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The Trump administration's nationwide immigration crackdown has ignited protests from Los Angeles
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It has also galvanized grassroots artists and community organization.
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Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from Chicago where shootings involving federal
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immigration agents and President Trump's threats to send in the National Guard led to city-wide
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Artists have been at the center of the movement using their skills and resources as part
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of organized dissent.
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This report is part of our art and action series exploring the intersection of art
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and democracy and our canvas arts coverage.
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At first glance, a normal craft knight at a neighborhood art center.
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But as volunteers full printed pamphlets called zines, they're really participating in
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a grassroots political protest.
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With everything that's been going on since the summer with immigration and ICE presence,
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we started a whistle community alert campaign.
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And so people come in on Mondays and Tuesdays to help pack whistles and zines.
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Theresa Magganya is an artist and co-founder of the Pilsen Arts and Community House in Chicago.
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It hosts art exhibitions, teaches classes for kids, and offers a free space for artists
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It's in the heart of the heavily Latino Pilsen neighborhood, which has been one target
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area amid the Trump administration's city-wide immigration raids.
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The zines and whistles instruct volunteers how to signal to residents when ICE is in the
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Magganya was inspired after seeing protests in Los Angeles this past summer.
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It came very naturally for us to say, hey, this is something we know we have capacity
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We know how to make zines.
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We know how to make a design.
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Why through this place?
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Why was that your response?
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We are a community space focused on arts, but we also are very much part of an activist
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Pilsen in Chicago is historically known for that through the arts and through our voices.
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The history of that activism is written quite literally on the walls of the Pilsen neighborhood.
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Political murals here go back decades, protesting gentrification, American military intervention,
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and more recently the presence of federal immigration agents in the city.
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Local printmaker Otlan Arceo Wixel has turned his focus to helping, and printmaking is
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an art form that enables him to get his work out quickly.
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Now we have all this water-based media that dries really fast.
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It's something you can kind of push out to your networks of support, whether that be
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for a demonstration in the streets or for, you know, pasting up outside or, you know,
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labeling to a telephone pole.
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From a graphic image perspective, what do you need to make it work?
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Having a balance between the words and the images, key because sometimes the image is
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the thing that holds you after you're able to read the text.
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Making sure those images reach people in the real world presents another balance.
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I think there is a tendency for people to think about the arts as something that doesn't
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happen in our everyday life.
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Art Professor Malita Morales is part of a collective that supports immigrant families impacted
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She organizes events where the group makes banners together, using art to get out their
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message and to build community.
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My role as an artist is to create opportunities for people to come together and work side-by-side
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and ask each other questions about who they are and how they got to Chicago and their
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lives as we sit and work with each other.
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Morales also silkscreens bandanas that so-called rapid response groups use to identify each
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other when they watch for immigration agents in their neighborhoods.
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I think a lot of times artists are processing the world around them and they express that
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through their use of color form and shape.
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And when they're brought to view in a public world, then they become meanings that are
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expressed and negotiated by all those who view them.
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This becomes more of an everyday image, doesn't it?
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You've seen this in different ways in our news.
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The scenes of the immigration crackdown in the streets and the protests against it are
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also impacting how traditional arts institutions think, says Jose Ochoa, president of the National
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Museum of Mexican Art.
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His wake-up call came after Department of Homeland Security officials showed up at the National
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Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture last summer.
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We needed to know how to engage if ICE were to come to the door, what do we tell our people,
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what happens to our guest, employees, what do we have school groups, what do we do?
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So he organized an event with cultural institutions across the city.
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The rules of the game kept changing and so here at the museum, we've had to keep moving
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along and so back then, in the summer, I was learning how to identify the warrants.
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What's an administrative warrant versus a judicial warrant?
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These are not the kind of concerns you thought you'd have as a head of a museum.
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Am I completely surprised?
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In communities of color and in disenfranchised communities, we're always waiting for
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That's always going to drop on us first.
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Museum is also saving pieces of community protest art.
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It's traditional work of collecting art now very much in the moment.
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Promoted artists in Chicago's hip-hop community, including Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper,
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have also been using their voices to respond to what they're seeing.
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We're seeing videos of things, people getting pushed out of buildings and out of cars and
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things of that sort and it's like, you can't unsee it.
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We met 30-year-old Femda, a Chicago native warrant in Nigerian immigrant parents, who's
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active in the community as a musician and head of an education and civic engagement nonprofit.
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I'm a child of immigrants, so it's an extremely personal one.
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So how does that impact you as an artist as a musician?
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Having a platform, whether that is just a music itself or the platform I've built based
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off the music, it's like, okay, I have to be able to speak to this in some capacity.
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Simply just tapping into my community, what's happening, what's going on, how can I be
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of service, how can I amplify things, and also create safe places for community to develop.
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Because also like, people also experiencing joy and also have a community as equally
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Back at the Pilsen Arts and Community House, Theresa Magganya says she sees her work as
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part of a wider movement.
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The community that has stepped in here, they've taken it back home to their family, their
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friends, to local businesses.
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It's just a way to spread the pollen, you know.
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In the form of whistles and zines, with orders for more coming in nationwide.
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For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown in Chicago.