By mass-producing bold, simple images, the TGP Taller de Gráfica Popular successfully communicated with the Mexican people and served as their advocate. The effective combination of illustration and narrative text typical of their posters had its roots not only in the work of Mexico’s masterful political printmaker José Guadalupe Posada but also in the early twentieth-century Soviet agitprop poster movement, which used art as propaganda to support Communist policies. The Taller were not the only artists in Mexico working toward social reform; at this same time, the revolutionary Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros were producing large-scale wall paintings celebrating the class struggle of the Mexican worker. Their iconic images revealed a new cultural ideology commemorating the mestizo (mixed European and Amerindian) heritage that had been lost prior to the revolution, under Porfirio Díaz. In a similar vein, the TGP artists created images that could easily be pasted on walls and signboards and distributed in broadside form throughout Mexico City to promote discussion of urgent cultural and political issues of the day. Like the muralists, they often put their art at the service of specific contemporary movements for social justice; for example, they supported local agricultural workers’ unions and endorsed national literacy programs.

from Costa, Para la Gente: Art, Politics and Cultural Identity of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Notre Dame, 2009)