Roosevelt High School Strike, East Los Angeles, March 17, 1970 (after Raul Ruiz), 2018, Ink and watercolor on Duralar

Roosevelt High School, East Los Angeles 1968 (after Devra Weber), 2018, Ink and watercolor on Duralar

In 1968, Mexican American high school students organized to protest discrimination and inequality in the East Los Angeles high schools. After school administrators refused to listen to their concerns, thousands of students from multiple schools staged collective, simultaneous peaceful walkouts.

These artworks are from Pasadena Time Travel, the artist’s temporary public art project which celebrates those events and 50 years of high school student activism in Southern California as a series of posters at bus stops and onboard Pasadena Transit buses in English and Spanish. To inform her drawings, the artist interviewed 30 participants in the 1968-73 walkouts for educational justice/Chicano Civil Rights Movement and referenced historical photographs from La Raza photographers, who documented the movement for the influential grassroots East LA journal circa 1967-1977—(used with permission from photographers and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center).

More info about the temporary public art project can found here https://www.pasadenatimetravel.com/