Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #7

New Art, New Politics Because I had just arrived in the city of Oaxaca, Hiro Yoshida suggested in his e-mail that we meet at the Institute of Graphic Arts, across the avenue from the imposing Convent of Santo Domingo. A small encampment of people clustered under a row of plastic tarpaulins eyed me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity as I paused in front of the television sets they’d set up on the sidewalk in front of the Institute to show videos of heavily armed federal police ripping out the barricades that had been set up to protect residents from marauding paramilitaries.

I told a young videotape vendor that I had left Baja California Sur in order to write about the turmoil the city was undergoing and he described how more than 4,000 “Robocops” (armored military and federal police) forcibly had evicted striking schoolteachers and their supporters from the center of the city. We were interrupted by Hiro waving to me from the steps of the Institute; I thanked the vendor and followed Hiro into the building.

The patio and display rooms were blocked by sheets dangling from ropes tied to the pillars. As Hiro swung the backpack he’d left by the doorway over his shoulder he explained that there’d been a “confrontation” with the police the day before and the injured were being treated at the Institute.

After we’d lunched with some of his art students and Hiro had boarded a bus to return to the little valley town of Popolutla where he lived I asked several vendors and people at the Institute about the confrontation. Some were reluctant to talk to me but one of the women vendors, who asserted that she was a member of Oaxaca’s Popular Assembly, explained that neither federal nor state authorities were willing to haul those whom they’d beaten and tried to arrest out of the Institute because they didn’t want to create a scandal that such an action involving “Maestro Francisco” would invoke.

“Maestro Francisco” is Francisco Toledo, the founder of the Institute and one of Mexico’s most prestigious and influential artists. Because he is so wellknown nationally and internationally and because he had political connections with the political party to which Oaxaca’s governor Ulisés Ruiz belonged the military and the police conceded him immunity from the persecutions they had no