Note—Here is the text of my remarks about Carlos Cortez a today’s book launch and exhibit opening at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
My name is Patrick Murfin. I was Carlos Cortez’s close friend and Fellow Worker in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1968. We collaborated in the Chicago Branch, at General Headquarters and on the Industrial Worker, lived together twice, and worked at the same trade school as custodians. I am an amateur historian who co-authored The IWW: It’s First Seventy Years 1905-1975 with Fred W. Thompson. I have continued as a life-long social justice activist, is an obscure poet, and maintain a daily blog Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout—An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating.
Carlos might not we well known to the general public, but he is a revered figure in the labor movement, especially with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and in the Latinx and Native American arts communities. He was perhaps best known for his lino and woodcut posters and illustrations. For him art of all types was inseparable from social activism and was meant to be easily accessible to ordinary people. He could have made a fortune and been far more widely recognized as a fine artist if he sold his posters in signed and numbered editions. Instead, he printed them himself in unlimited numbers by silk screening on whatever paper stock he could scrounge and were sold for a few dollars or more likely given away. In fact, if he discovered there was a commercial market for his prints that were being re-sold by dealers and galleries, he would print more just to keep the price down. Much of his work has been archived, preserved, and displayed here at the National Museum of Mexican Art, which he helped nurture.
But he is being recognized now as a writer. He was also a roll-up-his-sleeves, plain spoken poet who published three collections in his lifetime and who shared his work at poetry readings and slams around the city avoiding the establishment to find venues where the excluded and outcast could be included. He performed his pieces at union meetings and on picket lines, at rallies and benefits, and for those who gathered in the informal salon he kept open in the former Northwest Side neighborhood storefront where he made a home with his beloved wife Marianna.
Most of his work first saw print in the Industrial Worker with which he was associated for more than 40 years.
Born in Milwaukee on August 13, 1923 to a German Socialist mother and a Mexican indio/mestizo IWW member Father. He was steeped from the beginning in working class culture and revolutionary values. He took seriously the old Socialist admonitions not to allow governments to divide workers and turn them against each other in imperialist wars. During World War II he refused induction into the Army and spent nearly three years in the Federal Prison at Sandstone, Minnesota—ironically the same prison where I was held for the same offense for draft resistance during the Vietnam War.
After the war he worked at record store where he cultivated his taste for jazz, folk, and international music. He also immersed himself in the emerging Beat culture. He was most often seen in a jaunty beret.
In the late 1950’s he decided to come down to Chicago to become more involved with the IWW where there was both an active general membership branch and the union’s General Headquarters. He volunteered his time helping out at GHQ where Fred W. Thompson then the Editor of the Industrial Worker began to use his contributions of both illustrations and writings.
Soon he was contributing several pieces each issue—articles, essays, folksy polemics, and occasional verse. Short musings, observations, and yarns were printed as a regular feature column The Left Side. Other pieces appeared signed as CAC, C.C. Redcloud, Koyokuikatl, and his IWW membership card number X321826.
When he first came down he was still known as Karl Cortez as his mother called him, but has he immersed himself in the city and connected to the Mexican and Chicano communities, he became Carlos and adopted the big hats, and flowing mustache and sometimes goatee which became his trademark.
By the late 60’s Carlos took over as editor of the paper and in 1970 I began my regular contributions to its pages. Later we reorganized the staff as a collective and eventually I assumed the editorship while Carlos continued his contributions. When we lost office space to do the layout and production, we did it at a table in Carlos and Marianna’s apartment. When that place was remodeled by their landlord they stayed with me and then Secretary Treasurer Kathleen Taylor in our near-by fourth floor walk-up apartment in the building dubbed Wobbly Towers for a few months.
Meanwhile Carlos and I both worked as custodians at Coyne American Institute, a trade school on Fullerton Avenue. A few years later when I was homeless Carlos returned the favor and I stayed with them for some time enjoying Marianna’s strong espresso in the morning and hanging with Carlos over Wild Turkey in the evenings in the large gallery-like front room that served as his workshop and gathering spot. Almost every evening was an education.
It is really a tribute to the Industrial Worker as a working class institution that Carlos is being honored for the work that largely first appeared there.
During those years Carlos became a founding member of the Movemento Aristico Chicano (MARCH)—the first organization of Latino artists in the city. With his close friend Carlos Cumpián and others meeting in the comfortable front room, he built an organization which mentored many young artists, spread “the culture”, and helped foster the re-birth of the muralist movement in the city. He also became an early supporter of the Mexican Fine Arts Center now known as the National Museum of Mexican Arts which became the repository of many of his works and has the largest collection of his extensive production in the world. He was also active with the Chicago Mural Group, Mexican Taller del Grabado (Mexican Graphic Workshop), Casa de la Cultura Mestizarte, and the Native Men’s Song Circle, a Native American group out of the American Indian Center. Through that association, he came to mentor and encourage young Indian artists with the same passion he dedicated to the Chicanos. In fact, there was no artist or poet of any race who was not welcome in that home, as long as they were ready and eager to serve the people’s needs and not “art for art’s sake,” a notion he found repugnant and elitist.
Perhaps Carlos's most famous posters were his images of Wobbly songwriter and martyr Joe Hill. He did several different versions in at least three languages--English, Spanish, and Swedish.
A lifelong bachelor, in the early 60’s a Greek friend told him that he should meet his sister. The trouble was that she was still in Greece. The two corresponded through her brother for a while. Carlos saved his money, quit his job, and crossed the ocean as a passenger on a freighter. He met Marianna Drogitis, a lovely young woman who was, however, by the standards of her culture, a spinster having rejected several suitors. The two fell in love despite not speaking a word of each other’s language. They communicated by gesture and the few words of German they had in common—she had learned the language in occupied Greece where members of her family were active in the Resistance. They returned to the U.S. on another freighter, married, and settled into the happiest marriage I have ever seen in a Chicago apartment in 1965.
The love of Carlos's life--his Greek wife Marianna.
When I proposed to Kathy Brady-Larsen in the early 80’s, Carlos was pleased to make a drawing of the two of us with her daughters Carolynne and Heather for the invitations I designed. He and Marianna danced happily at our wedding party at Lilly’s on Lincoln Avenue.
By 1981 Carlos’s heart forced him to retire from wage slavery. It gave him more time to dedicate to his artwork, poetry and causes. Unfortunately, it also put a strain on Marianna who took extra work to make up for the lost income. Despite sometimes working twelve hours at two jobs, she always had a smile for any of Carlos’s many guests, and a pat on the cheek for the old man.
The original Charles H. Kerr & Co. edition of Crystal-Gazing the Amber Fluit & Other Wobbly Poems.
Carlos, although best known as a graphic artist and for his work on the Industrial Worker, was also a poet. He would do occasional readings at an old haunt, the College of Complexes, in coffee houses, at radical bookstores, and wherever his friends gathered. He wrote three books of poetry, including De Kansas a Califas & Back to Chicago, published by March/Abrazo Press, and Crystal-Gazing the Amber Fluid & Other Wobbly Poems, published by the old Socialist publisher Charles H. Kerr & Company. Carlos was President of the Kerr Board for 20 years, a title he detested. He also edited, wrote the introduction to, or contributed to several other books.
Carlos was devastated when his beloved Marianna died in 2001. I last saw him at her memorial.
His health deteriorated rapidly after that, and he was often confined to a wheelchair. He continued to greet a steady parade of visitors and admirers to his studio home and participated in the planning of new exhibitions of his work, including one in Madrid sponsored by the anarcho-syndicalists of the Confederacion National de Trabajo (CNT.) He suffered a massive heart attack and was confined to his bed for the last 18 months of his life.
On January 17, 2005 Carlos died, surrounded by friends and “listening to the music of the Texas Tornados.”
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