Pedagogies of the Movement: Chicano Public Art as Educational Praxis

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Our Presence Is Not Inevitable: Reflecting on Chicana/o Interventions at The University of California

Abstract

This contribution explores the educational legacy of the Chicana/o Movement by highlighting the work of artist-activist-educator Malaquias Montoya.
Montoya is a seminal figure in the Chicano Art Movement and a lifelong educator whose work merges art, activism, and pedagogy. Known for his politically charged silkscreen posters and murals, he has long used visual art to amplify social justice causes—from anti-imperialism to immigrant rights. He co-founded the Mexican American Liberation Art Front and the Taller de Artes Gráficas and taught for decades within the University of California system. Most notably, he created and facilitated the Mexican and Chicano Mural Workshop—the first and only course of its kind in the UC system. In this course, Montoya guided students in collaborative, community-based mural projects, serving as a facilitator rather than the lead artist.
Drawing from oral histories and archival research, I examine how Montoya’s art and teaching practices disrupt dominant educational narratives while building public memory and political consciousness.His syllabi and pedagogy position art not only as curriculum, but as a form of praxis—where theory, identity, and action converge in collective efforts toward justice and liberation.. In particular, his courses engaged students in what I call Pedagogies of the Movement—a framework grounded in three interrelated commitments: an ethical insistence that the public university serves both students and the community, an empathetic view of the Chicano community, and self-reflexive engagement as a mode of critical practice. These pedagogies cultivate an ethic of care, cultural reclamation, and collective responsibility, guiding students to see education as a space of transformation rather than assimilation.

By centering the knowledge production of communities historically excluded from academic spaces, Montoya’s work contributes to a decolonizing vision of education—one that affirms community cultural wealth and reclaims silenced histories. My recovery of his teaching, emerging from the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 70s, purposefully unforgets the living archive of our elders, manifest in both method and message within the Pedagogies of the Movement.

In honoring their legacy, this work invites us to reimagine education not merely as a site of knowledge transmission, but as a space for healing, resistance, and liberation.

Author

• Gloria E. Poveda, California Northstate University