How Chicana women artists have often used the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe for political messages

Judith Huacuja, Professor of Art History, University of Dayton

In 1975, Chicano artist Amado M. Peña depicted police brutality by showing the bloodied head of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez, whom Dallas police had shot for allegedly stealing $8 from a vending machine. Peña's work was part of what came to be known as the Chicano art movement. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Chicano art powerfully decried the discrimination, inequality and cultural oppression faced by Mexican Americans in the United States.