Chicago Mastheads

This is a 3 color silkscreen print, and the second version of a project I began by accident in 2017. Part of my work includes combing archives looking for Chicago's Latinx history for prints, in an effort to make this history more accessible to Chicago's teachers and students. While initially I had no intention to make work about Chicago's bilingual and Spanish language mediascape, after a visit to the United Farmworkers Chicago Strike Office collection at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State in Detroit I started to notice the massive number of neighborhood newspapers that served primarily Spanish speaking communities in Chicago. At the time, the Chicago Tribune had eliminated the last Spanish language reported from their staff, and the lack of Latinx-serving media in Chicago was a big conversation. I visited the Rudy Lozano papers at the Daley Library and Special Collections at University of Illinois, Chicago campus where I found a treasure trove of additional Spanish language newspapers in a box of newspaper clippings from 1981 reporting on the assassination of Lozano.  Other earlier newspapers were located on microfilm at the Daley Library and Special Collections and at Harold Washington Public Library Special Collections with the help of archivists. In 2018 I produced a print with 38 mastheads, and soon after I found almost 20 more newspapers and journals that were aimed at the Latinx community. In 2022 I decided to publish another iteration with the amazing printers at Hoofprint Studios in Chicago. As far as I know, only one newspaper remains at-large and is not included in the poster.