Your Presence Counts/Tu Presencia Cuenta

After years of working with Self Help Graphics, I was invited to make a screen print in early 2020 (before all hell broke loose). I was asked to address the upcoming census count, and I opted for this map-based print that highlights the invisibility of our unhoused neighbors. The police cars are a reminder that those with badges have historically policed the use of public spaces, and the Spanish galleons reference the fact that our current notions of private property as a commodity date back to the colonial encounter. The underlying map is based on an archival map of what we now call Los Angeles in 1930, of the South Bay of LA (where I lived at the time of making this). I obtained a copy of this map from the special collections department in the CSU Dominguez Hills library.