Community & Legacy
Movement Ink was built by a man who has spent his life doing community work — and it carries the legacy of his son, who chose the same work. This page is dedicated to both of them.
Rene Quiñonez
From the Mission
Rene Quiñonez was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District. His own early path ran through the streets — and in 2001, after serving a year in jail, he came home determined to change his life and the lives of people around him. He started as a volunteer at HOMEY — Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth — doing community service hours. A summer later, HOMEY hired him. He rose to become its executive director.
HOMEY — Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth
At HOMEY, Rene led workshops for youth, internships, and an entrepreneurial program in graphic design and t-shirt printing — teaching young people a trade they could build a life on. He stood with Mission residents against San Francisco’s civil gang injunction, which the community said punished young Brown men for how they looked and where they stood. HOMEY’s peace work was recognized by the San Francisco Police Commission. In 2009, he used screenings of the film La Mission to open up conversations with neighborhood youth about homophobia and gentrification.
Violence Prevention
Beyond HOMEY, Rene spent years in violence prevention — eight years as a case manager of a tattoo removal program, and as director of a neighborhood nonprofit — with a practice of hiring and training people who came from gangs, giving them real work and a real path.
Movement Ink Is the Continuation
Rene founded Movement Ink, his family-run screen-printing company in Oakland, with a simple goal: to support the social justice community while earning an honest living for his family. In the summer of 2020, when protest orders came in from around the country, Rene, his family, his employees, his community — and even his competitors — worked around the clock to print and pack nearly 10,000 masks carrying messages like “Stop Killing Black People.” When federal postal officials seized those shipments, he sued the United States to hold them accountable — a fight he has carried to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
That is who prints your order. We outfit community — it is not a slogan, it is a record.
In Memory of Luis Alberto Quiñonez
“Sito” — 19 years old, San Francisco
Our Son and Brother
Luis Alberto Quiñonez — Sito — was our son and our brother. He was a young man from San Francisco’s Mission District, raised in a family that does community work, and he chose that work for himself.
The Activist
At 14, Luis was wrongfully accused of a murder he did not commit. He spent five months locked up before surveillance video proved his innocence and the charges were dropped. The system that did that to him did not break him — it lit a fire in him. Luis immersed himself in social justice work. He fought for the closure of juvenile hall. He mentored young men who were on their way there. He advocated at the State Capitol for alternatives to incarceration, and he was a Dream Beyond Bars fellow at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ) in Oakland.
Four days before he was killed, Luis told his father he was going all in on social justice. His father warned him the work could disappoint him. Luis answered: “Dad, it hasn’t stopped you.”
September 8, 2019
On September 8, 2019, Luis was murdered in San Francisco. He was 19 years old. His father has fought ever since for the truth of who Luis was — for his son to be recognized as the victim he was, and to end the cycle of violence that took him.
His Legacy Lives Here
Movement Ink carries Sito’s legacy of art and activism. Every design printed for the community, every young person given a chance to learn the trade, every message carried into the streets on a shirt or a mask — that is his fire, still working.
Sito’s story is also told in the book “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him” by Laurence Ralph.