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Building a Movement and Constructing Community: Photography, the United Farm Workers and El Malcriado

The United Farm Workers’ widely circulated publication El Malcriado was highly influential in shaping Chicano movement print culture and the way it visualized emerging conceptions of identity, community, and politics. This essay examines use of photography within El Malcriado, the various audiences it addressed, and the multiple, at times contradictory conceptions of community it aspired to construct. The author builds upon his concept of the Chicano/a photographic, which accounts for the diverse, expansive uses of photography within the cultural production of a social movement, from the creation of images to their promiscuous circulation, juxtaposition, and reworking. By situating El Malcriado as an early, influential iteration of these photographic practices, Gunckel conducts a visual analysis that accounts for a publication’s rhetorical assumptions of audience or perceived circulation, and the networks of solidarity they envisioned.

social movement print culture, United Farm Workers, photography

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 42, Nos. 3-4 (2015): 29-45