Ayotzinapa somos todos (We are all Ayotzinapa) Drawing

I began to create my drawing, "Ayotzinapa somos todos," immediately after the 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Ayotzinapa Normal School were attacked by police in Iguala, Mexico on Sept. 26, 2014. I made the drawing with black colored pencils on textured handmade paper, producing an artwork that looks like a classical lithographic print. The woman in my drawing could be any Mexican woman. She might be a family member of one of the kidnapped students, a protestor outraged by the abductions, or perhaps someone that hears gunfire coming from one of the secret fosas clandestinas (clandestine graves) that pockmark the countryside. She may be a person who knows one of her country’s 26,000 desaparecidos… those who have been forcefully "disappeared" by the authorities or the drug cartels since 2006. For that matter, she might be an American woman declaring sympathy with the Mexican people and their yearnings for justice. I wanted to distribute my artwork internationally to as many people as possible, so I decided to circulate a digitized poster version of my drawing that people could print on their own. After adding the hand-drawn words "Ayotzinapa somos todos" to the digital artwork, I uploaded the poster to the internet's global community to be distributed for free. The poster continues to play its role of bringing justice to the 43 and democracy to Mexico.