Remembering Betita Martinez, 1925-2021

 

Here's Betita at a party at Brava Theatre with her friend Nancy. She loved a good time.

 

Betita was a friend, a neighbor, and a comrade in resistance to U.S. imperial adventures. She was a founding member of the collective which produced WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras in response to the wars of 9/11. Here she compares notes with Calvin Cheung-Miaw. The newspaper (yes, there was paper back in the day) aimed to make a broadly left, anti-racist intervention in a developing national peace movement. It was thanks to Betita that WT/TdG was bilingual in Spanish and English from its first issue. She insisted; we all learned.

 

There were meetings -- endless meetings.

One of my favorite Betita pictures was always this, from a mural of neighborhood heroes painted by the children of BuenaVista/Horace Mann School.

For more about Betita's early life in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, see this site. 

We shall not see her like again.