End Barrio Warfare

The Yreina Cervantez: Movements and Ofrendas exhibition is housed at the Vincent Price Art Museum located on the East Los Angeles College campus. This exhibition will run from April 22, 2017- July 22, 2017 and was curated by Mariaclice Jacob and Ana Guajardo. The exhibit is very self-portrait heavy. These self-portraits of Yreina Cervantez are filled with iconography that stems from feminism to Chicano history, themes that are reoccurring in her exhibit. With bright ceiling lights and white walls, each piece is brightly showcased on the walls of this one-room exhibit. End Barrio Warfare.1979.Silkscreen poster. This pieces primary focus is that of violence in Barrios, and is made in the form of a poster that contains blood spelling out “End Barrio Warfare.” Besame.1988.Linocut.Collection of Ramon Cervantes. This black and white piece is an eye catcher, and features a nude woman being caressed and licked by a
This graphic piece is in poster form and features a bleeding corpse and two figures fighting behind him, one being a police officer. At the top of the poster is crying feminine eyes overlooking the scene. The subject of the poster is the violence in barrios. A barrio is a Spanish-speaking section of a city or town that stereotypically has a high poverty and violence rate. Many drugs make their way into barrios and for some, crime is a way of life. Cervantez captures the reality of life in a barrio by showing death and sadness. The poster implies that the police officer was the gunman who shot the bleeding corpse, whose blood surrounds the scene and spells out “End Barrio Warfare.” The crying eyes seem to be a reference to “The Great Gatsby,” a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In “The Great Gatsby,” the main character Gatsby is shot and killed and the end of the book. Cervantez uses graphic imagery in this poster to inspire citizens of the barrio to stop the