In 1946, Elizabeth Catlett settled in Mexico City and joined Taller Gráfica Popular, an influential art collective producing sociopolitical art through muralism. She blended Mexican techniques with African American history to create some of her most famous works, like "Sharecropper."
Outside of artmaking, she stood in solidarity with oppressed communities in Mexico, even getting arrested for participating in a railroad workers' strike in the late 1950s. By 1962, the U.S. had exiled her due to her affiliation with Taller, which they considered a communist front organization. The U.S. couldn't stand her.
For a decade, she was barred from the country of her birth. "It's true, from the legal point of view I am a Mexican citizen; but how will some consul, some ambassador, some bureaucrat, some president be able to erase the color of my blood...
“... erase my twenty-some years of life as a Black citizen of the U.S. where I went to segregated schools, where I traveled in the back of the bus reserved for Blacks, where I sat in stations, in theatres, in restaurants in the section that said negroes only!?"
Anti-Blackness is everywhere. Despite the hostility we face when we honor our Blackness, we can create beautiful, lasting legacies. "I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies," Elizabeth Catlett said.