The Chismosas Revolution in San Francisco
Installation view of Chismosas entrance, photo by Sarai Montes.
The intersection of 24th Street and Mission is busy and bustling. At the heart of San Francisco’s Latino Cultural District, outside the 24th Street BART plaza, you will find a series of vibrant murals, señoras participating in alternative economies, and a plethora of nearby taquerías, panaderías, coffee shops, and markets. Less than a block away stands the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA), a multidisciplinary arts organization with an anchoring presence in the neighborhood since its inception in 1977. Located on the second floor of the center’s 37,000-square-foot space is its printmaking studio, Mission Gráfica, which opened in 1982. An invaluable community resource, Mission Gráfica has since been a historic resource hub for Chicanx and Latinx graphic arts activism in the Bay Area. Consisting primarily of silkscreen and woodcut prints, the studio has birthed an ever-growing archive by artists addressing political issues resonant both locally and across the world—many of them archived and collected by institutions such as the Library of Congress and the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
When San Francisco–based artists Alejandra Rubio and Sarai Montes met in March 2023, it was at the center. They were individually interviewing for its coveted R.A.I.C.E.S. fellowship; although neither received it, the center offered them a year-long artist apprenticeship, marking the beginning of an unexpected, collaborative journey together as artists and new friends. Their joint exhibition Chismosas, which was on view at the MCCLA from January 26–February 23, 2024, was the culmination of their apprenticeship.
“I do believe we’re able to have these very revolutionary conversations and at the same time be confident in our girlhood. This is part of our experience and who we are.”
In Chismosas, Rubio and Montes presented new prints they made together at Gráfica. While not expected of them, they willingly chose to produce a collaborative exhibition because of their shared artistic and political concerns. As Montes and Rubio tell me over tea and coffee at Café La Bohéme on 24th Street, the project “always felt collaborative from the start.” This body of work derives from their time spent “chismeando” inside and outside of the studio. But instead of interpreting the concept of “chisme” as nosy gossip, they approach it more like an inherited oral tradition—one rooted in solidarity, protection, and social and political awareness.
Alejandra Rubio and Sarai Montes at the opening of their exhibition, Chismosas at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, CA, photo courtesy of Alejandra Rubio and Sarai Montes.
As a result, many of the print works in the show express solidarity with the long struggle for Palestinian liberation. They denounce the most recent acts of genocide in Palestine, where Israeli military forces have killed over 30,000 people and displaced nearly 2 million since October 2023. Others address issues of gentrification in the Mission District, imperialism and femicide in Latin America, and affective, diasporic tributes to culture and ancestry.
“I do believe we're able to have these very revolutionary conversations and at the same time be confident in our girlhood,” Rubio says. “This is part of our experience and who we are.”
Not interested in the sterile, museological practice of simply hanging up artworks on white walls subject to the public gaze, the two artists created and exhibited a series of symbolic mixed-media, ready-made installations, and prints. Each of them contained a curated selection of Rubio’s and Montes’ belongings and photographs, combining a myriad of girly trinkets and ephemera, everyday Latinx household items such as pink jabón Zote, family pictures, and anti-colonial books, including Edward Said’s Orientalism, Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. These works, made using tables and bookcases, in part evoked the culturally familiar aesthetics of domestic ofrendas, interweaving material expressions of personal and collective history, memory, and identity while asserting their sanctity.
There were opportunities for folks to interact with the exhibition, too. Rubio and Montes whimsically installed a white and pink accent mailbox, encouraging guests to anonymously write down chisme and “send” it to them. To their surprise, many people did. In its entirety, the show’s layout evoked feelings of home and friendship, with cute rugs, a dining room table, a comfy couch to sit on, board games, a TV, and a large mirror—with the word “Chismosa” painted on it—placed throughout the space. A wooden key holder mounted on the wall welcomed guests. The holder declared: “En este hogar, somos chismosas y anti-imperialistas,” in bubbly pink pastel letters, which set the tone for the rest of the exhibition. Juxtaposing these works, Rubio and Montes sought to draw the links between entrenched, interconnected settler-colonial violences and their experiences as women of color.
Installation view of Chismosas, photo by Sarai Montes.
Growing up in the Bay Area has heavily informed and influenced the artists and cultural workers. Arguably one of the most special, culturally rich places in the world, the region is now the most expensive metropolitan area in the United States—a result of its lucrative tech industry, poor governmental leadership, and increased militarization under late-stage capitalism.
Landing first in the Mission District, Rubio moved to San Francisco when she was 12 after having lived in different U.S. states and Mexico. Seeing how difficult it was for her mother to find stable, affordable housing, Rubio left San Francisco in 2016 to attend college at the University of California, Santa Cruz with a plan to major in computer science and eventually work in tech. She changed her mind during her first year. Switching her major to psychology and studio art, she initially honed most of her printmaking skills through coursework, finding it to be a much more engaging practice than drawing and painting. “When I made the change out of computer science, [I] wanted to find a way to be in service to my community,” she says.
As a teenager in San Francisco, Rubio began social justice organizing, allowing her to name the injustices she witnessed in her community. For example, in 2015, she watched as Mission Market—a 108-year-old, mixed-use building housing Latinx businesses and residents on 22nd and Mission—caught fire in an electrical blaze and burned down due to a faulty fire alarm system. She references this event in the print From the ashes, we will rise (2023), acknowledging that in rapidly gentrifying urban neighborhoods, there has been a vast history of mysterious building fires, only to later become more profitable housing developments. Ignoring multiple pleas to build affordable housing in its place, just at the end of last year, the owner of the still-empty site proposed a 10-story market-rate apartment building.
In light of the fact that by July 2024, the MCCLA will also need to leave its historic location due to necessary “seismic and HVAC retrofitting” to a still unknown, unsecured space, Rubio also created Keep Us in the Mission (2023), a statement in support of the center’s hopeful efforts to find a suitable replacement building in its own neighborhood. Looking out the window of La Bohéme, she reflects on all of the changes in the neighborhood—which she assures me have been occurring for years now—and her post-grad decision to stay rooted here. What feels most urgent for Rubio in these moments is continuing to find a way to create community spaces for people to gather and engage in dialogue that are accessible, inclusive, and sustainable.
“I think if people were able to see those connections, we would build more solidarity with each other within our movements and not try to isolate ourselves in our communities.”
In contrast, Montes, who is part of the Oaxacan Ñuu Savi (People of the Rain) and Salvadoran diaspora, grew up in the East Bay. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating last spring with a degree in ethnic studies, film, and art practice. Despite not having a prior relationship to the MCCLA, Montes learned about the history of the center and screen printing in general through her ethnic studies and arts curriculum, specifying that its role in social and political movements had always been foregrounded to her.
Reflecting on the decision to set up the Chismosas show like a living room, Montes talks about honoring the sacred notion of home in her work, thinking about the intergenerational impact of displacement on her own family and the Indigenous community members she holds close in California. Calling attention to the fact that the issue of Palestine is also one of forced migration via architectural destruction, illegal settler construction, and redevelopment, Montes says, “These issues are very much interconnected. I think if people were able to see those connections, we would build more solidarity with each other within our movements and not try to isolate ourselves in our communities. Hopefully, that is something that we can help achieve through the art that we make.”
In a departure from the pretty pink aesthetics of the show, in her mixed-media installation Savi Tears, Montes explored self-portraiture in shades of blue ink. She hung a framed screen print of herself as a melancholic clown floating on rain clouds as tears dripped down her face. Surrounding the print, she pinned a series of plush raindrops/teardrops to the wall, which she made with the generous help of her mom, and included a set of small, delicate blue bows. The title—which combines Mixteco with English—roughly translates to “tears of the rain.” The piece encapsulates her thinking through her different identities and her deeply emotional, diasporic experiences despite a societal denigration of feeling.
Installation view of Chismosas, photo by Sarai Montes.
What makes Rubio’s and Montes’ works so significant are the simultaneously wounding and reparative ways in which they assert that femininity, girlhood, and matriarchy hold a crucial role in revolution, both in their art and personal lives. There is a conflicting tension that the two artists extract and play upon together so well. On one hand, it reminded me of the reverence I feel for the matriarchs in my family who have made the domestic sphere their place and ultimate source of pride, creating beauty out of cooking, sewing, and caregiving. I thought about my single mom and how she unknowingly embodies the principles of mutual aid with most women she meets.
Society often characterizes femininity as stagnant, unimportant, frivolous, and materialistic—even in “revolutionary” spaces and discourse—but Rubio’s and Montes’ works appear as an explicit contestation and refusal of these ideas. Instead, femininity is a proposed vehicle for healing and repair. Knowing how displacement, as an arm of colonialism, “distorts, disfigures, and destroys [the past of oppressed people],”¹ I felt seen in Rubio’s and Montes’ baby pictures and cute things—many of which they have had since childhood—intimately understanding that they held so much more social and emotional value beyond the fleeting properties of their materiality.
On the other hand, it was a sober reminder of the pain women and girls of color around the world carry, and more specifically, across different intersections of identity and experiences. Seeing a bright red handprint symbolic of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement on a pretty porcelain plate at the dining table to numbers representing the child death toll in Gaza in print, a line by Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad reverberated in my mind: “Shit is complicated, and I don’t know what to think, but I know who will pay. Women, mostly colored and poor, will have to bury children and support themselves through grief.” My mind went to the women and girls in Gaza and across the world facing a slew of reproductive and health care injustices, sexual violence, poverty, incarceration, displacement, and forced starvation. I thought about all of the insidious patriarchal, heterosexist, extractive dynamics many have to struggle against to obtain meaningful, just lives, the insurgent wars we continue to have to wage on the global structures that limit our collective agency and potential, and the impact of that on our individual and collective physical and emotional well-being.
Installation view of Chismosas, photo by Sarai Montes.
How do we reconcile these paradoxes? How do we build the world and the histories we deserve? Rubio and Montes continue to demonstrate that this work, much like the art of screen printing, is an embodied and communal process that exists between love and rage. Neither one of them sees their work as a solitary practice or as a way to make a profit, nor do they measure success via colonial, capitalist metrics. Instead, they have chosen to work together, with each other, with close friends, community members, fellow artists, and local activists. Even now that their apprenticeship has ended, Rubio and Montes continue to dream up new work together—maybe even future iterations of Chismosas—and spend ample time writing affectionately about one another on social media.
Both artists work within a male-dominated artistic medium with a history of being exclusionary. Rubio and Montes are also working within a longer genealogy of feminist arts activism internationally and in the Bay Area, including in the vein of recent collaborator and celebrated artist Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde. As they pay homage to many elders they have also taken on the duty of keeping this tradition alive in new and unique ways. At Mission Gráfica, where the studio and its archive has at certain times followed traditional conventions and centered male artists, Rubio and Montes have made tangible, collective efforts to alter its language and legacy. In addition to the show, they also hosted a weekly workshop called Colectiva Ella as part of their apprenticeship. There, the two designated a space exclusively for women, femme, and nonbinary printmakers, both new and established, to come together for the first time in Gráfica’s history. In the process, they generated consciousness-raising conversations about who the studio serves and how folks think of and describe it.
In her 1979 speech at the Second Sex Conference, Audre Lorde said that “for women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. . . Interdependency between women is the only way to the freedom which allows the ‘I’ to ‘be,’ not in order to be used, but in order to be creative.” She went on to say that “without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”² Rubio and Montes offer a compelling reassurance, reminding me that art feels at its most liberatory when it authentically comes from Lorde’s kind of radical conviction and praxis. Hearing what both artists are thinking, dreaming, and envisioning for the future, it is clear that Rubio and Montes’ Chismosas revolution is by no means over, it has only just begun.
Footnotes
¹Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth. Pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Constance Farrington (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 210.
²Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House*” in Sister Outsider: Letters and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 111–112.
Vanessa Pérez Winder (b. Lima Peru, 1996) is a writer, editor, and MA candidate in the Visual and Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. They believe in working toward liberatory and experimental forms of art historical study and curatorial action, and are interested in collaborative, community based, and site specific artistic practices and public interventions.