Chicago artists channel creativity into protesting the immigration crackdown

The Trump administration's nationwide immigration crackdown has ignited protests from Los Angeles

to Minneapolis.

It has also galvanized grassroots artists and community organization.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from Chicago where shootings involving federal

immigration agents and President Trump's threats to send in the National Guard led to city-wide

protests.

Artists have been at the center of the movement using their skills and resources as part

of organized dissent.

This report is part of our art and action series exploring the intersection of art

and democracy and our canvas arts coverage.

At first glance, a normal craft knight at a neighborhood art center.

But as volunteers full printed pamphlets called zines, they're really participating in

a grassroots political protest.

With everything that's been going on since the summer with immigration and ICE presence,

we started a whistle community alert campaign.

And so people come in on Mondays and Tuesdays to help pack whistles and zines.

Theresa Magganya is an artist and co-founder of the Pilsen Arts and Community House in Chicago.

It hosts art exhibitions, teaches classes for kids, and offers a free space for artists

to work.

It's in the heart of the heavily Latino Pilsen neighborhood, which has been one target

area amid the Trump administration's city-wide immigration raids.

The zines and whistles instruct volunteers how to signal to residents when ICE is in the

neighborhood.

Magganya was inspired after seeing protests in Los Angeles this past summer.

It came very naturally for us to say, hey, this is something we know we have capacity

to do.

We're artists.

We know how to make zines.

We know how to make a design.

Why through this place?

Why was that your response?

We are a community space focused on arts, but we also are very much part of an activist

community.

Pilsen in Chicago is historically known for that through the arts and through our voices.

The history of that activism is written quite literally on the walls of the Pilsen neighborhood.

Political murals here go back decades, protesting gentrification, American military intervention,

and more recently the presence of federal immigration agents in the city.

Local printmaker Otlan Arceo Wixel has turned his focus to helping, and printmaking is

an art form that enables him to get his work out quickly.

Now we have all this water-based media that dries really fast.

It's something you can kind of push out to your networks of support, whether that be

for a demonstration in the streets or for, you know, pasting up outside or, you know,

labeling to a telephone pole.

From a graphic image perspective, what do you need to make it work?

Having a balance between the words and the images, key because sometimes the image is

the thing that holds you after you're able to read the text.

Making sure those images reach people in the real world presents another balance.

I think there is a tendency for people to think about the arts as something that doesn't

happen in our everyday life.

Art Professor Malita Morales is part of a collective that supports immigrant families impacted

by federal raids.

She organizes events where the group makes banners together, using art to get out their

message and to build community.

My role as an artist is to create opportunities for people to come together and work side-by-side

and ask each other questions about who they are and how they got to Chicago and their

lives as we sit and work with each other.

Morales also silkscreens bandanas that so-called rapid response groups use to identify each

other when they watch for immigration agents in their neighborhoods.

I think a lot of times artists are processing the world around them and they express that

through their use of color form and shape.

And when they're brought to view in a public world, then they become meanings that are

expressed and negotiated by all those who view them.

This becomes more of an everyday image, doesn't it?

You've seen this in different ways in our news.

The scenes of the immigration crackdown in the streets and the protests against it are

also impacting how traditional arts institutions think, says Jose Ochoa, president of the National

Museum of Mexican Art.

His wake-up call came after Department of Homeland Security officials showed up at the National

Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture last summer.

We needed to know how to engage if ICE were to come to the door, what do we tell our people,

what happens to our guest, employees, what do we have school groups, what do we do?

So he organized an event with cultural institutions across the city.

The rules of the game kept changing and so here at the museum, we've had to keep moving

along and so back then, in the summer, I was learning how to identify the warrants.

What's an administrative warrant versus a judicial warrant?

These are not the kind of concerns you thought you'd have as a head of a museum.

No, not really.

Am I completely surprised?

No.

In communities of color and in disenfranchised communities, we're always waiting for

the shoot to drop.

That's always going to drop on us first.

Museum is also saving pieces of community protest art.

It's traditional work of collecting art now very much in the moment.

Promoted artists in Chicago's hip-hop community, including Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper,

have also been using their voices to respond to what they're seeing.

We're seeing videos of things, people getting pushed out of buildings and out of cars and

things of that sort and it's like, you can't unsee it.

We met 30-year-old Femda, a Chicago native warrant in Nigerian immigrant parents, who's

active in the community as a musician and head of an education and civic engagement nonprofit.

I'm a child of immigrants, so it's an extremely personal one.

It could be me.

So how does that impact you as an artist as a musician?

Having a platform, whether that is just a music itself or the platform I've built based

off the music, it's like, okay, I have to be able to speak to this in some capacity.

Simply just tapping into my community, what's happening, what's going on, how can I be

of service, how can I amplify things, and also create safe places for community to develop.

Because also like, people also experiencing joy and also have a community as equally

as radical.

Back at the Pilsen Arts and Community House, Theresa Magganya says she sees her work as

part of a wider movement.

The community that has stepped in here, they've taken it back home to their family, their

friends, to local businesses.

It's just a way to spread the pollen, you know.

In the form of whistles and zines, with orders for more coming in nationwide.

For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown in Chicago.