Accountability

corporations to sell back to us. Latinos are becoming a profitable market, but there are
not a lot of Latino designers.” The staff at Tumi’s strives to develop work that is relevant
to youth and communities of color — another co-founder is a well known graffiti artist
rooted in hip-hop. “A lot of us were brought up in hip-hop... We don’t want our work to
serve corporate interests, we want to speak to our audience.”
As part of their work on youth organizing and movement building, Tumi’s designers also
participate in national forums about media justice, Web-based activism and hip-hop
organizing. Tumi’s produced over 50,000 anti-war posters seen around the United
States. In California, they produced materials and helped coordinate campaigns against
Proposition 21, the “Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Initiative,” and
Proposition 54, the “Racial Privacy Initiative.”
Rodriguez is also active in a number of local arts organizations. She is a founder of the
East Side Arts Alliance that programs cultural arts and community programs for the
multi-ethnic community of East Oakland. The organization uses the arts for community
activism and allows members of the community to learn about their neighbors and to
share cultural traditions.
Rodriguez also helped found Visual Element, an arts program for young muralists.
Building on their experience with the youth program and teaching experience at
Oakland’s Castlemont High School, next year the staV of Tumi’s will participate in
Project YES, an educational program for youth in East Oakland, an area, Rodriguez
notes, that has one of the highest homicide rates in the country. Tumi’s will conduct a
workshop on graphic design and train young people in the skills they need to work
towards careers in design.
“Historically, political graphics in movements throughout the world have shaped our
society,” says Rodriguez. “One of [the] languages of liberation is art and design.”
Making Change
Returning to the streets of New York City a year after the February 15th march, one can
still find traces of those stickers and posters. The scratched and peeling remnants have
become a whisper of dissent woven into the fabric of the physical city, digested into the
collective memory, reinforcing subsequent protest — and informing the upcoming
election campaign.
But first, it starts with an individual.
Say an individual at a party is rude. If one person complains, others would chime in and
offer support. But if no one complains, the group may assume that nobody else thinks it
is a problem.
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