Kevin McCloskey just returned from two months working on a sabbatical project on Mexican popular prints in Oaxaca, Mexico. He shares his thoughts about the changes he’s seen in the region since he reported for CS2 last July in his article Hasta Cosas Cambian: Until Things Change. The great photos below were taken by Kevin and his wife Patricia McCloskey, during their stay in Oaxaca. Additional articles and images of Oaxaca and the ASARO artists can be found in our December ‘07 issue, The Art of Revolution: Social Resistance in Oaxaca, Mexico; Update on ASARO Prints; Revolutionary Art of Oaxacca, Mexico, March 08; ASARO: Images of Oaxaca, August ‘08; and The Walls of Oaxaca, September ‘08.

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Oaxaca rests in the shadow of Monte Alban, a Zapotec city founded circa 700 B.C. Some archeologists call it the oldest city in North America. Oddly enough, this ancient place has become an epicenter for change in Mexico.

I know Oaxaca fairly well, but could never write a guidebook, as I never know what to expect. Last year, the central zocalo (public square) was filled with striking teachers and red banners. This winter, the only red on the square was a massive display of Christmas poinsettias. During the holiday season there were nightly free concerts, dance recitals and parades. Tourism has clearly rebounded from the troubled days of 2006. Visitors from wealthier parts of Mexico and Latin America have made up for the decline in U.S. visitors. The historic center city was squeaky clean for the holidays. There were still beggars playing beat-up accordions, but no noticeable new graffiti or demonstrations during the holidays.

At the edge of the tourist’s city, life remains as hard as ever. One morning I watched a woman and her son washing dishes in a communal sink. More than half of the family’s dinnerware consisted of white styrofoam, the sort we throw away. Meanwhile, in the historic city center a bread and circus atmosphere prevailed.

I must admit I was looking forward to the circus-like festivities of December 23, the annual “Noche de los Rabanos,” or “The Night of the Radishes.” Ever seen those misshapen vegetable freaks displayed at a county fair? Imagine those vegetables on steroids. Radish growers poke the soil to make human-shaped cavities. Filling these holes with sifted light sand coaxes the radishes into very peculiar doll shapes. Other farmers simply force-feed their seedlings with fertilizer and then sculpt figures from the monster radishes.

This year’s Night of the Radishes was a hit. Tourists waited two hours to photograph tabletop dioramas of indigenous dancers, local cathedrals, and patron saints all made of radishes. I caught a glimpse of the nativity scene; naturally, even baby Jesus was a radish.

A radish festival might seem like a politically neutral event, but nothing in Oaxaca is free of politics. Since this festival is supported by the government, there is an alternative, anti-government People’s Radish Festival. A truckload of enormous radishes was dumped at the alternate site seven blocks north of the zocalo. Officially, the place is called Plaza Carmen Alto. Leftists prefer to call it “Plaza of the Resistance” to commemorate the street-fighting of 2006.

Here the artists of the ASARO collective, among others, created radical radish sculptures. They envisioned the flip side of the tourist-pleasing scenes found at the zocalo, making memorials to the barricades: radish slingshots, radish gas masks, and radish helicopters. Nutty as it may seem, the dueling radish festivals are another small skirmish in the deadly serious culture war between the “powers that be” and “voices of the street.” Just as Oaxaca’s street artists use murals to reclaim the city’s mental map, these alternative festivals are an attempt to reclaim every date on the cultural calendar.

The ASARO collective, the Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca, has undergone some remarkable changes since I met them in 2007. In one year’s time their artwork went from being sold in the streets to gracing the walls of the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. The L.A. Times wrote a glowing review, “Even if you know little or nothing about the complex political events that inspired it, the art’s technical skill and emotive power is hard to miss.”

As co-curator of that exhibition, I got to fly out to California for the show last October. Unfortunately, the ASARO artists were unable to see their own exhibition. The U.S Embassy in Mexico City denied them entry visas.

Success has changed ASARO in ways large and small. The Fowler Museum holds a collection of their works, as does Center for the Study of Political Graphics, also in Los Angeles. The Kutztown University collection of ASARO prints is still traveling to college galleries. Upcoming 2009 exhibitions include Misericordia University and Ohio University.

As their fame grows, they are attracting serious collectors.  An international art collector contacted me by email to tell me she had purchased nearly all of ASARO’s large-scale canvas paintings and scores of their prints. She even traveled to Paris looking for a European exhibition venue for her ASARO collection.

One of the most visible changes for ASARO is their new gallery, Espacio Zapata, named for the revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata. ASARO never expected to be part of the gallery scene. In a sense, they have been forced above ground by the system. Today there are security cameras everywhere in central Oaxaca. ASARO can no longer put up prints or stencils at night without a swift police response. From the front step of the Espacio Zapata, I saw two remote control cameras. One of them was on a pole three stories high. The municipal government says they are traffic cams. ASARO says traffic is just a pretext for 24-hour surveillance.

One night I ran into a young ASARO member, Moxo, as he was wheat-pasting posters to city walls. The poster announced a lecture on Pre-Hispanic Astronomy. It was clearly apolitical, but he said he had to work through the night because a new law against “visual contamination” would go into effect the next morning. I thought he was exaggerating, but later that week three young men were jailed for putting up an anti-capitalist poster captioned “The Rich Will Pay for the Financial Crises.” Clearly, the selective enforcement of the visual contamination ordinance amounts to censorship. Espacio Zapata provides some small space for dissident visual expression.

I was able to attend two art openings at Espacio Zapata. Both were packed. Local fare, including fried grasshoppers and shots of mescal, were part of the attraction. One exhibition included graffiti by collectives from Oaxaca and Mexico City. Is graffiti really graffiti if it is done on a gallery wall? I’m not certain. The other exhibition, “Todos Somos Palestina, Todos Somos Mujeres de Cuidad Juarez,” had two distinct political themes, “We are all Palestinians, We are all Women of Juarez.” The artwork included rapid artistic responses to Israel’s attack on Gaza and a new portfolio of woodblock prints commemorating the hundreds of women murdered in Juarez near the Texas border. Both exhibitions are documented on ASARO’s myspace page.

The gallery space cost them 9000 pesos a month to rent, about $650. The start-up money came from the larger sales to their new ‘collectionistas’, or art collectors. Volunteers man the gallery, and the profits get poured back into the collective. Prints that once cost 50 to 100 pesos in the street now go for 400 pesos, about $35. Prints on canvas can cost up to $500, and original oil paintings are priced even higher. At one of the openings I observed an American tourist try to buy three prints. The ASARO volunteer told him to wait for the open-air market the next day so he could buy them for half the gallery price. How do you tell an anti-capitalist his business plan needs to be tweaked?

While I was in Oaxaca, my “Google Alert” for Mexico info brought me the distressing news that US military commanders think Mexico might suddenly become a failed state. From page 36 of The 2008 Joint Operating Environment, JOE, Report:

“In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico…The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels… Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

It pains me to imagine the great country of Mexico falling apart. Oaxaca has largely been spared the gangland style violence of the border region, but a former police chief was recently gunned down in broad daylight. On January 11, a Sunday morning, just outside the office of the U.S. Consulate, I wandered into a group of protesting anarchists waving a Palestinian flag. Oaxaca has no Israeli Consulate. Press photographers huddled around an Israeli flag burning in the street. Someone had painted a swastika over the flag’s blue Star of David. While I agree Israel was the aggressor at this point in time, I felt heartsick to see the nation’s flag burning.

About 30 angry young people chanted slogans. Their faces were covered, some with blue surgical masks. Others wore zipped-up hoodies and Palestinian-style scarves. A young woman led the call and response in Spanish, “Down with Israel!” “Gringo tourists out of Oaxaca!” “Bush out the White House!”

Bush would, in fact, be leaving the White House in a matter of days, but I could not find the courage to begin a discussion on the relative merits of participatory democracy.

Walking away from the anarchists, at the next block I saw a truckload of police. Turning the corner I gasped. A convoy of shiny black trucks stretched for blocks. I counted fifteen identical trucks. Police stood in the truck beds, all heavily armed. Most wore side-arms, but each truck had at least one officer with a machine gun. Like the anarchists, the police officers’ faces were covered by masks, uniform black balaclavas. Mexico’s Nobel prize-winning poet Octavio Paz suggested in The Labyrinth of Solitude that every Mexican wears a mask to assume his or her role in life. Here the great poet’s metaphor was being played out in the streets. I scanned my surroundings considering my own personal exit strategy.

There was no showdown that day. The anarchists melted away into the narrow side streets. The police caravan rumbled off slowly, winding through Oaxaca’s avenues in a show of force.There is an ASARO image with an updated portrait of a punk Zapata above the date 2010. Mexicans understand this to be a cry for another revolution. Zapata was a great hero of the Revolution of 1910. I’ve just read a history of that 1910 revolution. The Mexican Revolution lasted nearly ten years and dissolved into a bloody civil war. The casualties, by some estimates, reached a million dead. I don’t wish another revolution like that on any country. Hopefully, Mexico will find another formula for change.

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Next Issue:Kevin McCloskey shares images from his pilgrimage to Mexico City’s Taller Grafica Popular. The TGP is “arguably the single most significant graphics workshop in the Americas” and “virtually unknown in the United States,” according to art historian Lincoln Cushing.

TGP links:

Docspopuli site with images from UC Berkeley library:http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Bancroft/TGP.html

Princeton’s TGP sitehttp://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=gc061

Wikipedia (brief entry)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Taller_de_Gráfica_Popular

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