Chicana Fotos\Nancy De Los Santos: Documenting the 1970s

In 2014 the Chicana por mi Raza digital Memory Collective interviewed foundational Chicana film producer Nancy de los Santos. Nancy had grown up in Mexican Chicago, far from the Southwest, and had participated in many key events related to the Midwestern arm of the Chicano Movement. During the interview, Nancy mentioned — as it turns out quite modestly — that she might have “a few photos” to share with us. When Nancy arrived with three bulging boxes of photographs, some of them large format photos, many of them repeated images that had clearly been modified, cropped, and artfully reconstructed, we began to understand that her creative life as an image maker did not begin with her filmmaking.

In hundreds of stirring and aesthetically sophisticated photographs and slides taken over the course of the 1970s, De Los Santos documented the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements in Chicago, marches in Texas for farmworker rights and against police brutality, and the first ever International Women’s Conference in Mexico City (1975). Nancy’s collection also included a series of short films that she worked on before she became a well-known film and television producer. The images Nancy De Los Santos captured during this immensely productive period not only document important historical events and figures, they frame these events and figures as well as everyday life in Latina/o Chicago through a striking visual language clearly informed by her growing consciousness as a Chicana and a feminist.

Nancy’s photographs investigate several visual themes: frames, juxtaposed angles of vision, and subjects who are turned away from the camera. In the image above, which is representative of her many images of children and women (sometimes even herself) framed by windows, door frames, and mirrors, Nancy captures a threshold space between the domestic interior and the urban exterior of life in the city.

**Deconstructing the Movimiento Hero**

This image of two men preparing for a speech captures Nancy’s aesthetic interest in mirrored images and “frames within frames.” But it also suggests a sly feminist undertone in its reference to the mirror-like quality of male leadership in the Movement Era. The dominant narratives of the Chicano Movement tend to center on its leading male figures, Cesar Chavez, Jose Angel Gutierrez (included in the photograph below), Rodolfo Corky González” and Reies Lopez Tijerina. Nancy chose more diverse subjects in her representation of political activities in the period—old women, young women, children—breaking the mirror (which always duplicates its male subject) of movement imaginaries.

mirrored men.png

Capturing the Activism of Her Time

Throughout the 1970s, Latina/o students from across Chicago helped to organize a number of United Farm Worker Boycott actions, including hunger strikes, picket lines, marches and mass meetings. Nancy closely documented these activities for the Northeastern Illinois University Chicano student newspaper, Contra la Pared, capturing priceless images that bring the Chicago Boycott to life. In these photographs, most of which were taken in 1975, Nancy captures the vibrancy and commitment that many Chicagoans brought to their work in support of the farmworker struggle.

Contra la Pared cover.jpg Contra la Pared Back Page.jpg

Nancy documented many UFW events in Chicago as a reporter for the NEIU student newspaper “Contra la Pared,” including the historic “Unity Rally” organized by Cha Cha Jimenez and the Young Lords in October of 1974. Held at the Palacio Theater on Chicago’s Northside, the Unity Rally brought together between 1,500 and 2,000 Black, Latina/o, and White Chicagoans to form a unified front to challenge urban renewal and support the UFW’s grape and lettuce boycott. The Unity Rally featured speeches by notable political activists like Slim Coleman (Campaign for Community Control), 44th ward alderman Dick Simpson, Marcos Muñoz (a UFW organizer) and a performance by Chicago’s Teatro del Barrio (pictured in these photos). It ended at a nearby National supermarket where marchers demanded that grapes and lettuce be removed from the shelves.

Fighting for Justice from the Fields to the Streets

Throughout the 1970s, Latina/o students from across Chicago helped to organize a number of United Farm Worker Boycott actions, including hunger strikes, picket lines, marches and mass meetings. Nancy closely documented these activities for the Northeastern Illinois University Chicano student newspaper, Contra la Pared, capturing priceless images that bring the Chicago Boycott to life. Nancy continued be interested in farmworker rights after she moved to Texas to attend the Radio, Television and Film program at the University of Texas, Austin. Her photographs of the Texas Farmworker Union’s 420-mile march from San Juan to Austin document their historic struggle to gain the right to unionize.

Copy of ufw flag.png

Mujeres Latinas en Acción

Nancy first encountered the long-standing social service non profit, Mujeres Latinas en Accion in the early 1970s, before she had graduated from high school. She participated in youth programs with Mujeres, and continued to work with them through the 1970s. She even joined their delegation to the first International Women’s Conference in Mexico City (1975), where she met noted Chicana feminist, Gracia Molina de Pic.

mujeres movie night.png