This story aired in the January 28, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Bay Area has a long history of activism and protest that lives on today. And when you walk our sidewalks, you still might come across a flyer on a telephone pole that leads you to a community event… or an act of civic disobedience.
These days it's safe to say, most of those flyers are made on a computer. But in San Francisco’s Mission district, there’s it's a well kept tradition of screenprinting those posters. The practice is as resilient as the community that developed it.
Here, we meet an artist from that community who still believes in the magic of printing messages by hand.
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Story Transcript:
CALIXTO ROBLES: Get one squeegee that will be good to print, and now I’m gonna get the color. I think this will be good.
REPORTER: Calixto Robles picks a vivid red paint from a collection of jars.
Sound of pounding paint on the screen
REPORTER: He dumps the paint onto a large screen stretched across a wooden frame screwed to a table.
CALIXTO: Then we have the paint and we're gonna pull it.
REPORTER: He scrapes the paint down the length of the screen with a squeegee, pressing an image onto the paper below.
Sound of the squeegee pulling the paint across the screen
REPORTER: He lifts the screen to reveal an intricate, complete print.
Sound of lifting the screen off the paper
REPORTER: Like magic.
REPORTER: Wow. That is beautiful.
CALIXTO: It says, “People united will defeat fascism.” People unite, you know.
REPORTER: That's, that was so amazing.
CALIXTO: You gotta put it on the streets later. You know, share it.
REPORTER: We’re in the studio Calixto shares with his wife. I can smell sage burning. The small room is covered wall to wall in art that they’ve made over the decades. There’s one image in particular that shows up in a lot of his work.
CALIXTO: People kind of started recognizing me in the Mission for my jaguars, my screen prints with that figure.
REPORTER: For the ancient societies of Mexico and their descendants, jaguars represent fertility, royalty, and power. Calixto sees the jaguar as a warrior that fiercely guards his culture.
CALIXTO: So it is very magical.
REPORTER: Calixto has always been an artist, since he was a kid. He wanted to study art, but his dad wanted him to be a lawyer, doctor, architect –– something like that. So he studied business and met up with his friends at night to talk art.
CALIXTO: And I, by myself, I started doing my things in my home. You know, I got some watercolors, acrylics, and oils and paint. So I'm a self taught artist.
REPORTER: Calixto immigrated to San Francisco from Oaxaca in 1983. He found work at restaurants, landscaping, and construction in the Mission.
CALIXTO: But one day in 1986, I was walking by Mission Street and I saw this building, Mission Cultural Center, and I saw some flyers on the windows that [said] free drawing classes.
REPORTER: So he started taking the classes. Then one day, he went up to the screenprinting studio, Mission Grafica.
CALIXTO: I remember the beautiful posters there. They [had] a poster for Mandela, you know, to stop the, the apartheid in South Africa. I saw posters in support of Leon Peltier or to end the embargo against Cuba.
REPORTER: The posters changed how he saw art — as a form of protest.
CALIXTO: I’m from Oaxaca and in Oaxaca I remember when I was a young student there were a lot of protests in the streets and we [saw] the posters in the streets and all this supporting of Cuba, Nicaragua. So when I saw these things in Mission Grafica, I [said] “Wow, this is the place I would like to be.”
REPORTER: So Calixto asked the director of Mission Grafica if he could volunteer there. And the director said yes.
CALIXTO: So next day after my shift [at] the restaurant, I was right there.
REPORTER: He started apprenticing and has been there ever since.
Mission Grafica started in 1982. It’s the screen printing arm of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, an organization which supports art by Chicano, South and Central American, and Caribbean San Franciscans.
The center’s founders see culture as a reflection of a future determined by the concrete actions of today. The future is not static. You can change the future by acting in the present. In this case by making art as a form of resistance. Art as activism, activism as art.
Take screen printing. The Chicano Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and 70’s developed the art form to advance their movement. It was this quick, easy way to reproduce colorful, powerful images and messages.
CALIXTO: We didn't think about, you know, fine art or being [in] museums. No, no. We just, in that moment, we mostly were –– I think what we were thinking is to make, how to create an image that can move people.
REPORTER: Even when computers came on the scene, Calixto kept screenprinting because it was a powerful tool.
He remembers when the dotcom bubble started inflating in the late nineties. Tech workers wanted to live in the Mission; rents went way up; long-time residents were evicted. He and his printmaking students made posters protesting the displacement and put them on the streets.
CALIXTO: So it's always been whatever is happening. Mission Grafica, always responds with doing posters to the people, to the community.
REPORTER: Calixto’s art draws on a long history of resistance to oppression. He shows me some beautiful ceramic whistles he made by hand, inspired by the tradition of his grandmother’s village. The whistles are shaped like snarling jaguars, painted bright orange and jade. He picks one up that’s the size of a fist…
Sound of a jaguar-shaped ceramic whistle
REPORTER: …Then he plays one that’s as tiny as a grape.
Sound of a smaller jaguar-shaped ceramic whistle
CALIXTO: Anything that is made with the hands, you know, like, the food that you cook[with] your hands. You make your salsa, you make your salad with the hands.
REPORTER: I know what he means. We have a word for it in Korean, son mat, which literally translates to “taste of your hand.” It’s the delicious flavor of the labor someone puts into food when they make it by hand.
Calixto’s art has a flavor that a computer couldn’t generate. And even though a screenprint design can be reprinted hundreds of times, each print is different. The hand that bears the squeegee makes the print.
Calixto has shared his knowledge with students at Mission Grafica for decades. And he’s still making prints.
Sound of unrolling a print on a table
CALIXTO: It’s called “Jaguar With Flowers.”
REPORTER: Neon spirals pinwheel across the paper. His work looks lighter these days. He says he’s been focusing on symbols of peace.
CALIXTO: So when people see them, for one second, they can put their mind in peace, in love and resilience, you know?
REPORTER: But the jaguar at the center of the piece has stayed the same through the years. It’s a rusty red in thick black lines. With its teeth bared in a growl, it guards the history and the future of this place and its people.
