Since the 1950s, George Rodriguez has quietly documented multiple social worlds—in California and beyond—that have never before been displayed togethe…
Since the 1950s, George Rodriguez has quietly documented multiple social worlds—in California and beyond—that have never before been displayed together, a rare mix of Hollywood and Chicano L.A., film premieres and farmworker strikes, album covers and street scenes, celebrity portraits and civil rights marches.
Last week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the East L.A. “blowouts,” in which thousands of Mexican-American high-school students protested their crowded, understaffed classrooms and outdated textbooks with an organized walkout. At the time, George Rodriguez was a thirty-one-year-old photographer working at Columbia Pictures. It was a good job, working on the publicity stills of stars like Frank Sinatra and Jayne Mansfield. Rodriguez, who is also Mexican-American, had grown up at a different time, and in a different part of the city—South L.A., not the Eastside, which was the hotbed of the burgeoning Chicano movement. But he recognized that something important was happening. During lunch breaks, he grabbed his camera and drove across town to take pictures. Who else would document this moment? One photo features a teen-ager, his hair parted down the middle, holding a sign in each hand: in the right, roosevelt chicanos demand justice; in the left, fuck the pigs. A visual reminder, in light of the recent Parkland student protests, that teen-agers have long been at the forefront of demanding political change.
