My role has been important in the struggle to organize the unorganized

The eminent expatriate artist Elizabeth Catlett has spent much of her life working in Mexico while remaining active, though sometimes unwelcome, in American politics. This early print, made a year after Catlett’s move to Mexico, exemplifies her commitment to creating images that speak to the culture of the working class. The prominence of hands and arms functions as a formal device to crop an intimate compositional space for the viewer, as well as a narrative device to represent physical gestures of self-declaration, confinement, and control. As such, the central outlined figure—possibly an autobiographical figuration of Catlett—is both ensconced within and liberated from the physical and social community.