Bonus Episode: How Does a Chicana Activist Find Her Place in History?

This episode explores the life and impact of Irma Lerma Barbosa, a Chicana activist and artist, highlighting her contributions to activism and the arts.

1. Irma's activism was integral to the Chicano movement, emphasizing community service and empowerment.
2. Despite facing sexism within the activist groups, Irma carved out a significant role for herself and other women.
3. Her artistic endeavors were not only creative expressions but also potent tools for activism.
4. Irma's legacy is preserved through her contributions to collections like those at the Smithsonian.
5. Her story is a testament to the enduring power of activism through art and community engagement.

1: Introduction and Background

The hosts introduce Irma and her significant donations to the Smithsonian. They provide background on her early life and involvement in the Chicano movement. Ellie Carver Horner: "History has a bad name a lot of times, you know, it doesn't include her story."

2: Activism in the Chicano Movement

Discussion of Irma's activism with the Brown Berets and the Royal Chicano Air Force, highlighting her initiatives like the free breakfast program. Irma Lerma Barbosa: "I was gonna think I was gonna demonstrate, I was gonna help people, you know?"

3: Challenges as a Woman Activist

Irma shares the gender-based challenges she faced within her groups and how she overcame them to lead and inspire. Irma Lerma Barbosa: "I had to stop being a woman. I could not be a woman."

4: Art and Activism

Exploration of how Irma used art to further activism, including her work on the RCAF women's mural. Irma Lerma Barbosa: "Children and women, you know, they hold up half the sky."

5: Legacy and Impact

The episode concludes with reflections on Irma's lasting impact on the arts and activism, capped by her advocacy for sexual harassment training in California. Irma Lerma Barbosa: "Freedom is what I want them to feel."

1. Embrace Art as Activism: Use your creative skills to express and address social issues.
2. Challenge Gender Roles: Advocate for equality in all spheres of life.
3. Preserve Cultural History: Document and share stories of underrepresented communities.
4. Engage in Community Service: Start or join initiatives that help your community.
5. Stand Up for Your Rights: Advocate for systemic changes to protect and empower individuals.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are sharing a special bonus episode featuring Chicana activist and artist Irma Lerma Barbosa. Her legacy will be preserved for years to come in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Collections. Irma attended college at a time when the Chicano movement was just gaining momentum – and she jumped right into fighting for her community. Picture this – a legacy that includes being welcomed into Cesar Chavez's family home through her time in the United Farm Workers Movement, leadership with the Brown Berets, spearheading a free breakfast program to help her community, and eventually founding her own woman-led arts collective.

People

Irma Lerma Barbosa, Veronica Mendez

Companies

Smithsonian's National Museum of American History

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Ellie Carver Horner

Untextbooked.

Gabe Hostin

You're listening to untextbooked. This is a history podcast for the future that gives young people like us agency and voice in our education. I'm your host, Gabe Hostin. I'm producer Ellie Carver Horner. Today we have a special bonus episode for you.

Ellie Carver Horner

Yes, March is women's history month. And we are back with an incredible guest from earlier this year. History has a bad name a lot of times, you know, it doesn't include her story. And here's mine. My name is Irma Lerma Barbosa.

She's both an artist and activist. This year, she donated a collection from her life's work to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Curator Veronica Mendez facilitated the acquisition. The sort of historical significance of her collection as a whole is extremely unique. We have a great episode about her time in the brown berets and the items she donated to the Smithsonian.

Gabe Hostin

In that episode, we go in depth about Irma's time as a leader in the brown berets, how she met with the Black Panthers and started a free breakfast program, and her experience as a woman in the artist activist group Royal Chicano Air Force. In this episode, we'll share how she continued to bring women together through art and activism.

Ellie Carver Horner

So a quick refresher on Irma's story. She grew up near Sacramento, California, during a time when the Chicano movement was gaining traction. Okay, hold up. What is the Chicano movement? The Chicano movement fought for the civil rights and empowerment of people living in the United States who descended from Mexico.

Got it during college. She became really politically active in her community. I had also been recruited into an organization called the Royal Chicano Air Force. At that point, it was called the revolutionary Chicano Art Front. It was while I was in school.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

And I love art. I loved art growing up, it was like, what fed me would save my soul. Just to be super clear, the Royal Chicano Air Force didn't have anything to do with planes. That's right. This was a collective of artists and activists.

Ellie Carver Horner

And even though Irma is a talented artist and impassioned community organizer, she says she was not embraced by the group leaders. The guys, they were all men in the RCAF, the Royal Qigong Air Force. I was the only girl because they were so chauvinistic, you know? But it didn't bother me because I was gonna do what I was gonna do. I was gonna think I was gonna demonstrate, I was gonna help people, you know?

Irma Lerma Barbosa

And I kind of brought that flavor into this art group. And they were like trying to be like romantic heroes, you know, and they pretended a lot that they were like military. They would drive around in jeeps and stuff. But they were artists, basically. They were artists and they worked with farmworkers.

Movement mostly. Yeah. I've slept on Cesar Chavez's mother's kitchen floor, you know. Yeah. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta started the National Farm Workers association in 1962 to fight for civil and labor rights on farms.

Ellie Carver Horner

It was an incredibly important part of chicano activism at the time. You know, we would go there and. We would help them and we would. Demonstrate in the fields and we would. Hold up the signs that we would.

Make specific to the experiences you mentioned. What was it like being a woman in these organizations, like the brown Berets, the Royal Chicano Air Force, United Farm Workers? I'm curious. I had to stop being a woman. I could not be a woman.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

I had to wear clothes that were not what other girls wore. I had to wear combat boots. I had to wear army navy kind of clothes, you know, that did not reveal my body. And I became what they called me, a heavy. Like the people that were leaders in.

The movement were called heavies. It's because you're powerful. Like, you're the spokesperson, you're the leader. So I, very few women heavy. So I was a heavy.

And all of the women in the. Organization, everybody, you know, these are Chicanos, Mexican Americans as a role, right? The man's the boss, they're the cooks. He'S their hero, all of that. Well, I didn't fit in there.

I was walking like a man with the men, and I didn't need anyone. To give me permission. My womanliness was removed from me by the other women. I was not treated like a woman. I was not invited to be part of their womanly gatherings to prepare for organization.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

I was working on security and I was working on who's going to speak and those kinds of things. And even with the men, you know. They knew they couldn't flirt with me because they knew how serious I was. I kind of scared them a little bit. So it's like I was invisible, you.

Know, I was like useful, valuable, powerful, but I wasn't a woman and I wasn't a man. So that was what was really hard, you know, about being a girl and. Doing the things that I did while. I was in college. Years later, Irma says she was being pushed out from the story of this organization when an author was writing a book about the history of the Royal Chicano Air Force.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

And so this author interviewed them all. Took years to get them all interviewed, and she took her writings to the university press, and the university press would not accept it. Said, you have neglected to interview Irma Barbosa. And then she couldn't get through to me. I mean, no one would give her my name.

Finally, she was able to find me. I had all my transcripts from college that showed, you know, had a classmate up for the breakfast program. And then she started looking at all of the other evidence that I had in my work, and she included in her writing, and she sent it off, and it resulted in the university press. Accepting it and publishing it. Flying under the radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force.

I've got a huge chapter in here. That tells all about what I did. And it's an award winning book. After Irma graduated college, she started her career and started a family of her own. But what about her art, her activism?

Gabe Hostin

What happened? Oh, that never stopped. It just took a different shape. Years after she graduated from college and started her life as a mother, she got a call. I got a call one night from another lady who was also an artist, and she said that the Royal Chicano Air Force had been invited to go to Chicano park in San Diego to paint a mural on a freeway stanchion.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

And what had happened was, in this neighborhood, the police were planning on building a police substation, and it was a mexican american neighborhood. It was a barrio. And so the people were organizing, and they were protesting, and they were calling for artists to come from all over. There were other women artists that wanted to go, but they didn't know how to paint a mural. She learned how to create murals from an art teacher, Eduardo Carillo.

So they recruited me to go with them. And now there is a stanchion there that has the images of a group of women, not only from Sacramento, but from Los Angeles. And it's called the RCAF women's mural, and it was called women hold up half the sky. My part was at the very center, and it had a woman holding half of the earth as though it were a cradle with a baby in it, because that resonates with me. Children and women, you know, they hold up half the sky.

That means you wouldn't be here without a woman, right? We do our work, and we lift our family up. You know, we lift what we love up. Half of that sky belongs to us.

Ellie Carver Horner

Irma and her fellow women artists painted this mural in 1975. It is such a beautiful symbol of solidarity as Irma experienced firsthand. Women are so often ignored for their contributions to the arts and activism. But this mural vibrantly asserts their resistance. I asked Irma, why can art be such a powerful force for activism?

Irma Lerma Barbosa

What is necessary for survival of your soul is food, art, and music. We have a vibration, you know, our body, our aura, our soul has a vibration, and this world has a tendency to compress us, to push us down, to not give us room, you know, to be able to enlarge, you know, our vision and our vibration. But when I cook, oh, my God, it's like a work of art, all of the different spices. I give my granddaughter a cookie. She says, what's in this, grandma?

15 ingredients? Yeah, because we're creating, right? So art and music and food are necessary for survival. Necessary. I have a work of art called Comadre Enchilada that's really popular, and it's just a picture of a happy woman in a beautiful costume flipping a tortilla up in the air.

And you ask yourself, is that a tortilla or is that the moon? You know, so we need all of those things. She started a group named Comadres artistas, an all women artist collective. But after my marriage failed, I was still working. I still had a job.

And then I had to realize, you know, no one's going to take care of me. I want to have to take care of myself. And I have two children, two beautiful. Children that I raised. But being alone, without a husband, raising children, going to work, I was still called upon by the women.

Now, these were different women. These were young women who wanted to. They had energy, and they wanted to accomplish things. And they asked me if I would. Invite them to form a group because women were dying out there.

I mean, as far as, like, hope in doing things. And so I said yes. And some of the women I invited were the actual wives of the men in the Royal Chicano Air force who were artists but had to give up their art because they married an artist, right? And I lent all of my skills. To lifting up this group.

What I did was I used all of my marketing skills to create this. An art catalog called story visions from the cactus tree. And then I mailed it everywhere, and we got invited to exhibit everywhere. And I did full color illustrations of their work inside. This is one of mine called warriors.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

Of a new day. But I'm just saying they were lifted way up. And it was kind of offensive to the guys in the RCAF because they were trying to erase me, because they were starting to get notoriety. And when they would get interviews from opportunities with newspapers or television, they would leave me out, and they wouldn't mention me. And there was some kind of confusion about that.

And I didn't want to get embroiled in fighting for a place there because I never did that in the first place. And they said that their motto was, we belong to the community. And so we were invited to visit. All of the communities around Sacramento, and we became kind of visible, and we even got an honorable mention or commemorative plaque from Maria Shriver. Wow.

When her husband was the governor of California. Yes. And these were older ladies. You know, it, like, saved their souls. She continued to be a voice for women throughout her career in the public and private sectors as well.

There's one more thing I didn't tell you about those ten years that I was missing in action before I came back and created the comadres artist. I worked for the state of California for the Office of Information Services, and it was kind of just like, we did reports, and we looked official, and. And it was a very tiny little office. There were, like, two or three women and a female boss and a male boss. And I was supervisor over the women.

And they were two girls. They were in college, and they were quite young, about your age. And he, the male boss, would set up out of town meetings. They finally told me after I got to know them. And then he would come and pound on their doors at night, all drunk.

Yes. And if he felt like it, he would punish them, dock their pay, you know, things like that. And so I filed a complaint against him, and usually nobody would testify, but. Women came forward and testified for me. For my complaint, and I won the complaint.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

But I told them, I don't want your money. What I want you to do is. Institute required sexual harassment training for every employee in the state of California and every new employee. And I got it. Wow.

Ellie Carver Horner

That's. I mean, that's unbelievable. Once an activist, always an activist. You know, you just have to wait for it to arrive in your lap, and then you stand up.

When people look at your art, what do you hope they take away from it? I hope that it educates, like, gives you a different perspective so that you don't just accept what people tell you. This is a box. This is a circle. No, maybe it's a tortilla.

Irma Lerma Barbosa

Maybe it's the moon. You know, I want them to come out of their shells, you know, and see how grand their spirit can be and that they can invent things, and they can call it by freedom. Freedom is what I want them to feel.

Ellie Carver Horner

Thank you. Again to Irma Lirma Barbosa for generously sharing her story with us. You can listen to our previous episode that includes an interview with curator Veronica Mendez. We dive into Irma's work with the brown berets and the historic items she donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Thanks again to Veronica Mendez for facilitating the connection that made the interview possible.

Gabe Hostin

You can find photos of Irma's artwork and the item she donated on our website, untextbooked.com.

This is our last episode of the season, but don't stress. We'll be back with season five in October. Trust me, you'll want to hear what we have in store. In the meantime, take a look at our brand new website@untextbooked.com, you can check out all of our past episodes there. We actually have a few producers who are aging out of the program this.

Year, so just want to shout them out. Ellie Gavin, Carly Victor, Lily Oliver, and your host, yours truly, Gabe Hostin. I'm leaving, guys. You know, I'm 21 now, aging out of the program, and it's honestly been such an amazing program project to run here. I'm so proud of what we've done here.

Gabe Hostin

I'm so proud of the education we've brought to our people who are looking for a new way to learn history. Even though I may not be hosts coming on the next seasons, I will. Have a hand in the program, and I will continue to bring education to those around the world who need it. Thank you so much for listening these past four seasons. I love you all and appreciate you all.

Thank you. That's all for this episode of Untextbooked. I'm producer Ellie Carver Horner. And I'm Gabe hostin. Thanks to the history colab, Fernanda Rain and Cece Payne.

Untextbook is produced by pod people, Rachel King, Amy Machado, Danielle Roth, Hannah Pedersen, Michael Aquino, and Tony Montita. You.