In 2012, Shanna Collins went to her first black-run DIY punk show in Chicago. It wasn’t long after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida while walking to the home of his father’s girlfriend carrying a can of Arizona fruit juice cocktail and a bag of Skittles. “I was experiencing a lot of anger,” she says. “A lot of disenchantment with a lot of systems.”

In 2017, Collins became a member of the Black and Brown Punk Show Collective herself. After that year’s festival, the group decided to reorganize itself as the Black, Brown, and Indigenous Crew (BBIC), which they consider an extension of the Black and Brown project Estrella Negra and Oxun began. “We wanted to continue to do the work that previous organizers were doing,” Collins says.

The Resurrection: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Crew Punk Fest with Blacker Face, Molcajete, Frank Waln, K.E.N, the Breathing Light, Mermaid N.V., and Megiapa, with DJ sets by Las Bizcochos

The fest also includes the workshops “Decolonizing Punk Rock: Understanding Indigenous Identity,” “Alternatives to Calling the Police During Mental Health Crises,” and “Punks and Zines: Self Publishing for Our Movements.” Sat 10/20, workshops at 4 PM, bands at 8 PM, Caliwaukee North, bbicchicago@gmail.com for details, $5-$10 donation requested, all-ages

The festival includes plenty of hardcore, but not every act plays fast, aggressive punk. Frank Waln is a Sicangu Lakota rapper, born on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, who moved to Chicago to pursue a hip-hop career. The Breathing Light play Sun Ra-inspired, futurist punk. Blacker Face combine gospel-inflected vocals with blues and funk in their otherworldly tunes. The lineup is sonically diverse on purpose.

Ramírez helped organize a preshow for the BBIC festival last week at the Harold Washington Library, where he works as the lead STEM mentor for the YouMedia Center. The bill included teen performers from the YouMedia program. “I feel like youth often get forgotten about,” he says. But every music scene needs fresh blood to stay healthy, as older folks age out and start staying home. Most of the kids in the YouMedia program are into hip-hop, Ramírez says, and the preshow let them see young people making other styles of music—and it gave everyone the chance to perform for a wider audience.

“A lot of people have kind of felt validated and seen,” Ozero says. “The Pilsen Latino punk scene—it had its own politics. Those were the politics of all the punks around. And that was great—because, as a black person, I got to see the Latino experience and their politics and issues that they’re going through. A lot of conversations and viewpoints opened up. We were able to bridge cultural experiences and shared experiences.”

Blacker Face bassist PT Bell applauds the collective for what it does not just at the festival but also throughout the year—which includes putting together benefit shows, DJ nights, movie screenings, and art shows as well as posting educational content on its social media accounts. “The amount of practical political work that BBIC fest organizers do when the fest isn’t happening—the resources they tap people into are valuable to the scene,” Bell says. “There’s also a bastion of historical knowledge that these folks have correlated and issue out to the masses. There’s a diasporic concern that’s really incredible. There’s deep origins of some kinds of punk imagery: Mohawks, piercings, things of that sort.”