This Viva Zapata banner was carried by the Kaolin Workers Union in the 1995 Mushroom Day Parade. The annual mushroom day parade was usually a self-congratulatory event for the owners, while the workers stayed on the job. We were able to help crash the event by creating banners and signs, along with providing instruments for a marching band. It was quite a scene.
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The predominantly Latino mushroom workers in Kennett Square, the "mushroom capital" of Pennsylvania, desperately underpaid and subject to brutal working conditions, had struck the growers and organized themselves into the Kaolin (the leading company's name)Independent Workers Union.
Alewitz had been impressed by this and similar attempts of immigrant workers to organize unions. Like the thousands of mostly Mexican drywall workers in Southern California, these workers were counter-posing a strategy of self-organization to the union officialdom's more conservative methods.
These workers were educating North American labor in an important concept: Unions don't organize workers, workers organize unions. Hiring young organizers, regardless of how dedicated, and spending money, regardless of how much, cannot substitute for a worker-driven, political movement. Working with PHILOPOSH: the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health, and a residency sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Alewitz brought Agitprop to the streets of Kennett Square.
Unable to find an adequate wall for a mural, Alewitz instead designed portable art for the Mushroom Day parade. The annual event was a self-celebratory growers event, and did not normally include the workers.
This year the workers demanded and won the right to march. Parade officials made a last attempt to exclude their contingent, at one point by demanding that all signs carried be in English. Alewitz and other volunteers from New Jersey responded by devising picket signs whose images conveyed the message of struggle without the need of text.
Previously, Alewitz had been struck by the life-size puppets used in street festivals of Nicaragua and Mexico. In 1990 he helped lead a group of artists designing material for a pro-choice Demonstration in Washington. The troupe contained drummers, a giant puppet of martyred German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, a two headed monster of the two-party system, nine skeleton Supreme Court justices, and a giant red club labeled "Labor Power" on one side and "Women's Action" on the other. To see these assorted creatures on the march with the wind filling out their shapes (a scene carefully recorded on fun-filled videos) is like an adult puppet show, not particularly close to the theatrical classicism of the famous Bread and Puppet Theater but more free-flowing and spontaneous.
Two years later, the pro-choice puppets became mushroom workers and the monster properly turned into their bosses. Carrying a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and with a giant Alewitz portrait of Emiliano Zapata, adorned with union t-shirts and playing kazoos, the workers were the centerpiece of the parade.
- Paul Buhle, Insurgent Images
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