Stylogenyin the style of Chicano Screenprint Poster

Counterculture · 1965–present · North America

Chicano Screenprint Poster

Also known as Chicano graphics, Chicanx poster art, Movimiento posters

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.

Make something in this styleGet advice in this styleMix it with another style

A bold illustrated screen reads “PLANTA JUNTOS” above a braided woman and a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, framed by corn plants and a rising sun. A seedling and red agricultural rows fill the foreground, with four circular navigation icons along the bottom.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

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.

01

How it works

  • Print by screen in a community workshop: flat, opaque inks in short, fast runs priced for the street.
  • Posterise photographs of leaders and icons into two or three tones of flat colour.
  • Write bilingually and play on the gap between Spanish and English.
  • Recast Mexican and pre-Hispanic icons (the UFW eagle, Guadalupe, calaveras, Mexica glyphs) as emblems of a US-born identity.
  • Turn US advertising and packaging against itself through parody, as Sun Mad does with the Sun-Maid raisin box.

California and the Southwest: Delano and the United Farm Workers, Sacramento (Royal Chicano Air Force), San Francisco's Mission District (Galería de la Raza, La Raza Silkscreen Center), East Los Angeles (Self Help Graphics & Art)

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Luxurious & glamorous, Rational & objective, Ornament-free, Gloss & highlights, Chrome & 3D render, Modular grid

Palette

  • #f2eadb
  • #141414
  • #d7262e
  • #f4a11c
  • #1f6f4a
  • #7a2d8c

Typefaces

  • Hand-cut screen-stencil lettering

  • Bold sans and hand-drawn capitals for bilingual strike and boycott slogans

    '¡Huelga!', 'Boycott Grapes'

Known for

  • Andrew Zermeño, Huelga!

    offset poster for the United Farm Workers, 1966

  • Rupert García

    political screenprints from the late 1960s; Frida Kahlo portraits

  • Malaquias Montoya, Yo Soy Chicano

    1972

  • Ester Hernández, Sun Mad

    screenprint, 1982

  • Royal Chicano Air Force, Sacramento

    José Montoya, Esteban Villa, Ricardo Favela

  • Self Help Graphics & Art, East Los Angeles

    founded by Sister Karen Boccalero

  • ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now

    Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2020–21

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Chicano Screenprint Poster’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleChicano Screenprint Poster1965–present · North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. https://americanart.si.edu/node/59972
  2. https://hyperallergic.com/715351/in-the-chicano-movement-printmaking-and-politics-converged/

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.