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Carlos Cortez
A Remembrance
By Franklin Rosemont

Carlos Cortez was for decades one of Chicago’s best-loved characters, a colorful and dynamic figure on countless picket lines and at demonstrations, May Day meetings and Joe Hill memorials as well as at art fairs, poetry readings, open forums, and his own rollicking workingclass “To hell with the boss” New Year’s Eve parties. Seriously ill the past couple of years, and more recently confined to a wheelchair, he died in his sleep at home on Tuesday, January 18 at the age of 81. On the following Saturday, some 500 friends and fellow workers, many from out of state, braved the worst Chicago blizzard in years for a last visit to his fabulous studio.

Cortez was a Chicagoan most of his life, but his impact extends far beyond the city: to all of North, Central and South America, to Europe, Asia and Australia. As poet, artist, and revolutionary, he was an inspiration to three generations of fighters for a better world.

An active member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for nearly sixty years (with red card number X321826 in his pocket), he remained till the end a fervent supporter of workingclass self-emancipation and a no-compromise enemy of capitalism and the state. Fellow Worker Cortez died like a good Wobbly, with his union dues paid up.

As his close friend the Comanche poet Lonnie Poco recently put it: Carlos Cortez was “a man aware of his mission in life.” Born and raised in Milwaukee, Carlos Cortez was the son of a remarkable couple. His father, a Mexican-born Native American Wobbly, Alfredo Cortez, was an organizer fluent in five languages who took part in the union’s historic free-speech fights. His mother, Augusta Ungerecht Cortez, was a German Debsian socialist and pacifist. You can hear Alfredo singing on the Smithsonian/Folkways 1990 album, Don’t Mourn, Organize: Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill. Augusta was a poet and writer, noted for her fiery letters to the editors of Milwaukee papers. The Cortezes were active in many groups, including the Socialist Party and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Their friends included union organizer and pacifist A. J. Muste and Ammon Hennacy, the “One-Man Revolution.” Opposition to militarism, war, and all forms of injustice was a Cortez family tradition. To Carlos we owe the great slogan: “Draftees of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Generals!”

For a time Carlos was a member of the Socialist Party’s youth section, the Young People’s Socialist League (known as “Yipsels”), but early on he was attracted to anarchism. Convinced that it was wrong for U.S. workers to shoot workers of other countries in the wars periodically concocted by profiteers and politicians, he served eighteen months in the federal penitentiary at Sandstone, Minnesota, as a war resister during World War Two. Shortly after completing his sentence in 1947 he lined up in the IWW. The Industrial Worker was soon running his cartoons, and in the early 1950s began featuring his poetry and articles as well.

The IWW, with its grand dreams of “One Big Union of All Workers” and “Solidarity Forever,” remained his principal organizational focus, but he took part in a wide range of other groups and causes, including the New York-based anarchist group, the Libertarian League; the civil rights and antiwar movements; and the Chicano arts movement. He was also deeply involved in support for the United Farm Workers, and in the ongoing struggles to free U.S. political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.

Next to the IWW, however, the organization to which he gave most time and attention was Chicago’s own Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company (established 1886). In 1970, the old-timers who had kept Kerr going during hard times were urban-renewed out of their space at 333 North Avenue, which also happened to be the home of the Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE) and the original Old Town School of Folk Music. When the old Wobbly Fred Thompson and longtime Socialist Virgil Vogel, with the help of Leon Despres, took the initiative in revitalizing this venerable publishing co-op—Chicago’s oldest publishing house and the world’s oldest workingclass publisher—Carlos at once became a vigorous supporter and remained one of the firm’s stalwarts, serving as President of its Board of Directors since 1993.

Aware of the close century-old connection between the Kerr Company and the IWW, he regularly reviewed Kerr titles for the Industrial Worker and proposed IWW-related books for publication. Well into the new millennium the Kerr Board held its meetings at “Casa Cortez,” as the storefront studio at 2654 Marshfield was commonly called. For many years Carlos was a familiar presence at the Charles H. Kerr Company table at the annual Printers’ Row Book Fair.

More recently he was also a “regular” at the annual July Bughouse Square free-speech events across the street from The Newberry Library, where his fine poem “Where Are the Voices?” was always a big hit.

I met Carlos Cortez for the first time early in 1963 at the old Wobbly hall at 2422 North Halsted, just off Fullerton and Lincoln. I was nineteen; Carlos, in his forties, was the next youngest member of the Chicago IWW Branch, a glorious caboodle of class-war veterans, seasoned hoboes one and all (though retired from active hoboing long before ‘63). Few had ever attended high school, but they knew Marx and Kropotkin backward and forward, and could recite long passages from Burns and Shelley from memory. These proletarian intellectuals, whose IWW membership dated from the 1910s and ‘20s, had been an important factor in Carlos’s education, as they were for younger Wobs like me. In those days, however, Carlos and I did not get to know each other well, for he was still living in Milwaukee, and came to Chicago only for the monthly IWW meetings. (He moved to Chicago in 1965 after marrying a young Greek woman, Marianna Drogitis.) Our real friendship and close collaboration dates from the mid-1980s in connection with the Haymarket Centennial and Kerr Company activities.

By spring 1964 a lot of younger people were taking out red cards, and even the daily papers were running articles, with headlines announcing “The Wobblies Return,” on the union’s organizing activities and the Roosevelt University free-speech fight. The “Old Left,” or the “Square Left,” as we called it, regarded Chicago’s younger Wobs in the Rebel Worker group as the “left-wing of the Beat Generation.” Carlos, though nearly twice our age, had his own links to the Beat scene, as evidenced by such poems as “Digging the Squares in Jack London Square” (reprinted in Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology). At least one of his poems appeared in the New York edition of the Beat journal Beatitude. After moving to Chicago, he was a frequent visitor to the IWW’s Solidarity Bookshop, where the Chicago Wob branch held its monthly meetings as well as parties and special events. Although his woodcuts and linocuts were unadaptable to the mimeographed Chicago Branch journal, The Rebel Worker, he was active—as speaker, writer, and artist—in just about every aspect of the 1960s IWW resurgence. And even then, as in later years, his role was often that of a mediating spirit: between older and younger Wobs, the IWW and the New Left, Anglos and Chicanos.

Through the years Carlos “made a living,” as the dismal expression goes, at various so-called “unskilled” jobs: construction work, stevedore, bookstore clerk, janitor. His “real work,” however, lay elsewhere, and his achievements were many and impressive. He was the IWW’s best-known post-World War Two poet, artist, cartoonist, and columnist. He edited the Wobbly monthly Industrial Worker for several years. (Many of his articles are signed C. C. Redcloud, Punapilvi [Red Cloud in Finnish], and other noms de plume; in later years he often added Koyokuikatl—Nahuatl for “coyote’s song”—to the name Cortez.)
Carlos’s Mexican/German heritage influenced his art; his main sources of inspiration were Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada and German expressionist Kathe Kollwitz. Nonsectarian in art as well as in politics, he disdained so-called “socialist realism” and greatly admired Berlin Dadaist George Grosz and Italian surrealist Enrico Baj. He frequented the surrealists’ Gallery Bugs Bunny in the 1960s, and his early Joe Hill poster was featured in “The Domain of T-Bone Slim” at the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition.

A prolific cartoonist, Carlos appreciated the work of comic artists as different as Ronald Searle and Jules Feiffer, but his favorites were his Wobbly predecessors, notably Bill Henkelman, Ern Hansen and C. E. Setzer (X13). In addition to numerous cartoons, he did many drawings, several paintings, and a few murals. His best work, however, and also his most popular, is his series of woodcut and linocut poster portraits. These powerful black and white posters, 17” x 22” or larger, depict some of history’s great revolutionists—Joe Hill, Ben Fletcher, Lucy Parsons, Emiliano Zapata, Ricardo Flores Magon, Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, Jose Guadalupe Posada, and his last, Native American Wobbly martyr Frank Little.
As a poet, too, Carlos read widely—Kenneth Patchen, Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues—but he drew most deeply on the old-time Wobbly bards, especially Ralph Chaplin and Arturo Giovannitti. In Carlos’s poetry, the old Wobbly watchwords, “An Injury to One is an Injury to All” and “Don’t Mourn, Organize” are reborn in a new imagery, his own, in which revolt, humor, love of wild nature, and Native American lore also figure prominently.

With characteristic modesty, he called himself “basically a soapbox artist and soapbox poet.” And therein lies his greatness, what his longtime friend Federico Arcos, a Spanish anarchist militiaman in the 1936 Revolution, has called the “vital and important legacy” of Carlos Cortez.

Surrealist poet Franklin Rosemont edited the Chicago IWW Branch journal the Rebel Worker in the 1960’s. He has authored/edited some 30 books, the latest Dancing in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s (Charles H. Kerr, 2005). All art by Carlos Cortez.