Chapter four of this series is Peter M’s profile of Oakland's Favianna Rodriguez. By any measure she is a successful poster artist, businesswoman and organizer. She organizes other progressive artists into projects, such as the mural that went up last year on the side of the Oakland Museum. She is a role model for up-and-coming Latina artists, proving in her life that sí se puede — yes it can be done.

“I first interviewed Favianna Rodriguez for Indybay in 2004. We met at a conference held in Barrows Hall at the University of California Berkeley that was called ‘Designs on Democracy.’ She was one of a handful of designers and activists who put the conference together, and it was attended by several hundred people from around the U.S. She told me, ‘The conference is not just for designers, it’s for communicators and people who are in the business of doing marketing and selling the image of the left, to take it to a broader audience, and make it more appealing.’ Rodriguez contributed a poster to the event, in which she portrayed herself pasting the poster—a poster within a poster—onto the air in front of a cityscape. ‘It’s being posted on a cityscape to reclaim the right to public space,’ she said recently. ‘I wanted to highlight this, since the conference was around our democratic right to have our voice of dissent.’”

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Chapter 1: Tracy Rosenberg of Media Alliance
Chapter 2: Bradley of Santa Cruz Indymedia
Chapter 3: Bill Hackwell, Activist and Photographer