A Public Conversation with Carlos Montes & Amitis Motevalli
Political activist Carlos Montes & artist/activist Amitis Motevalli talk about being raided by the FBI, activism, art and how we can be activists as well. Saturday, August 13 at 4:00pm at the Outpost for Contemporary Art.
On May 17, 2011 at 5:00 AM the SWAT Team of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and members of the FBI raided the home of Carlos Montes, a long time Chicano activist and active member of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. After ransacking his house, taking his computer, cell phones and hundreds of documents, photos, diskettes and mementos of his current political activities in the pro-immigrant rights and Chicano civil rights movement he was arrested on one charge dealing with a firearm code and released on bail the following morning. He has another court appearance this Friday, August 12, 2011.
On May 21, 2001, Amitis Motevalli was fired for refusing police searches from Locke High School. Under the supervision of Motevalli, the students at Locke High School formed an organization called the Locke Student Union (LSU) to improve their school. During the time Motevalli was teaching at Locke she, along with these students, were feed up with an extreme shortage of textbooks, other materials, lack of school teachers, lack of clear and consistent disciplinary rules and more importantly the brutal random weapon "searches" on students. After 9/11 the "weapons search teams" became more antagonistic of the students and disregarded the students civil liberties. Motevalli had enough, as did the LSU, and the results of fighting back for civil liberties, justices and equality in LAUSD ended in being fired. Motevalli's case went up to the Supreme Court.
This event is in-conjunction with Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros' project "Transformer Display for Community Fundraising: Version 2.
About the Speakers
CARLOS MONTES was a co-founder of the Brown Berets, a Chicano working class youth organization in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Brown Berets were inspired by and often compared to the Black Panther Party. Montes was one of the leaders of the Chicano Blowouts, a series of walkouts of East Los Angeles high schools to protest racism and inequality in Los Angeles-area high schools. He is portrayed by Fidel Gomez in the 2006 HBO movie Walkout.
The agenda of the Brown Berets was to fight police harassment, inadequate public schools inadequate health care, inadequate job opportunities, minority education issues , the lack of political representation, and the Vietnam War. It had a 13 point program that included self determination for Chicanos. It set up branches in Texas, New Mexico, New York, Florida, Chicago, St. Louis and other metropolitan areas with Chicano populations.
Montes was indicted twice for the ELA Blowout (he was one of the East LA 13) and later with 10 others for conspiracy to commit arson by the LAPD at a demonstration against then Governor Regan in 1969. After threats against his life and beatings by the police and many arrests on false charges he went underground and lived in Mexico and later Juarez and El Paso where he did labor organizing. He was rearrested in May 1977 and tried. However, with a competent legal defense, community support and a defense committee he was found not guilty of all charges. The Walkout indictment was thrown out of court as unconstitutional.
Montes remains an activist and is a leader of Latinos Against War, a Latino antiwar organization based in Los Angeles and a member of the immigrant advocacy group the March 25 Coalition.
AMITIS MOTEVALLI was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to the US in 1977. In 1995 she received a BA from SFSU in Art with a minor in Women’s studies and in 1998 an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Her work as an artist incorporates a combination of near-eastern aesthetic with a western art education. Motevalli states, “Being an immigrant in the US shows in my work a duality of culture, both natural and learned. In all of my work, I create a dialogue that critiques dominant views of oppressed people and culture in general”.
Her work in art education is with youth who share a similar duality in vision. Motevalli has been active in creating social change with her students on issues of civil rights within the class through pedagogy or working with students and community to organize around issues that effect their quality of life and access to education.
Amitis Motevalli is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship and the Visions of California Award. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art nationally and abroad as well as organizing to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artist and educators.
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