Protesters' most powerful weapon: Art

Washington Post

15-07-2025

Designer Willy Chavarria's presentation of his 2026 spring/summer collection in Paris last month began as any other fashion show. The room went dark and the opening notes of José Feliciano's 'California Dreamin',' poured from the sound system. As the lights crept on, a model dressed in baggy white shorts and an oversize white T-shirt strutted onto the runway and knelt. Another model in the same ensemble followed, then another and another. As Feliciano soulfully crooned, 'I got down on my, on my, on my bended knees/And I began to pray,' the men had assembled into a kneeling queue, their hands clasped behind their backs. What had started as a fashion show became a performance evoking the scenes of captives at the Salvadoran megaprison called the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
Chavarria, a Mexican American designer who hails from California's Central Valley, told GQ's Eileen Cartter in advance of the show: 'We're living in a time with the most horrifying atrocities happening all around us and what we're seeing is the erasure of cultures, the erasure of people, the erasure of education, the erasure of compassion, and the erasure of identity.' After the presentation, some online commenters accused the designer of exploiting the issue, but many more praised him for drawing attention to the plight of undocumented people — who face the prospect of not just deportation, but being dispatched to a foreign prison without due process. Images of the Chavarria's show went viral on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, and became all anyone in fashion seemed to talk about.
This was exactly the point.
Protest is a driver of political change. Mass protests in Rio de Janeiro in 1984 helped end Brazil's military dictatorship. Protests in Tunisia in 2011 forced from office dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and helped spark the Arab Spring. In the United States, large-scale protests have led to civil rights legislation (the 1963 March on Washington) and environmental action (the Earth Day protests of 1970, which drew an estimated 20 million participants around the country, preceded the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency).
Just as important are targeted actions like Chavarria's that wield culture as a tactical weapon. Even the most progressive person might avoid a news report about CECOT because it can be difficult to countenance the prison's grinding dehumanization. But for those in the audience at the Salle Pleyel in Paris as the show got underway, there was no scrolling past the men kneeling with heads bowed.
Chavarria told GQ last year that 'fashion can't change politics.' But, as he has demonstrated, it can affirm identity and function as protest. (It can also support a cause: The white T-shirts the designer presented at the show were created in support of the American Civil Liberties Union.)
As we pass through the sixth month of President Donald Trump's second term, and protests against his administration's thuggish deportation methods intensify, artifacts of culture — art, design, music, dance — have surfaced as important elements of the fight. In Los Angeles, on the front lines of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, visual arts groups such as Meztli Projects have produced free, downloadable posters; other artists have created custom bandannas in support of day laborers. Earlier this month, during an anti-ICE protest, graphic artist Pauline Mateos installed in front of Los Angeles City Hall a wall-sized collage of images of deportees. The black-and-white close-ups of so many faces evoked the protest aesthetics of South America in the 1970s and '80s, when the display of headshots of the missing was a standard response to state-sanctioned disappearances.
Music and dance have been particularly dynamic in transforming ordinary protest into something more visceral, more memorable. At an anti-ICE gathering in downtown Los Angeles in June, mariachis and ballet folklórico dancers in bright, ribboned skirts performed on the steps of City Hall. When the 'No Kings' rally took over a vast swaths of downtown L.A. last month, the rock act Ozomatli, whose music is infused with cumbia and Mexican norteño, boarded a flatbed truck and put on a rolling show. This month, when hundreds of people staged an anti-ICE protest in Boyle Heights, one of the oldest Mexican neighborhoods in L.A., the march was led by mariachis playing violins. Countless protests have featured line dancing to 'Payaso de Rodeo' (rodeo clown), an infectious tune by the Mexican band Caballo de Oro.
'As the pressure mounts, music becomes more than performance,' said photographer David Lopez in a recent video dispatch for L.A. Taco, an independent media outlet that has assiduously covered the raids. 'It becomes presence. It becomes protest. It becomes power.'
A piece of music can express defiance and joy; in dance, the body conveys what words cannot. Even the smallest aesthetic gesture can have outsize resonance in the context of protest. In the introduction to their 2019 essay collection, 'The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication,' scholars Aidan McGarry, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Olu Jenzen and Umut Korkut note that the aesthetics of a protest can 'rupture conventions of doing politics.' An ocean of protesters can be powerful. More powerful is seeing them come together to sing 'We Shall Overcome,' with its refrain of 'We are not afraid/We are not afraid today' — as civil rights advocates did during the 1963 March on Washington.
Dance has been an especially formidable tool. During the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and '80s, wives and mothers of the disappeared would dance in public the cueca, a flirty partner jig that is typically performed by a man and a woman — except the women would dance it alone, drawing attention to their missing male partners, who presumably were dead or imprisoned. No more than a handful of women participated in these actions, but their choreographies of grief became so iconic, they inspired Sting to write a song about it in 1987 called 'They Dance Alone.' As the British pop star told Spin magazine at the time, 'Its power is that it's ostensibly a peaceful gesture. It's innocent in a way: Security forces can't arrest you for dancing.'
Dance has been deployed to protest apartheid in South Africa and corruption in Puerto Rico. And it was used in the 2020 protests against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In June of that year, a dancer by the name of Jo'Artis Ratti stood before a row of police officers in Santa Monica, California, and began to krump, a dance that combines exaggerated arm swings, sharp stops and chest pops. Krumping can feel expressive and angry. As Ratti later told The Post, 'How else do we cry to the grotesque?'
In Los Angeles, where I live, ICE raids have left families broken, sent people into hiding and transformed bustling commercial districts into veritable ghost towns. In this context, playing Latin music has become a form of defiance, whether blared from a pickup or performed live at a march. As the scholars of 'The Aesthetics of Global Protest' note in their book, this approach can be especially important for 'minority and marginalized voices that might remain invisible or not heard.' Music has become a remarkable way of asserting a Mexican presence in a city that is Mexican in origin.
In early July, while making my way through downtown L.A., I ran into a small anti-ICE protest at Plaza Olvera, a historic corner of the city that was laid out by the city's Mexican founders. There, the Mexican norteño band Los Cadetes de Linares, and the long-running local act Los Jornaleros del Norte, founded by day laborers in the 1990s, were performing on the back of a truck. Organizers distributed fliers about legal rights as Los Jornaleros sang their catchy, off-color ditty, 'La migra desgraciada' (wretched immigration). No speeches or chants were heard, only music and dance.
In the days prior, Trump had taken a media-saturated tour of a newly built immigrant detention camp in the Florida Everglades, and far-right influencer Laura Loomer had posted a jibe to social media about feeding the nation's 65 million Latinos to alligators. In Plaza Olvera, men, women and children were on the dance floor, defiantly shaking their hips to bouncy Mexican polkas and classic cumbias, some waving placards that read 'ICE out of LA!' In the face of depravity, art has become a way for a community to articulate its humanity — and, more important, to make itself heard.
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