’t do anything yet there they were.
Yeah its like they were just waiting for us.
They don’t even know what we do here (Mestizo Arts & Activism).
So we just ran.
Miguel and Gabriel are youth researchers and artists in the intergenerational social justice think tank, the Mestizo Arts & Activism (MAA) Collective (https://maacollective.org). On this day, both were angry and scared as they described how they ran from the police. This experience, while distinct, was familiar to other young people who participated in MAA who also live on the West Side of Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah. Youth researchers understand what it means to be profiled and labeled, agreeing with Miguel’s assessment: “It’s because we live on the West Side and are brown!”
In SLC, the “West Side” is synonymous with race and has become a code word for deviance, low income, and uneducated. Artists like Miguel and Gabriel become easy targets; stereotyped as “taggers” they are collapsed into narratives that associate graffiti or street art with gang violence and crime. However, this is less about “tagging” and more about a familiar racialized script of the “West Side”—that isolates, categorizes, and misrepresents young people growing up in this area of SLC. Historically, home to immigrant communities and the working class, these racialized representations of “West Side” students were designated as “at risk”—cuts both ways, justifying both their marginalization and educational disinvestment—while blaming them for their failure to succeed (Buendía & Ares, 2006; Cahill, 2006; Cahill, Gutiérrez Alvarez, & Quijada Cerecer, 2015). For young people and immigrants who live on the west side, it is difficult to run or hide from such narratives because their story has been told before they arrive (Grossberg, 2005). Central to this article is how young people like Gabriel and Miguel engage in artistic cultural production to resist generalizations made about them and their community while advocating the rights of others.
When Gabriel and Miguel run away from the police to avoid harassment, they also run somewhere and toward something. In this case, they run toward the MAA Collective, a shared participatory intergenerational space that young people create for each other and community. At MAA, Gabriel and Miguel are embraced as artists and knowledge bearers, not pejoratively misrepresented and criminalized as “taggers.” Understood to be stakeholders and active contributing members in our community, they/we engage in art, activism, and research. Our inquiry focuses upon the intimate and collective ways we come together to make meaning and experience our everyday lives on our own terms through participatory creative inquiry, engaging the arts both as a way of knowing and being in the world and as a form of resistance.
We write as co-founders and facilitators of MAA. As artists, researchers, and activists, we are not surprised that the arts have been eliminated from many public schools across the country in the name of austerity. While art is often understood in terms of aesthetics, instead if we, in the words of Madeline Fox, “consider art as much more, as a way to make meaning and generate knowledge, then we open up important pathways for knowledge production that might otherwise be foreclosed” (Bagley, 2008; Barone & Eisner, 2012; Denzin, 2003; Fox, 2015). We have learned that “opening up” how we know, not only what we know, becomes a critical epistemological move that resists and pushes back on stereotypes and the criminalization of communities of color. Fox (2015) argues that there exist limited perceptions over who has a right to conduct research and produce knowledge, and that this is what serves to maintain power structures that benefit only a few.
Stereotypes associated with pejorative labels, including criminal, dangerous, illegal immigrant, and “West Side,” function to simplify, misconstrue, exclude, and exploit communities of color as an ontological form of violence that targets brown bodies. At MAA, we engage in art as a form of resistance, challenging misrepresentations of our community. In this article, we discuss how art is an epistemological move that opens up new ways of understanding and knowing our world and representing ourselves. Our discussion of artistic cultural production combined with research and activism is an epistemological move centering our collective community concerns as a way of connecting us with each other. Cultural production necessitates new language, feeling, and emotion to describe, analyze, and understand our circumstances. This feels especially relevant in Utah, given the deep history of conservative majority rule (read as White Latter-Day Saints or Mormon) that has upheld knowledge to preserve Whiteness over the rights of women, immigrants, and people of color.
To this end, we turn to art as an expansive practice of meaning-making, not codified or embedded in traditional social science inquiry to question truth claims and oppressive conditions underlying our reality. Rather than move quickly to identify, name, analyze, and resolve our circumstances, we are encouraged by art-making that allows us to experiment, explore, raise questions, and dream across our shared inquiry. This shared inquiry creates an opportunity for us to explore our relationships with our social political context and how shared inquiry critically creates moments where we might see ourselves in one another’s struggle. In this article, we focus on the epistemological and ontological commitments of collective praxis as a way of practicing solidarity.
Drawing upon our work with the MAA Collective (https://maacollective.org), we engage in participatory action research (PAR) and the arts, considering examples from our collective work. We focus our discussion on research we conducted in the “belly of the beast,” during the legislative session at the Utah State Capitol (Cahill, Quijada Cerecer & Gutiérrez Alvarez (2015). Our analysis is based on ethnographic field notes, interviews, and documentation of our research projects and cultural productions. We write collectively as a strategic “we” to highlight our shared standpoint as co-researchers working collectively toward social change. This process belies the messiness of our process, which was rich with dissent and negotiation, not only in doing the work but also in developing our analysis. Matt Bradley, our esteemed former and beloved colleague and friend, who co-founded MAA with us (RIP 2012), was engaged in this discussion, and his perspective is embedded in our writing.
This article proceeds by describing the MAA Collective and our approach to PAR and cultural creative practices. Next, we discuss the context of our research and artistic practice, the Utah State Capitol during the legislative session where we witnessed how our communities were framed and profiled, paralleling similar positions we experienced on the West Side. Central to our discussion is how we engaged art, research, and activism as epistemological moves to question how we know and what we know about ourselves and others. Specifically we discuss how youth researchers and artists use spoken word to resist generalizations and systemic oppression underlying false representations. We conclude as we began, raising questions about how and what we know about community.
MAA: Who We Are, What We Do, and Where We Live
When we co-founded the MAA Collective in 2007, we envisioned a creative space of social justice inquiry for all ages to come together, make art, do participatory research, and engage in change in our community. We use the terms art and cultural praxis interchangeably here as a shorthand to refer to the collective cultural production we engage in as part of our inquiry process. We developed MAA as a university–community partnership with the Mestizo Institute for Culture & Arts (MICA) and the University of Utah, where we were all faculty members and students.
While some of the young people who join MAA do so because they are interested in either art or activism, others are drawn to a combination of both (i.e., “artivism”). Each year approximately 25 young people, aged 14 to 25, representing ethnically culturally diverse backgrounds (Latinx, Chicanx, mixed race, African American, Asian and Asian American), participate in MAA. MAA participants are identified as youth researchers and receive a stipend and university credit hours for their participation in the collective. Our roles as facilitators of MAA involved mentoring different projects, often shifting between projects depending upon what the needs were and how we could support and be involved. Over the past 10 years, MAA continues to act and participate with community, guided by the leadership of young people who are committed to each other and to sustaining this creative space of justice and community-based scholarship. 2
Our process is youth-led and places emphasis upon the particular contribution and access they bring to understanding their everyday lives. We engage with the premise that young people are active contributing members of society who possess knowledge to forge social justice, conduct original research, and dismantle oppressive conditions (Cahill, Rios-Moore, & Threatts, 2008; Quijada, 2008). With this in mind, we engage in PAR that is liberatory—a practice of “re-membering” excluded bodies, history, knowledge, culture, language that interrogates power and privileges underlying research” (Fine & Torre, 2004). PAR starts with “the understanding that people—especially those who have experienced historic oppression . . . hold deep knowledge about their lives and experiences, and should help shape the questions, [and] frame the interpretations [of research]” (Torre & Fine, 2006). More than a method, critical PAR is an epistemological position grounded in everyday life experience and a commitment to both the “right to conduct research” (Appadurai, 2006) and the right to represent (Cahill, 2006; Kindon, Pain, & Kesby, 2007; Pain, 2004; Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012; Tuck, 2009).
Art, like our PAR, is produced from deep concern and commitment for our community. We understand art as a culturally situated activity involving “actual people, under real social circumstances, in particular cultural contexts, and within specific material and symbolic relations” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 226). We aim to understand how collective cultural production is a practice of meaning-making, engaging our multiple intelligences beyond language as part of our inquiry, analysis, and activism (Gardner, 1993; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). For Latino immigrant young people growing up in Utah, where the regional “dominant culture,” Mormon Anglo, marginalizes alternative forms of expression, engaging in creative cultural praxis might indeed be a “practice of freedom” (Freire, 1974, p. 64).
We envision art-making as a process of inquiry whereby men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation. (Freire, 1974, p. 12)
As Jarred Martinez, spoken word artist and MAA mentor, further explains, art-making is “a process to really rearticulate something—to reimagine something . . . whether it is to inspire, to build community, to critique, to problematize, to reimagine, or to connect . . .” As will become clear in the body of the article, youth researchers cited in the opening vignette, Miguel and Gabriel, collectively engage the arts as inquiry to think about the social issues that they experience (i.e., anti-immigration policies, pejorative stereotyping) and to also transform them. In this way, perhaps we might understand cultural artistic practice as a “counter-story” of resistance to the “dominant culture,” at the same time reframing how we understand the intimate everyday dispossessions of neoliberalism (Fox & Fine, 2013).
Our work is personal and political. Together, we research, theorize, critique, create, and resist in the belly of the beast, in SLC, Utah (Cahill, Quijada Cerecer, & Gutiérrez Alvarez, 2015). To date, most scholars across the nation are surprised that our collaborative youth-centered research happens in SLC. Utah is not only one of the “reddest,” most conservative states in the country, it also one of the whitest, although this demographic is rapidly shifting. Utah is undergoing sweeping demographic transformations. For example, projections suggest that by 2050 the state will be 40% ethnic minority, which correspond with the fact that 75% of the enrollment increases in Utah’s public school system from 2000 to 2004 were students of color, mainly Latino (Perlich, 2006, 2008). From 2005 to 2015, the number of Latino students enrolled in public school nearly doubled (Harrington, 2005; Utah State Office of Education, 2015); however, the gap between young people of color and White students going to college is the widest in the country (Fry, 2011).
Political and public debate over immigration status, education, and geographic boundaries has become increasingly hostile, especially as Utah’s 90% White majority has shifted over the last few decades. Within this time span, hundreds of anti-immigrant policies have been proposed, dominating the state’s annual legislative session with xenophobic discourse that fans the fire of racism “demonizing” immigrants as the main problem with balancing the state budget and overall economic crisis (Cahill, 2010). In 2011, Utah legislated House Bill 497, also known as the Show Me Your Papers Please bill. This is Utah’s most punitive and comprehensive xenophobic policy which was modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070. Juxtaposed with these racist policies, there exist a few bright spots, including that Utah is one of 18 states where undocumented students qualify for in-state tuition rates to pursue higher education. This is the contradictory context that young people and their families negotiate, and this is the focus of our inquiry, activism, and cultural praxis.
Epistemological Movement at the State Capital: How “We the People” Know
As immigration issues are one of the most important concerns for the young people with whom we work, one significant site for our activist research is the Utah State Capitol. During each legislative session, we follow proposed policies and discuss their implications and potential impacts upon our community. We write our representatives, track bills, attend committee hearings, and speak to legislators about our concerns.
Several of our participatory research projects were inspired by our experiences at the state capital and address particular legislative concerns that affect our community. For example, the Edúcate project (https://educate-utah.org/) focuses on the educational issues of undocumented students and their families and was informed by our research findings that many students did not know they could attend college, and they did not know about their right to pay in-state tuition nor their educational rights (see Cahill, Gutiérrez Alvarez & Quijada 2015; Reyna & Rivarola, 2016). Another project, “Media representations of young people of color,” focused on how the stereotyping of young people, and immigrant youth in particular, as criminal and dropouts informs policy and the impact upon young people’s everyday lives (see Quijada Cerecer, Cahill, & Bradley, 2013).
Following the work of Cahill and Torre (2007), we ask: What is the purpose of our research? To whom do we want to speak? How will this affect our community? And, how might we reach out to diverse publics? Whether PAR is to make a meaningful contribution beyond the armchair revolution—action!—is of critical concern. In this spirit, we co-created a site-specific spoken word piece, “We the people,” which MAA performed in the rotunda of the state capital on the last night of the Utah State Legislative session. Speaking to the ongoing struggles faced by our communities, the piece was inspired by our research and was another way that we shared our work with a broader public. “We the people” was co-facilitated by Jarred Martinez and Yvette González, spoken word artists and MAA Collective mentors (and co-authors of this article). MAA performed the piece as part of a poetry reading at the capital that Jarred and Yvette organized with and for youth activists and community members. The title of the piece, “We the People,” refers to the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, rearticulating its meaning based on personal, familial, and communal lived experiences, and was performed by members of the collective who took on different parts. Here is an excerpt:
(One voice) We the people of the Westside!
(2 mujeres) Las SUPA cholas of love.
(One voice) We the people of the Westside.
(One male voice) We from Your so called “shadow” lands, . . . My home, . . . My pride Land. . . . Come one, . . . Come all. Welcome Home, homes!
(2 voices) Home Sweet Home. (shake hands)
(Jarred) We are the familia, the people. We the familia who cares and has each other’s back. We the ones that regulate.
(Yvette, Jessica, Laura)The Sista cholas of love
A group of 4 walk toward the first group—creating spatial divide and representing the rupture of safety- threatening body language from the corporates
(Jaynell) We the people (the corporates) we’ve come to tell you what to do and how to live. It’s not my fault that you guys just can’t do everything we do and how we do it. That is the reason why we get lobbyists to change laws to fit our needs not yours.
(Sara) We own your labor and know that you need the money. . . So go ahead and quit if you don’t like the health plan. . . There’s a person behind you, waiting to replace YOU! Not to worry—we got your interest in mind—so sit back, relax and let us take control
(Natalie) We who started off by putting chains on ankles and wrists, and stole dirt and earth even though it was a gift. We who re-sell what you build and break your backs in the field so our green eyes of dead-presidents can keep slavery alive, and if you don’t do your time in our factory then we’re sure we have one of your family doin’ time in the yard without salary.
Initial group speaks in protest and with assertive voice.
(Jessica) You call us gangsters and yet you have come to change laws that only profit you. . .
(Jessica) It is obvious we will not melt into the pot, but rather we’ll savor our flavors in a pico de gallo bowl.
(Jose) We are most importantly the people who make up Utah.
The process of creating the spoken word piece provided what Erika Apfelbaum (2001) describes as a social and shared context for the witnessing and reliving of each other’s private experiences of discrimination. Yvette describes it this way: For me it felt like the power was in owning our stories, and in telling them from our perspectives. And I think that’s the political act itself. That’s the transformative part in that we were owning our stories and in owning them there was a process of self-inquiry. . . . That was the transformative piece.
To this end, our shared identity as “people of the West Side” included acknowledgment that Gabriel and Miguel’s experience with the police as described in the opening vignette was not just their own but affected everyone on the West Side. Recognizing that divisions exist between police and residents—or Self and “Other”—is a form of analysis that youth researchers extended when debriefing how laws and policy were shaped by representatives they encountered during the legislative session. Whiteness prevailed as witnessed how passive, nondissenting voices were accepted and normalized when they fell in line with dominant majority political positions in the State Legislature. Such sentiments fall in line with the anti-immigrant policies being proposed, whereby immigrant communities, (i.e., our families and neighbors) are placed on a spectrum of blame and accountability that overlooks—or denies—the role of global economic restructuring. The persistent inquiry about who is “legal” or “illegal” continues to frame issues and define policy without naming who benefits from the readily available surplus of underpaid labor, or how and why this is systematically maintained. For example, as Representative Donnelson, a Utah legislator supported by the Minutemen, said to the MAA youth researchers when we met him in the hallways of the capital, “I’m sorry your mother broke the law crossing the border illegally, and now you have to pay for her mistakes, for her criminal behavior. This is a country of rules and laws” (Cahill, 2010).
While cultural praxis may be a more accessible and meaningful way to reach out to broader publics “beyond the journal article” (Cahill & Torre, 2007), another way to consider “action” is to reflect upon ourselves and how in this process we are developing our own subjectivities (Cahill, 2007). Denzin (2003) suggests that we do not write culture; rather, we perform it. In the doing of it—in the performance—we have the potential to create a new, critical, and political space. Denzin further states that “if we know the world only through our representations of it, then to change the world, we must change how we write and perform it.” Our piece, “We the People” was developed by us, for us. Privileging our own community, we rearticulated the dominant narrative. We did not create this piece for legislators to think differently about us or expect our work to change their minds, but instead focused our attention upon our own collective agency. As Yvette says above, “this is the transformative piece.”
Beyond communicating facts or findings, “We the people” engages an emotional register, expanding the space of knowledge production in dialogue with the public. “Telling is knowing one’s story” (Apfelbaum, 2001, p. 24), and Apfelbaum (2001) also suggests that what is critical is a willingness to become “part of the transmission” (p. 31). Spoken word performance creates a collective space for conscientization (Boal, 2000; Freire, 1997). By performing our critical consciousness, we develop our sociopolitical awareness, as Jarred explains: The act of doing it within the capital was symbolic. Connecting the dots between lived experiences and our stories, some of the things that were going on, and some of the research we were doing .. other people’s perceptions. And the acting; and the doing, and expressing the learning of that in a space that we were not expected to be at or listened to in . . . . And at the same time, being aware of all of that, and intentionally doing it in this way.
With pride in our oppositional stance, we proceeded with caution as we navigated the process of advocating for our community. Taking up space and articulating “We the People” in one of the whitest, most conservative state legislatures in the country made us even more aware of our commitment to each other and to our community as we questioned what we know and understand about ourselves. Our inquiry propelled us to ask, “why do they hate us?” (Cahill, 2010), while requiring that we care and commit to one another as we delved deeply into our research (Cahill, Quijada Cerecer, Reyna Rivarola, & Hernández Zamudio, 2019).
As opposed to thinking of social and political change as happening out there, and investing in others the power to transform our world, our emphasis instead is upon recognizing the power that we possess to create change in our own lives. As Robin D.G. Kelly (2014) explained, change requires a set of simple breaks in structure—structural power breaks. Perhaps most importantly of all, those breaks are also conceptual because you cannot design a different future unless you can think through the current one . . . We are the breaks. (p. 93)
Connecting the dots, as Jarred says, is the epistemological move where in the spoken word process the young people involved drew lines between their everyday lived experiences, how they identify, and how it feels to be dispossessed by neoliberal global restructuring. And, importantly, at the same time that we connected the dots, we connected with each other and our community. Yvette explains this in her reflection on the process: . . . I remember that most of the people who were present for the performance were people from our community. So it felt like we had support of the people who cared about us. So that felt really connecting . . . like a really loving space. Even though we were risk-taking and being in a space we felt marginalized most days, but to just be there, to be there with multiple generations of people who were striving for the same thing, that was to tell our stories and to take up space. That was really powerful.
Instead of directing action, outward toward others, our activism is oriented toward our own community and how through cultural praxis we might try to build community in more liberating ways. Placing emphasis upon ourselves and our own community might, in this way, be understood an epistemological move that is simultaneously an ontological move. Our knowing is inseparable from our relationships with each other and from our commitment to being a collective (Smith, 2012).
Conclusion
In our opening vignette Gabriel and Miguel ran from the police to avoid being stereotyped as criminals. They ran toward our collective participatory space (MAA) where they and their cultural artistic production are valued and understood as a possible source of solidarity. More than art, collective cultural artistic production generates opportunity to witness one’s reality in relation to the community with whom we participate and engage. Rather than understand ourselves in isolation, we seek refuge in the knowing relationships we create through artistic practice so that we might better question both what and how we know. For us, cultural artistic practice becomes a starting place.
Participatory cultural praxis and research recognizes not only the connectedness of knowing, doing, and being but also how we know, do, and are in the world. This is obviously significant in Utah where the “dominant culture” dominates. Knowing that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 2003), we are committed to doing research differently in a way that honors our whole selves, our cultures, and our community. Like Gabriel and Miguel, this necessitates that we move toward collective spaces that allow us to question, know, and understand ourselves rather than be profiled by stereotypes that mischaracterize the complex realities of our lives. And, in this neoliberal political moment where big data are being collected every time we click on our cell phones, we purposefully slow down the moment of knowing. This in itself might be understood as a project of resistance. Through creative inquiry, we pause, negotiate, and connect with each other. How we know is tightly intertwined with what we know. Together we develop a collective analysis that is as intimate as it is global (Pratt & Rosner, 2012). By engaging in expressive cultural practices, we rearticulate research, reimagining how we build the house, who we are building the house for, and why we are building it in the first place. In this way, we “work” the minor, as theorized by Cindi Katz (1996), to “decompose the major from within,” returning to questions we raised earlier with regard to the purpose and publics of research. Katz (2017) also explains that minor theory is doing theory differently, working from the inside out—“of fugitive moves and emergent practices interstitial with “major” productions of knowledge” (p. 4). Understanding collective cultural praxis within this frame and as we undo and rework to transform the way we know, we can attend to the differentiated ways that we experience and make sense of everyday contradictions of neoliberalism. Katz (2017) continues that “subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities are embodied, situated, and fluid; that their productions of knowledge are inseparable from–if not completely absorbed in—the mess of everyday life . . .” In the process of creating something together, we struggle together, build relationships with each other, collectively theorize, and “act” differently in the world, as articulated in the last few lines of “We the People” together: (Jessica) We share the same land, breathe the same air, live on the same soil. Why are we not treated the same? (ALL) We have come—our time is now! Today! Not yesterday! (Laura) We are rejecting the crumbs we have been given and demand that we be given a piece of the pie—a piece with which we will nourish our communities and counteract the hunger we have been plagued with. (All) We are hungry! Hungry for change! (One voice) Meaningful change!
Robin D.G. Kelley (2014) argues that change doesn’t always involve getting people organized on the street, but instead may include new ways of thinking and understanding ourselves. For us, placing emphasis upon our collective subjectivity, our “We” in “We the People,” challenges the premium put upon autonomy and personal accountability in a neoliberal context where “each person should be obliged to be prudent, responsible for their own destinies, actively calculating their futures . . .” (Rose, 2000, p. 324). Instead, like Kelley (2014, p. 93), we too believe that “We are the breaks” and this commitment informs our analysis and our practice. While this may not immediately affect structural change, Kelley suggests that these conceptual shifts are always about opening up the potential: “you can’t design a different future unless you can think through the current one.” To this proclamation we add that collective creative inquiry affords us the space for creating a world within a world where we are thinking through, undoing and redoing theoretical propositions together as ways of knowing and being in the world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
