When a snowstorm struck the city one December in the early 1970s, the rank and file showed up to work at the Richardson Company chemical factory on time. The plant manager, supervisors, and line foremen–who all lived in the suburbs–didn’t arrive until late afternoon. At the end of the day, the plant manager shook hands with the workers in the packaging unit and thanked them. Afterward one worker, Carlos Cortez, remarked to his foreman that the plant would be better off without managers.
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Cortez has spent his working life as a laborer, but he’s better known as an artist and poet. A longtime affiliate of the Industrial Workers of the World, a charter member of Movimiento Artistico Chicano, and an anarchist, he’s advocated for workers’ rights, environmental preservation, and social justice through murals, cartoons, posters, and poems since the late 1940s.
Carlos Cortez started drawing while attending a rural Wisconsin elementary school and moved on to linoleum-block prints in high school. He joined the Socialist Party’s youth section after graduation and, during World War II, spent two years in a federal prison in Minnesota as a conscientious objector. After his release in 1945, he returned to Milwaukee and joined the IWW.
Now 78, Cortez says he’s “entering the most productive phase of my life.” Apart from some nude studies (many of his wife, Marianna, who died last year), Cortez’s work has rarely strayed from his activist agenda. “An artist, whether visual or nonvisual, expresses that which is closest to him or her,” he says. “To try to express something else would not be genuine.”
