Anonymous Comrade writes (from Daybreak #3):

Carlos Cortez, ed., Viva Posada! A Salute to the Great Printmaker of the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2002.

Before I ever heard of the EZLN’s rebellion in Chiapas, I knew about the revolutionary power projected by the image of Emiliano Zapata thanks to the propaganda poster art of José Guadalupe Posada.
I’m sure that you’ve seen Posada’s picture of Zapata before, too: the guerrilla fighter stands with crisscrossed bandoliers of ammunition slung over his shoulders and a sombrero on his head, defiant with a rifle in one hand and the hilt of a saber in the other. It’s one of those images that seemed to have followed me around for years— I’d seen it on t-shirts, stenciled in spray paint in alleys, photocopied onto flyers for punk rock shows, and even tattooed on the neck of someone that I used to work with who said that he got it when he was released from prison. I finally went to the public library and looked up Zapata; I learned about the Mexican revolutionary wars of 1910-17, about Pancho Villa’s invasion of the U.S., and the indianismo cultural movement. When the “Zapatista Army for National Liberation” (EZLN) rose up against the Mexican government and the New World Order in January 1994, I understood why the ghost of Zapata was conjured up by the rebel army as a historical point of reference. And I had been spurred on to investigate all because of a picture of Zapata done by Posada eighty years ago.

Anarchist cartoonist, poster maker and poet Carlos Cortez has selected about 120 of Posada’s woodcuts and metal engravings for this slim volume, concentrating primarily on those from broadsides put out during the most turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution. It is no accident that the pictures chosen for this book are keyed to an insurgent sensibility: Cortez has been active for many years in the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union, and the book’s publisher (the Charles H. Kerr Company) is a Wobbly worker-owned cooperative that has been mixed up in the antiwar, labor, feminist, environmental, and anarchist movements for over 175 years. Scattered throughout the book, and sandwiched between illustrations of monstrous animals, firing squads, bandit folk heroes, skeleton musicians, and weird scenes of crimes and accidents, are quick comments of appreciation for Posada’s work by a variety of anti-authoritarian poets, artists, and propagandists who emphasize the value of these illustrations as street art rather than high-brow museum pieces. In his short introduction, Cortez calls attention to a “tradition of radical popular art” that he hopes that more people will discover and utilize, since “poverty, inequality, exploitation and other forms of social injustice...goad artists of social conscience to use their forms of expression to awaken the awareness of their fellow humans.”

It is exactly this shared sense of socially-conscious street credibility that makes Viva Posada! such an interesting and inspiring book. Even though Posada relied on many ancient indigenous Mexican elements and references in his work, you don’t have to be an expert on the Mexican culture or history to appreciate the raw rage and black humor of these prints— they could very easily be reproduced in radical publications in most cities of the world with captions about the most recent imperialist outrage, capitalist crisis, or despotic abuse in order to encourage a direct popular response. (I keep imagining some of these as graffiti painted across billboard advertisements or on the outside walls of banks.) There are many talented graphic designers, poster makers, and illustrators who are involved in today’s struggle against capitalism, war, and the state who should find the time to look at Posada’s images; his propaganda stirred up a lot of people in Mexico, many of whom were peasants and workers unable to read but who nevertheless read his messages clearly.