705 S. RAMPART ST.
LOS ANGELES, CA 90057
(213) 382-4207 info@imprentala.org
IMPRENTA'S May Day Events
Imprenta, an art, cultural, and social space in the Mac Arthur Park area of Los Angeles, invites you to participate in a number of events in relation to May Day and the Immigrant Rights struggle in Los Angeles.
IMPRENTA is located at 705 S. Rampart Street, LA, CA 90057.
Calendar
On Wednesday, April 29th, we are meeting at IMPRENTA at 8pm in order to post signs that read "I AM A CITIZEN" AND "WHAT IS A CITIZEN" around the city. Project Description is below. If you are able to meet and post, please join us. Bring a camera if you can in order to document.
On Friday, May 1st, we will meet at IMPRENTA at 11am and walk down to the march that begins at Broadway and Olympic and ends at the I.C.E. Detention Facility at Temple between Los Angeles and Alameda. The flyer is attached below for your information.
On Saturday, May 2nd, we'll have an exhibition opening at IMPRENTA at 8pm.
Project Description
IMPRENTA, an art, cultural, and social space in the Mac Arthur Park area of Los Angeles, is mounting an artists’ response to the May Day events of 2009. After engaging in a series of conversations and planning sessions around questions of protest, politics, immigrant rights, and our role as artists, we are working on a collaborative project that deals with the history, politics, and semiotics of protest.
We are producing 1000 signs composed of simple black text on a white field that read “I AM A CITIZEN” and "WHAT IS A CITIZEN?" These signs will be posted around the city of Los Angeles and distributed during the May Day protests.
Given the questions of labor and protest that underscore May 1st and the violent repression of the Immigrant Rights Movement in Los Angeles in 2007, we are interested in thinking about these events historically and activating a resonance between the Immigrant Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement.
The sign that we are creating is based off those that were held by African American sanitation workers in 1968, during their sixty-four day strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Two unrelated incidents sparked the strike: two sanitation workers were killed in a garbage truck while trying to escape the rain, and twenty-two black sanitation workers were sent home without pay while their white supervisors were kept for the day with pay. At the time, sanitation workers were making $1.80 an hour, a wage so low that half the workers qualified for welfare or had second jobs.
About two weeks after these incidents, about 1100 sanitation workers went on strike to demand job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. The Memphis strikes were not without violent event, with conflict between the police and the protesters erupting numerous times over the course of the sixty-four days, one man was killed, and the National Guard summoned to the area. In the midst of these events, sanitation workers held signs that read “I AM A MAN,” which stated their basic demand that members of the African American community, both men and women, be treated as citizens.
This demand for the recognition of basic human and labor rights is one that we carry with us in this project. By shifting the term from “man” to “citizen” we seek to highlight the question of human and labor rights that is at the core of the contemporary immigrant rights movement and the changing politics of race and labor in our era of globalization.
We understand the function of the term “citizen” to be highly ambiguous and complex, a hotly-contested semantic ground in the battle for immigrant rights. It is a legal term wielded by reactionary conservatives to signify those people deserving of human rights, as distinguished from “aliens” or “illegals.” It is used to defend a system of labor and human rights based upon national belonging and the fortification of national borders, despite the contemporary reality that international global capital knows no borders. Much of the progressive immigrant rights activism cedes this contested ground, and centers around the fight for amnesty within the construct of traditional notions of citizenship.
We seek to intervene in the conservative discourse around citizenship, and enable May Day participants, regardless of their legal status, to claim the contentious term of “citizen.” By stripping the term of its necessary legal implications for a moment in time, we seek to use a modest strategy of reduction and inversion to negotiate a radical conception of citizenship that recognizes that labor and human rights are universal. This expansion of terms and this locational identity is one that we can understand as the condition of possibility for a radical politics.
In the events of May Day 2009 we propose that the struggle is one of the recognition of the rights of the undocumented as fellow citizens of the world regardless of legal status. “I AM A CITIZEN” highlights a positional claim, one whose interpretation depends upon the location from which the ‘I’ is situated. It is an assertion of recognition that engages a question of the singular in the multitude.
As artists, we pay special attention to how representations drive our understanding of history. We will be considering how the image haunts history and comes to tell a story. We will be invested in considering how a documentation of the event will carry this moment into the future, and how an image helps us to understand both a continuity and fracture between then and now.