<b>Reimagining Afro-Puerto Rican History and Dispelling Stereotypes Within Media</b>
What do you do when your history has faced mainstream erasure? Growing up I had many questions that usually went unanswered. If it wasn’t about Puerto Rico’s time as a Spanish colony or our unwanted and unbreakable tie to the U.S, then teachers remained silent when I asked about my country’s history. Watching TV was no help either. Mainstream media grouped Puerto Ricans with other Latinx POC. When we were finally given a chance to shine individually, we were forced to fit a certain persona. The maid, baby mama, drug dealer, gang banger, noisy neighbor that blares bachata at all hours of the night, etc. Now, with the help of the internet and a sewing machine, I’m going to tell my country’s story: the way it deserves to be told.
Subcultures [have] endured in the Mexican American community since the Second World War. One is born Mexican American but one chooses to be a Chicano. Politically charged, the Chicano life style has been passed from one generation to another. It has survived wars, prisons and strife
- Gaspar Enriquez
Guadalupe Rosales is California born Mexican American. During the early 90′s, when many of her friends and relatives were in gangs, she was a part of the Latino party crew scene. These informal gatherings took place in the backyards and industrial spaces of Los Angeles. It was a youth subculture that allowed disempowered young people, who were often criminalized by the public school system & mainstream media, to gather as a form of resistant cultural practice. Party crews were made up of 30 people or more with names such as Aztek Nation, Operation X, East LA’s Madness, Latin Tribe, Rebel Familia among others. The party crews and raves allowed these youth to organize for the sake of unity and alternative lifestyle.
After living in New York for over a decade, Guadalupe began to think back on the community she left in Los Angeles and fear that gentrification was erasing her history. In 2014, she started an investigation into her history in Los Angeles and that there might be others who had similar stories that had to be heard and acknowledged. She writes:
I began to understand the body as archives, bodies that document memories, history and trauma. I focused my research on the Los Angeles youth cultures in hopes of finding a deeper identity. I wanted to read and look at images the brown youth on the dance floor and backyard parties, cruising the boulevard or anything that had documented the (sub)culture that existed in the midst of violence. I started an Instagram feed, titled Veteranas and Rucas and posted photos from my own personal collection as reference. Within a week of my initial posting, people began to submit their own photos through email and messaging them through Instagram, perhaps because they felt an intimate connection to mine even though we had never met before and yet our lives were now exposed as parallel. This digital archive was proof that my desire and need to find material about this particular part of my life was also important to others- I describe the Instagram feed as a digital archive of previously inaccessible images of an unrepresented, unstudied group of people.
In 2015 she proposed a project to UCLA Chicano Studies- to start an archive collection on the 90s Latino Party scene in Southern California. Through an organized panel discussion she used this archive to reframe and establish this shared history.
Guadalupe’s collaborative photo archives, Map Pointz and Veteranas & Rucas celebrate the identity of young latinos. Creating a space for people who shared a similar history to “go back and fetch it” (Sankofa), to retrieve and position their history in a celebratory way, provided them with a space to declare their identity and to uncover a history which may have been permanently lost.
This project gave one our Fashion Participants, Nelva Mendoza, a more complete language to talk about the stereotypes she experiences. Reading Guadalupe’s story and seeing her instagram feed, offered a bigger space and platform for her to subvert those stereotypes and lift up her own history as a Mexican American. The images she used for our final video were inspired by the images in Guadalupe Rosales’ photo archive.
Afro-Futurism is way to connect to your roots in order to envision a future in which you are free.
My design reflects Afro-Futurism by envisioning a transformative future where we as human beings and a society have developed mentally and physically. As a scholar and artist named D. Denenge Akpem once said, “In Afro-Futurism, the garment is an active part of the creative/transformative process; the garment or costume is an activator. In west Africa, priests who invoke the departed spirits, the self disappears in the wearing of the sacred garment; one becomes a vessel for spirit.” This special garment helps empower those who fear to reveal their true power. I incorporate SANKOFA in my design by embroidering a white rose on the back of my garment.
Embroidery is something incorporated in many cultures, like the Mexican culture. The white rose is meant to symbolize,
“With all of the attention paid to the Time’s Up movement (a campaign started by more than 300 powerful figures in entertainment that works to combat sexual assault and harassment in the entertainment industry, which has started a legal defense fund to provide assistance to women in other industries) it stood to reason that the music industry would launch a similar initiative. After all, 2017 was a year that saw Taylor Swift win a lawsuit against a DJ who she claimed groped her, Kesha’s ongoing harassment lawsuit against Dr. Luke, and further abuse allegations against R. Kelly surface. (All have denied the allegations.)
Indeed, stars will be showing solidarity in the movement against sexual harassment and assault by wearing white roses to the Grammys “
The white rose not only symbolizes the Time’s Up movement, but also my belief in La Virgen de Guadalupe. Not only do many Mexicans believe in this saint but also many Christian believers, like me.
<<AFROFUTURISM DISRUPTION>> How do SEQUINS n’ SWeAThIRts Subvert?
Sequins and starts tell a different story when used in pastels and rainbows on athletic silhouettes.
WHAT DO GOLD SEQUINS, KICKS N’ JOGGERS SAY?
When we look at fashion, we might often miss the messages the fabrics and materials are sending us. In the examples above we see two materials not commonly found together - sequins and sweatshirt fabric or thin, organza cut into an oversized teeshirt. This kind of juxtaposition is often seen in the work of Afrofuturists.
FASHION, AFROFUTURSIM & SANKOFA
Afrofuturists draw on symbols from the past to shine light on the experience of black Americans and to reconnect that identity with its roots. The dress in this picture is made from traditional quilting techniques of African Americans from the South who used quilting as a form of communication in the underground railroad. They “subverted” the decorative aspects of the quilt by using it to communicate and therefore disrupt the enslavement of African Americans.
Rather than look to the past and stay there, Afrofuturists look to the future to represent the feeling of “otherness” that has become intertwined with being black. Afrofuturists take bits from sci-fi, graphic novels,and the Space Age, to disrupt typical representations and societal stereotypes of people of color. They use this juxtaposition to transcend and recreate the black experience.
LINA IRIS VIKTOR
Historically, and even today, Western representations of Ancient Egypt in history books, art and film, depict rulers as white. British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor, paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge. She uses her own image along with symbols of Egypt, an ancient technologically advanced culture, to challenge the dominant ideologies Western cultures have of the leaders of Egypt. Here she surrounds herself with gold patterns representing math systems developed in Africa and spread throughout Europe. The gold she uses represents the frequent use of gold in ancient Egypt - to decorate plain white linen. It was sewn into the fabric itself to create patterns and designs as well as worn as jewelry.
When we see gold today, we can be reminded of this ancient and advanced civilization. Gold is in your roots.
WHAT IF YOUR WORK GLOVE BECAME YOUR COSMIC ANIMAL POWER?
In our investigation of Afrofutursim we look at the way stereotypes affect our sense of identity and truth.
Racial Stereotype = Images, attitudes, and judgements applied to people of color. Who benefits from these stereotypes?
As we set out to unpack stereotypes of gender, class and race, one student asked,
“Can stereotypes be true?”
To address that question, we asked ourselves who benefits from stereotypes? Who is built up by them and who is torn down? And we ended with the question: Where do we see the effect of stereotypes built into the structures of law & criminal justice?
Looking at images from the media, we discussed how images continue to express attitudes and judgements about gender, race and class.
BLACK TO THE FUTURE afrofuturism & the fashion hack
From SunRa to Janelle Monae, Afrofuturism declares a vision of the future that challenges the dominant ideologies of Western (white) cultures. Afrofuturism draws on past technologically advanced cultures (Egypt) and uses them to establish a vision of the future where Blackness is at the center, where Blackness not only survives, but fundamentally exists. Afrofuturism is a way of talking about the urgency of real black freedom.
Lina Iris Viktor
"Improvisation, adaptability, and imagination are the core components of this resistance [to systems of oppression] and are evident both in the arts and black cultures at large. Jazz, hip-hop, and blues are artistic examples, but there are ways of life that are based on improvisation too, that aren't fully understood. In the Western world, improvisation is failure: you do it when something goes wrong. But when black people improvise it's a form of mastery." - Alexander Weheliye
The purpose of fashion in a subculture is to challenge and oppose the dominant culture by means of appropriating and changing the meaning of signs (Barnard, 2007). In the imagery of Sun Ra, through the reorganization of symbols of Egypt, juxtaposed against symbols of the future, a new cultural form (Afrofuturism) was created—one that challenged normalized ideologies, and aided in creating new cultural identities.
Monáe’s song and music video Q.U.E.E.N featuring Erykah Badu on her latest album, The Electric Lady, employs Afrofuturist conventions to pay homage to and propel the work of her black feminist foremothers in the fight for the freedom of expression and self love of black women and other marginalized identities.
"Improvisation, adaptability, and imagination are the core components of this resistance [to systems of oppression] and are evident both in the arts and black cultures at large. Jazz, hip-hop, and blues are artistic examples, but there are ways of life that are based on improvisation too, that aren't fully understood. In the Western world, improvisation is failure: you do it when something goes wrong. But when black people improvise it's a form of mastery." - Alexander Weheliye
"I see Afrofuturism as a way to encourage experimentation, reimagine identities, and active liberation." - Indrid Lafluer
These Are the Women Organizing the Women’s March on Washington
Vogue.com JANUARY 10, 2017 8:00 AM
by JULIA FELSENTHAL
Top row (left to right): Ting Ting Cheng, Tabitha St. Bernard, Janaye Ingram, Paola Mendoza, Cassady Fendlay, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland, Nantasha Williams, Breanne Butler, Ginny Suss, Sarah Sophie Flicker. Bottom row (left to right): Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Vanessa Wruble
Photographed by Cass Bird | Sittings Editor: Jorden Bickham
One very cold New York City morning just before Christmas, a group of women showed up to have their picture taken by photographer Cass Bird at a warehouse turned studio in the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, a chunky little peninsula that reaches out into the East River toward Rikers Island.
Those who made the trek were among those responsible for organizing the Women’s March on Washington, a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.
Perhaps you’re planning to be there? Perhaps you’re bringing your mother, your grandmother, your daughter, your sister? You’ll be in good company. Per the event’s Facebook page at press time, 176,000 people are planning to attend, with another 250,000 still on the fence. It seems likely, said Linda Sarsour, one of four national cochairs acting as spokeswomen for the movement, that it will be “the largest mass mobilization that any new administration has seen on its first day.”
Ahead of our shoot, emails flew back and forth about just how many organizers we could expect to show for the portrait. First it was 10. Then 15. Fourteen women materialized, but several of them informed me that it might have been more like 20.
That fluidity says something about the Women’s March and how it functions; it’s an organic, grassroots effort that prides itself on being inclusive, intersectional, and nonhierarchical, on taking what Bob Bland (one of the movement’s cofounders, now serving as a national cochair) called “a horizontal approach to leadership.”
It’s also an all-hands-on-deck, eleventh-hour, race-to-the-finish-line kind of endeavor, which has required all 10, or 15, or 16, or 20 of its chief orchestrators to work around the clock since the week of the election. This is the type of national effort that the group’s communications czar, Cassady Fendlay, told me could take “six months to a year to plan.” These women had just over two months to pull it off.
“We don’t sleep much, as you can probably tell from all our faces,” Sarsour said drily, her own face framed by a fuchsia head scarf. She’s Brooklyn born and bred (with the accent to prove it), the Muslim daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and a veteran activist who heads up the march’s fundraising efforts. She juggles that with, among other things, her job as executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.
Sarsour was sitting with me during a bit of downtime before the shoot. “Hey, sweetie; hey, sweetie,” she greeted a couple of her fellow organizers, wandering in late. Nearby, Bland’s infant daughter, Chloe, born just after the election, began wailing.
“I couldn’t get it together this morning to have her at home,” announced Bland, her red hair tied up in Harajuku-style double topknots. “So I just brought her along.” Later, Sarsour, in her mid-30s and the mother of three teenagers, would go over and use a baby blanket to swaddle the crying newborn tightly into what the activist called “a cigar” as a couple other women looked on admiringly. It takes a village, I thought to myself.
But that impression of cozy familiarity was not the whole picture. The day of our shoot, I later learned, was only the second time that this particular group of women had ever been in the same room. Some members of the team had worked together before: Sarsour and two of her fellow national cochairs, Tamika D. Mallory, an African-American civil rights activist and gun control advocate, and Carmen Perez, executive director of Harry Belafonte’s Gathering for Justice, had collaborated on previous marches against police brutality, for example. But many of these women were newly acquainted strangers who communicated mostly by email and phone. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Sarsour said. “When I started this process, more than half the women I’d never met in my life.”
“It’s a bunch of people who have no idea who each other is, creating something massive,” Vanessa Wruble, in charge of campaign operations, added later. “If you think about how hard it is to trust people normally, on a day-to-day basis,” she said, “try to do that within the span of a month and a half.” The activist smiled, in some mélange of frustration and awe, and gave her head a little shake.
Left to right: Nantasha Williams, Breanne Butler, Ting Ting Cheng, Ginny Suss, Bob Bland, Janaye Ingram, Paola Mendoza, Carmen Perez, Sarah Sophie Flicker, Tamika Mallory, Tabitha St. Bernard
Photographed by Cass Bird | Sittings Editor: Jorden Bickham
The story of how the Women’s March on Washington came into being has already been codified into lore. As the returns rolled in on November 8, a Hawaiian grandmother and retired attorney named Teresa Shook created a Facebook page suggesting that women gather to protest in D.C. on inauguration weekend. Then she went to bed. By the time she woke up, 10,000 people had affirmed the plan.
Simultaneously, Bland, founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York and an advocate for domestic manufacturing, had a similar idea. She also posted about it on Facebook, where her followership had ballooned after she raised $20,000 for Planned Parenthood by selling Nasty Woman and Bad Hombre T-shirts. “We need to form a resistance movement that’s about what is positive,” she remembered thinking. “Something that will help empower us to wake up in the morning and feel that women still matter.”
It wasn’t long before Shook and Bland caught wind of each other and consolidated their efforts. Soon Wruble became aware of their plan. In her real life she runs Okayafrica, a media platform seeking to change Western perceptions of Africa that she cofounded with her business partner, Ginny Suss (also the march’s production director) and The Roots drummer Questlove. Having worked for years as a white person in a black space, Wruble quickly recognized that Shook and Bland, both white, could not be the sole faces of the protest they were starting to organize. “I think I wrote, ‘You need to make sure this is led or centered around women of color, or it will be a bunch of white women marching on Washington,’” she paraphrased. “‘That’s not okay right now, especially after 53 percent of white women who voted, voted for Donald Trump.’”
Bland agreed, and Wruble reached out to a friend, activist Michael Skolnik, who recommended she and Bland talk to Mallory and Perez. The latter two activists brought Sarsour to the table shortly thereafter.
Somewhere in there, controversy bloomed over the name Shook had floated: the Million Women March, which threatened to overwrite the history of a same-name protest by thousands of African-American women in Philadelphia in 1997. It was Wruble who proposed that they call it the Women’s March on Washington instead, locating their protest in direct lineage with the 1963 March on Washington, the occasion for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
The new coordinators even reached out to the civil rights leader’s daughter, Bernice King, who offered her blessing and shared with them a quote from her mother, Coretta Scott King. Perez read it to me when we followed up by phone a couple weeks after the shoot: “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.’”
“It gave us all chills,” she remembered. “It assured us that we were moving in the right direction.”
What I think she meant is this: Where past waves of feminism, led principally by white women, have focused predominantly on a few familiar concerns—equal pay, reproductive rights—this movement, led by a majority of women of color, aspires to be truly intersectional. So though the Women’s March has partnered with organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—and though second-wave feminist icon Gloria Steinem is now an honorary cochair—the march’s purview is far more sweeping. Women are not a monolith, solely defined by gender; we are diverse, we represent half of this country, and any social justice movement—for the rights of immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, the LGBTQ community, for law enforcement accountability, for gun control, for environmental justice—should count as a “women’s issue.”
If you’re a woman in America, you probably feel personally affected by at least a couple of those struggles. “Women are Muslims,” Sarsour offered. “Women could be black Muslims. Women could be black Muslims and African and undocumented.” Personally, she said, she might care about immigration, “but I also understand that if I don’t have a planet to live on in 30 years, my civil liberties are quite moot.”
“Yes, it’s about feminism,” Wruble elaborated. “But it’s about more than that: It’s about basic equality for all people.” Women’s rights, in other words, are human rights, a turn of phrase that march leaders, several of them self-identified Bernie Sanders supporters, have reclaimed from a 1995 speech by Hillary Clinton. And if you believe Coretta Scott King (and can look past the results of the presidential election), where women lead, men will eventually follow.
“I think it has been the downfall of the progressive movement in the United States,” Sarsour told me, “that we have not figured out how to organize all the different progressive social justice movements into one intersectional movement.” Pluralism is a sacred principle. Identity politics is important, but so is winning elections: What makes a pluralistic electorate, with its deep rifts, its tensions, its conflicting agendas, cohere into an actual voting block? If the women behind the march pull this off on the scale they’re hoping for, their success at communicating a message that resonates with a wide array of communities, that activates the formerly politically complacent across racial and cultural lines, could offer a blueprint to the flailing Democratic Party.
Those may be the unspoken stakes, but the organizers are insistent that the march be treated as a nonpartisan protest. It will surely send a message to Trump, but the coordinators explicitly want to leave his name out of it. “He’s a narcissist,” Sarsour pointed out. “He wants us to make this all about him.”
It’s bigger than him. “Racism, misogyny is in the fabric of this country,” insisted Perez. “I think Trump was just an individual who was able to ignite a spark, awaken a sleeping giant.”
She meant the racist, misogynistic minority of voters who tipped the balance in the president-elect’s favor (along with those who looked the other way so that they could cling to his promises of simple fixes to complex problems). But I couldn’t help but think that the sleeping giant might also refer to the masses of women who seem suddenly eager to get political in the face of a president who offends and frightens them to their core, the women who, after a long campaign cycle in which they saw their candidate forced into a perpetual defensive crouch, would like to mobilize for something and not just against something.
“This is absolutely not just about us having a symbolic march in Washington and that’s it,” said Bland. “It can’t be that way. We’ve helped facilitate the self-activation of so many people. Because when you think about it, especially those first 48 hours when people were just saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes’—that’s them self-selecting into a movement. When we get together, who knows what we can do.”
Mallory, who grew up in the projects of Harlem in the ’90s, in a family directly affected by Bill Clinton’s omnibus crime bill, who has spent the past two decades on the front lines fighting for her community’s civil rights, shared a slightly more cynical, world-weary view. “Maybe it took your own pain to realize that we’re all bound up in this thing together,” she said. “For me, success for this march doesn’t happen on January 21. It happens after.”
***
You’ve probably already guessed: All has not been seamless or simple in the organization of the march. Many of its leaders were quick to speak to how difficult it has been to align so many different agendas into a single movement. “We never shy away from history, from the difficulty of where this started,” I was told by Paola Mendoza, a Colombia-born filmmaker serving as artistic director for the rally portion of the program. (She and Suss are wrangling high-profile talent like actress America Ferrera, who is chairing a group called the Artist Table that includes, among others, Scarlett Johansson, Margo Jefferson, Frances McDormand, Amy Schumer, and Zendaya.)
“It goes to show how inclusive we’re trying to make this movement,” Mendoza said. Muddling through differences of opinion and experience has required what Perez referred to as “real, courageous conversations”; what Wruble called “really uncomfortable discussions.” (For more on that dialog, check out this piece from the New York Times about the tensions that permeate the march at every level).
Mallory told me that the friction came as no surprise. “There’s always conflict, even when all black folks are organizing,” she said. “Because it’s discussions that people shy away from. They don’t want to talk about issues of race, of white privilege. It’s, ‘Woo! Why do we have to talk about that?’ There are those, particularly in this movement, who want to have an ‘all women matter’ conversation. Our position”—and by this, I assumed she was speaking for her community, not for all her fellow organizers—“is that all women do matter. But black women are particularly suffering. And therefore the black women’s voices will be heard. Not just heard, but leading the charge.”
Any internecine struggles were well below the surface on the day of the shoot, where I watched this loose confederation of women, dressed in a uniform of black jeans and crisp white shirts, goofing off on set as they awaited further instructions.
The women were getting a little cabin-feverish after a long day of waiting around. Music played on the sound system, girl power anthems like Diana Ross’s disco hit “I’m Coming Out.” Wruble danced with Nantasha Williams, a 28-year-old from Queens who’d recently lost her run for New York State Assembly and was now volunteering as Mallory’s right-hand woman. Several women took selfies. Perez emerged from a makeshift changing area in a sharply tailored black coat. “Okay, Neo!” crowed Janaye Ingram, the woman in charge of on-the-ground logistics.
Earlier, Sarsour had pointed Ingram out to me as “the poor lady who had to get asked about the permit,” referring to a series of news stories speculating that the organizers had either failed to apply for the correct clearances or might yet be rejected by federal agencies. Those concerns have been allayed, and per Ingram, the permits were never actually in doubt—the hubbub surrounding them had been an annoying distraction. Perez later pointed out the underlying sexism at play in the media: “Was Dr. King being asked if he had a permit?” she asked. “Is it because we’re women, and people think we’re incapable of organizing and mobilizing such a major event?”
Bird was ready to shoot. She instructed her subjects to arrange themselves in two rows. “The back goes high,” she said, “and the front goes low.”
“When they go low, we go high,” Ingram quipped, quoting the line from Michelle Obama’s rousing DNC speech that became Hillary Clinton’s rallying cry. But when Bird started snapping photos, the women of the Women’s March channeled a different woman’s words. Fists raised, they followed Perez in a call and response chant cribbed from Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army member controversially convicted of murder in the ’70s, who escaped prison and has lived for decades in exile in Cuba. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” Perez shouted, the rest of the group echoing her. “It is our duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains!”
Later, the women put on coats—a mismatched assortment in shades of purple inspired by the suffragists—and assembled outside in the middle of Lafayette Avenue. It was bitterly cold, and pedestrians were few and far between, but those who scurried by did a double take. A couple cars crept up and honked at the road-blockers, and the activists, Wayne’s World–style, cleared the way.
During a long pause in traffic, they returned to the middle of the street, arranged themselves in a semicircle, and began stalking toward Bird as she walked backward, camera raised. But each woman moved at her own pace and within seconds the “u” had become a squiggly line.
It suddenly occurred to me that the women in charge of the Women’s March were good at a lot of things, but marching wasn’t yet one of them. A photo assistant tried to help. “Right, left, right, left,” he called out. “Too slow!” some of the women retorted.
Then Sarah Sophie Flicker chimed in. An activist with a background in political theater and media production—she worked extensively with the Clinton campaign—she had described her role to me as “trying to fill vacuums and show up where I’m needed.”
Here was a need for her kind of stagecraft, and an illustration of the flexibility of horizontal leadership in action. “The ends go, the middle stays,” Flicker suggested, as the semicircle reconstituted itself for another try. And that, at least for a few crucial moments, seemed to do the trick: Fourteen individuals melted into a single organism. Bird glided backward, finger on the shutter. And the women of the Women’s March lurched forward, in tenuous formation, as one.
Set Design: Nick des Jardins
Hair by Ilker Akyol and Makeup by Mariko Arai
In 1913, Women Marched on Washington. This Month, They March Again
Washingtonian By Greta Weber on January 9, 2017
German actress Hedwig Reicher wearing costume of "Columbia" with other suffrage pageant participants in front of the Treasury Building. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Women’s March on Washington is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of women and allies to DC on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“This effort is not anti-Trump,” march co-founder Tamika Mallory told NPR. “This is pro-women. This is a continuation of a struggle women have been dealing with for a very long time.”
Along with echoing the 1963 civil rights demonstration where Martin Luther King Jr. first declared, “I have a dream,” the Women’s March on Washington has historical ties to the early suffrage movement. More than a century ago, thousands of suffragists gathered in DC on the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration demanding the right to vote.
Organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade saw more than 5,000 marchers from around the country to “march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded,” according to the parade’s program. It was one of the first national efforts in the name of women’s suffrage, and it would take seven more years for women to secure the right to vote through the 19th Amendment.
Here are some photos from the day of the parade, March 3, 1913, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The parade started on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Capitol building.
Lawyer Inez Milholland Boissevain was one of the leaders of the Suffrage Parade.
Spectators started to block Pennsylvania Avenue during the parade.
parade
A group of “homemakers” marching in the section of the parade celebrating women workers. They were among farmers, doctors and pharmacists, actresses, librarians, and college women in academic gowns.
a pointed redeployment of adornment + embellishment as identity & representation
Gabriel Garcia Roman | Embroidered patches & embellishments
“our crown has already been bought and paid for, all we have to do is wear it.” - james baldwin
In thinking about the way fashion can be an expression of agency, the images below show ways in which small accessories, embroidered images, & symbolic embellishments can “hold within them the power of memory, of a place of autonomy. It is small objects like these, precious or shiny bits like beads and ribbons, that slaves often collected and used . . . in gestures of memory, individuality, and subversion.”
- Slaves to Fashion, Monica L. Miller
Gabriel Garcia Roman chooses symbols and iconography from his Mexican heritage to act as signifiers of identity. These embellishments are used as an everyday form of resistance against systems of cultural oppression and erasure. By bringing beauty to the front, they create an insistent opposition to dominant (white) culture.
IMAGES as AMULETS of RADICAL RESISTANCE
How have images held their power & meaning over time?
What images will you use to express an idea, a belief, and to symbolize the declaration & celebration of identity?
How can wearing this symbol become a radical act of resistance to social toxicity?
EGYPTIAN EYE of HORUS
The Eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power and good health. To wear this symbol is to reference a connection to a rich history.
HAND OF FATIMA
The Hand of Fatima can represent femininity and is referred as the woman's holy hand. As women’s bodies, especially women of color, are vulneralbe to violence, this symbol is a proclomation of power against male-dominant society.
CRYSTALS | PROTECTION
Almost every culture has a connection to healing through stones and crystals. Even today, gemstones are synonomous with power and prestiege, Here is an embroirdered piece by Arthur Bispo Do Rosario using found, cut crystals.
FEMALE | GODDESS | EARTH
Joseph Campbell: “[The female goddess figure] is associated primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies. It has to do with the earth. The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants...so woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form. The antique model for the Madonna, is Isis with Horus at her breast".
- “Joesph Campbell and the Power of Myth”
Adinkra Symbols | Language and Legacy
Adinkra are visual symbols, originally created by the Ashanti, that represent concepts or aphorisms. Adinkra are used extensively in fabrics and pottery. They were important symbols used in the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief.
SANKOFA | GO BACK AND GET IT
Amaris Modesto, pays tribute to families of victims of police murder and terror, and the movement initiated to stop police murder by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network this year with #RiseUpOctober.
DY Fashion Activists thinking about:
POWER | PRIVELAGE | VISIBILITY | INVISIBILITY
| How is fashion a symbol of power? | What role does fashion play in subverting societal power dynamics?| What role does it play in celebrating or ritualizing self care/self determination? |
Power | The Black Panther Party
Using military-style dress,The Black Panther Party leveraged an identity of power. The beret, the leather jacket, the sunglasses, became an indelable image and they used the power of that image futher their objective to dismantle systematic racism.
Today, the beret is a cultural signifier referencing the legacy of The Panthers.
Power and Appropriation | Herero Tribe | South Africa
The Herero tribe of Namibia appropriated the clothing style from their colonial german past. The tribe's traditional clothing, serves as a subversion of their former rulers' fashion, showing how the tribe survived a concerted effort by German colonialists to wipe them from the face of the earth.
PATTERNS | Ghana & Cote d’Ivoire
Strip-woven cloth adorned with elaborate patterns has long been a main theme in African textiles. patterns like kente cloth are often associated with royalty and social status in ghana and the Cote d’Ivoire. Tabric pattern and the way fabric covers the body have been used to create and challenge power.
How are women of color vuinerable to police brutality & violence?
How are these stories made visible or INVISIBLE?
How do we heal?
We explored these questions through a close reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s research into the theory of intersectionality.
How do our social identities, particularly minority identities, overlap or intersect with our gender, race, or class? We found that ignoring the struggle of women of color in the face of police brutality, sexual or domestic violence leaves the systemic and structural causes out of the conversation. including Black women and girls in the narrative broadens the scope of the debate, enhancing our overall understanding of the structural causes. In this case, we responded to articles and reports about the death of Sandra Bland to shed light on the relationship between Black communities and law enforcement agencies.
What were the reasons for her arrest? Why did she die in her jail cell?
We used both images and sewng artifacts to bring her story to the forefront, to SAY HER NAME.
Adire is made in Yorubaland, Nigeria. Women usually make it. The indigo dye is made from indigofera a type of plant. The patterns mean money, long life, everything will be okay, hope, cycle of life and so much more.
Race: Women of color are more vulnerable than men because they are viewed as the bottom of the system because they are both a woman and a minority. Women are human just like men no matter their ethnicity or skin tone and deserve the same respect.
Gender: Biologically the traits that pertain to mostly males are viewed as “superior” compared to those females have. It all depends on the situation just because a person isn’t physically strong, it doesn’t make them any less.
One way that race and gender have combined to effect us both females and males, is to restrict and or categorize us into what society thinks we are or want us to be.
I wear my poems on my sleeves. Heart stays in my ribs because a lot of you want to play catch with it. -Gregory. @pyermoss
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SS16/// #1 of 11. Hand painted and numbered by Gregory Siff. Available in stores only. See pyermoss.com for the full list. #pyermoss #gregorysiff #OtaBenga @4am_losangeles
