Style combination · Pairs well

Chicano Screenprint Poster × Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster

Two Spanish-language screenprint traditions of the Americas; add Chicano bilingual slogans and posterised portraits to Puerto Rican letrismo for community event posters.

From the research on Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP)

Mix them and make something Chicano Screenprint Poster Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Chicano Screenprint Poster, their arrangement from Chicano Screenprint Poster, the finish from Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Chicano Screenprint Poster Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP)

Type from Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster: Hand-lettering
Brush & pen calligraphy
Colour from Chicano Screenprint Poster: Flat fields
Full polychrome
Form from Chicano Screenprint Poster: Stylised figuration
Folk & sacred symbols
Composition from Chicano Screenprint Poster: Isolated object
Central symmetry
Surface from Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster: Carved line
Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster

Ours

Yatra One, standing in for Bold sans and slab-like display capitals cut for DIVEDCO film titles ('DOÑA JULIA', 'NENEN DE LA RUTA MORA'), with small sans capitals for the credit line 'Película hecha en Puerto Rico por la División de Educación de la Comunidad'

Text · Chicano Screenprint Poster

The screenprinted poster of the Chicano Movement and its heirs, made from the mid-1960s in community workshops across California and the Southwest for farmworker strikes and boycotts, teatro, dances, anti-war marches and immigrant rights. Flat opaque inks, posterised portraits and bilingual slogans recast Mexican icons (the UFW eagle, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Posada's calaveras, Mexica glyphs) for the US barrio, often by parodying American packaging.

Archivo; Chicano Screenprint Poster used Hand-cut screen-stencil lettering and Bold sans and hand-drawn capitals for bilingual strike and boycott slogans

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Chicano Screenprint Poster, with a counter-accent from Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Chicano Screenprint Poster Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP)

#f2eadb ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#f4a11c accent · 18%
#d7262e accent · 14%
#7a2d8c accent · 10%
#1f6f4a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2eadb;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #f4a11c;
  --accent-2: #d7262e;
  --accent-3: #7a2d8c;
  --accent-4: #1f6f4a;
  --font-display: "Yatra One", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Chicano Screenprint Poster: The Virgin of Guadalupe is a devotional image for many Mexicans and Chicanos, and Chicana feminist reworkings of her have met protest. Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery carry Indigenous meaning, and the UFW black eagle is the union's own emblem, not a free motif. Use them with community context, credit the movement, and commission Chicanx printmakers rather than lifting the look for marketing.

Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP): The posters drew on living Puerto Rican traditions, among them the vejigante masks of the Afro-Puerto Rican fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza and the carved santos of household devotion, and many were public-education posters of the Muñoz Marín government; give these motifs their community and devotional context rather than using them as generic 'tropical' decoration, do not pass pastiches off as DIVEDCO or Instituto originals, and credit or commission Puerto Rican printmakers rather than lifting the look. The Instituto was founded in 1955 amid nationalist sentiment to foster a Puerto Rican identity distinct from that of the United States, and its Spanish hand lettering has been read as a passive resistance to US cultural influence, while DIVEDCO was a product of the governing Popular Democratic Party and its films, which these posters announced, often read as propaganda for it; keep the Spanish and the island subjects, and do not re-letter the look in English for US brands or reduce it to generic 'Latin' flavour.