“Artivista: Music, Community, and Social Movement in East LA”

The 2023 Ramona Arreguin de Rosales Lecture presented by the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies

A conflation of two words; artista (artist) and activista (activist), artivista signals more than just an identity. As Gonzalez will demonstrate, artivismo is a philosophy and way of existing through music and art practice. Via a multimedia talk that involves music, poetry and song Martha Gonzalez will discuss her book Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles (UT Austin Press 2020), Gonzalez will share the varying ways music methods have been implemented in East Los Angeles as a way to resist, organize and build community beyond the confines of the stage. In this way Chican@ Artivistas is a critical examination of artist/activist in East Los Angeles from 1990's into the present. 

Although the book project recognizes that earlier generations of Chican@ movement artists strived to advance social justice issues through music and art practices, Gonzalez' analysis is focused on the ways in which a new generation of artists from East LA learned from their elders, yet moved in new directions by utilizing their skills as artists to not only build and strengthen community, but doing so by drawing on music and art as tools of dialogue. Inspired by the Mayan Zapatista Movement that came onto international consciousness in 1994, Chicano and Chicana artists in East LA began to focus on creative expression as verb and action rather than object or commodity.