En El Frente (On the Front): How Activist-Designers in the Chicano Movement Developed a Distinctive Visual Language to Fight for Social Justice in the U.S.

Abstract

Note: In this essay, the term "Chicano" is used because it was the identifier claimed by historical participants in the Mexican American Movement in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The Mexican American Movement is a term that has been expanded since its inception in the mid-1960s and that has addressed many different social, cultural, political, and economic issues, but it mostly focused on four: land ownership. workers' rights, and educational and political equality.1 In the context of this discourse, the authors offer that the Mexican American Movement is synonymous with the Chicano Movement. The authors also utilize the contemporary term Latinx to refer to a person of Latin American origin or descent.2 Along with other civil rights movements like Black Power, women's liberation, and gay rights that were initiated and sustained in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond), the Chicano Movement (also known as El Movimiento) advocated for social justice by using independent publications to amplify its message. Independent publications are defined in this context as periodicals produced without approval from established publishers and presses or against the wishes of a dominant governmental or institutional group.3 Newly accessible and affordable design technologies such as offset printing and production technologies brought about a rise of independent publishing in the U.S. in the 1960s--especially in urban American settings--and helped fuel the rise of the American activist-designer. The ability to utilize these types of publications to disperse information quickly to targeted audiences allowed for the correction of at least some of the disinformation about the Chicano movement that had begun to appear in the traditional, American "white press," and in the so-called mass media of the time.4 For example, the independent Los Angeles newspaper and magazine La Raza observed in 1969 that neither the Los Angeles Times nor the Herald Examiner published many stories about Mexican-Americans, and in the stories they did print, 80% had been, in the words of one scholar, "sensationalized reports of crime allegedly committed by Mexican-Americans."5 Activists within the Chicano community designed and wrote these publications to serve as a record of social, political, cultural, and economic events, and encourage their readerships to act by unionizing, boycotting products, and marching in demonstrations to advocate for social justice. After documenting and critically analyzing the Chicano publications archived at research centers at universities in California and Texas, the authors observed the repeated usage of a unique genre of formal patterns utilized in the compositions of the cover designs of many of these Chicano publications. The authors are using these critical observations to posit that these graphic compositions constitute a distinctive Chicano visual language that consists of original, stylized deployments of imagery, icons, and masthead typography, and that this visual language was operationalized to visually communicate the socio-cultural locations of the issues these publications were addressing in ways that would effectively resonate with their particular audiences. The visual languages that affected the compositions of the covers and, in some cases, the interior page spreads of these independent Chicano publications (i.e. newspapers, newsletters, flyers, and small magazines intended for readerships in areas such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) were critical to the formation and sustenance of the Chicano visual and socio-cultural identity and the role these played in visually communicating the ideals of the Chicano movement across the American southwest.The visual essay and narrative organized for Dialectic is titled En El Frente, which translates from Spanish to English as "On the Front." It documents and analyzes some of the ways that the assertions and formal arrangements of these uniquely Chicano visual language elements and compositions were used in these publications by the designer activists who created them to advocate for social, economic, and political justice in and around their communities. Between approximately 1966 and late 1979, over 300 Chicano publications from 150 communities (mostly in the American southwest, but also Chicago, Illinois, Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C.) were designed and distributed across the United States, and together they constitute an important addition to the predominantly white American design canon.6 By making this particular historical analysis of periodical publications designed and written by Chicanos more accessible to contemporary design practitioners in the U.S. and around the world, the authors seek to expand the canon of historical approaches to engaging in and executing visual communication design processes in ways that might positively influence these processes, particularly in the U.S., so as to make them more broadly informed, equitable, and inclusive.