Cahill - FINAL - Dec 12 19


Correspondence Address: Caitlin Cahill, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, New 
York, NY, 11205. Email: ccahill@pratt.edu 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 14, Issue 1, 122-124, 2020 

Creative Intervention 

Caution 

MESTIZO ARTS & ACTIVISM COLLECTIVE 
Salt Lake City, USA 

Figure 1. Caution (© Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective) 

One	of	the	interesting	things	is	that	this	image	has	always	been	interpreted,	
and	even	called,	“Caution,	we	have	power.”	In	reality,	the	conversation	within	
the	group	never	headed	in	that	direction.	It	was	more	of	a	‘we	are	peaceful	
and	we	care	about	each	other,	our	communities,	our	families	and	we	have	a	
responsibility	 to	each	other.	 “Estamos	 junt@[x]s	pase	 lo	que	pase	(we	are	
together	 whatever	 happens).”	 	 Which,	 now	 that	 I	 come	 to	 think	 about	 it,	
could	be	interpreted	as	“Caution,	we	have	power.”			

Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola, Youth Researcher (2008-2011), 
Co-Director (2012-2015), Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective 



Caution 

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 14, Issue 1, 122-124, 2020 

123 

Caution was created by young people as a way of making sense of their 
experiences of xenophobia and racism (Cahill, Quijada Cerecer, Reyna 
Rivarola, Hernández Zamudio & Alvarez Gutiérrez, 2019; Quijada, Cahill & 
Bradley, 2011).  Specifically we created the image in response to online racist 
and hostile comments posted below an article in the local newspaper 
featuring the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (www.maacollective.org). 
Reading the hostile comments we felt sad and outraged, and decided to create 
this image “by us and for us” to collectively process and respond to the hate 
directed towards the Latinx immigrant community. “Theorizing from the 
flesh” (Anzaldúa 1987) literally and figuratively, Caution offered an 
opportunity to rework cultural narratives that misrepresent our community.  

The Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (MAA) is an intergenerational 
social justice think tank based in Salt Lake City, Utah that engages in critical 
participatory action research (PAR), placing emphasis upon the particular 
contribution and access young people bring to understanding their everyday 
lives.  Collectively we co-create spaces of recognition that center the agency 
of young people of color, immigrants, and our capacity to make change on 
our own terms (maacollective.org).  More than a method, critical PAR is an 
epistemological position grounded in everyday life experience and a 
commitment to both the “right to research” (Appadurai, 2006) and the right to 
represent.  As cultural representations are key to the criminalization and 
exploitation of immigrant communities, in our collective creative practice we 
document and respond to undocumented immigrants’ intimate everyday 
experiences of racial capitalism, and challenge what we call the “school-to-
sweatshop pipeline” (Cahill, Alvarez Gutiérrez & Quijada Cerecer, 2016). 
In our work, participatory art-making is a critical aspect of our activism and 
inquiry whereby “people develop their power to perceive critically the way 
they exist in the world with which, and in which, they come to see the world 
not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire 
1974, xx; Quijada Cerecer, Cahill, González Coronado & Martinez, 2019).  

References 

Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands La Frontera: The new Mestiza (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: 
Aunt Lute Books. 

Appadurai, A. (2006). The right to research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4(2), 
167–17 

Cahill, C., Quijada Cerecer, D., Reyna Rivarola, A., Hernández Zamudio, J., & Alvarez 
Gutiérrez, L. (2019). “Caution, We Have Power”: Resisting the school-to-sweatshop 
pipeline through participatory artistic praxes and critical care. Gender & Education, 31(5), 
576-589.  

Cahill, C., Alvarez Gutiérrez, L., & Quijada Cerecer, D. A.  (2016). A dialectic of dreams and 
dispossession: The school-to-sweatshop pipeline. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 121-137. 

Freire, P. (1974). Education: The practice of freedom. London: Writers & Readers Publishing 
Cooperative. 



Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective 

 
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 14, Issue 1, 122-124, 2020 

124 

Quijada Cerecer, D.A., Cahill, C., González Coronado, Y. S., & Martinez, J. (2019). “We the 
People”: Epistemological moves through cultural praxis. Cultural Studies-Critical 
Methodologies, 19(3), 214-221. 

Quijada, D., Cahill, C., & Bradley, M. (2011). Resist This! Embodying the contradictory 
positions and collective possibilities of transformative resistance. The International Journal 
of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(5), 587-593.