EZLN Women’s Revolutionary Laws (2007)

Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza
20″ x 26″ , 6 color screenprint, Lennox 100 Archival paper and poster paper, Printed in San Leandro CA, September 2007

This was the first collaboration on a screen printed poster with melanie, we had talked about doing something for months and finally at the end of the summer we found some time to put something together. The drawing came from a series of illustrations that melanie has been working on this year, some really beautiful pieces that she has been repurposing in different mediums and for different purposes. This piece of the Zapatista woman with her baby was first a large 3′ x 4′ foot painting before it became a poster, and we picked it because of how powerful the image was.

We started with the image of the woman and her baby and started searching for a concept. We thought that it would be good to make the poster something that spoke about the Zapatistas world view, we felt that the image really connected with the EZLN Women’s Revolutionary Laws. After that we worked on the composition adding the women in the background and the text next to the woman.

I really enjoyed working on this piece, it brought me and melanie together on another level, making art together. This was the first major piece we did together and it came out beautiful. Take a look at the gallery with all the pictures of the printing process, we ended up with a really nice edition of about 70 posters. We gave half of the edition to Collectiva Zapatista Ramona to help them fundraise to support Native American women to make the trip to Intercontinental Indigenous Summit in Mexico.