BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE INSTRUMENTAL
Free Association, Collectivism, and Making Space for Chicano/a Art
During my teenage years in Sacramento, the California state capital, located in the Central Valley, I had first admired the synthesis of artistic aesthetic and direct political message in the Chicano murals that appeared downtown in the seventies.
Ben Keppel
(1998, xxvii) in Toward a People’s Art
It should go on record that we definitely do not—with our art—want to destroy this country. That’s not our purpose—to be destructive . . . and we’ve been accused of that, but not as educators. . . . In fact, education is constructive, and what was interesting is what they were opposed to—our connecting with history.
Esteban Villa,
interview, December 23, 2000
On November 8, 1978, RCAF member Juan Carrillo sent a letter to Esteban Villa from the California Arts Council (CAC), informing him that he had “inquired at the Department of Transportation in regards to your proposed use of the walls under Interstate 5 for a mural project.” Carrillo added, “It appears as though this request is not out of line and has often been granted throughout the state.” He pressed Villa to “keep in mind the idea of the gift to the City of Sacramento. Phil might be open to that as a way of finding additional support and publicity for you. I am glad Bill Moskin of SMAC happened by. Perhaps he can find the scaffolding for you” (Carrillo 1978). Carrillo referred to Sacramento mayor Phil Isenberg by his first name and tactfully noted the CAC visit by the director of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission (SMAC). In doing so, he informed Villa that Moskin was aware of his interest in creating art on the tunnel walls (see fig. 4.1).
Two days after Carrillo’s official letter, which he addressed to Villa at the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, RCAF artist Ricardo Favela sent Mayor Isenberg a letter that begins with an unassuming tone: “Just thought you might like to know what we are doing these days” (Ricardo Favela 1978). Writing to the mayor as the director of the Centro, Favela quickly turned to the real intention of his letter, reporting that on “Tuesday November 7, 1978, Mr. Villa began working on the tunnel walls [but] Sacramentos [sic] ‘finest’ decided to ask for his permission slip . . . and don’t be surprised if you receive a midnight telephone call from me asking you, again, to get Mr. Villa and probably myself, out of jail” (Ricardo Favela 1978). From the dates on both letters, it appears that Villa began painting a mural without the city’s permission. After being stopped by the police, he asked Juan Carrillo how to obtain access to the walls lining a pedestrian underpass between K Street and downtown’s Old Sacramento tourist district. Favela then contacted the mayor to ensure Villa did not face more consequences.
Ironically, the K Street tunnel was the future site of the RCAF mural L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. (Light Art in Sacramento, Energy Resources In Unlimited Movement), which was officially created in 1984 but, as the letters evidence, began in 1978. At the time of Villa’s unauthorized painting, a Sacramento Housing Authority director told local press, “It won’t remain” (Mendel 1978). Villa claimed in the same article that the impromptu mural was an attempt to “bring more attention to how murals are being painted over throughout the city without proper permission from the artists” (Mendel 1978). His actions were swiftly countered by the police, as Favela made clear. Despite the humorous tone of his letter, Favela conveyed the RCAF’s resolve to make Chicano/a art regardless of administrative obstacles: “We welcome whatever help you may deem necessary for the continuation of aesthetics and spiritual ceremony as a way of life. Again, I remain yours truly, in community growth” (Ricardo Favela 1978).
Figure 4.1. L: Letter to Esteban Villa from Juan Carrillo, November 8, 1978. Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library. R: Letter to mayor Phil Isenberg from Ricardo Favela, November 10, 1978. The Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.
Villa’s actions and his colleagues’ official correspondence tell a story about the RCAF and their allies, who were working in public offices, municipal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and at the Sacramento campus of California State University (CSUS). In the early 1970s, the RCAF made art in Sacramento’s Chicano/a neighborhoods, creating a Chicano/a sense of place by using resources available to them through grassroots efforts. By the late 1970s, they demanded access to space beyond Chicano/a barrios to foster community in locations deemed transient and pedestrian, many of which were devoid of the histories of people who had lived and worked in them. To do so, the RCAF combined verbal, visual, and written demands for access that reveal how they enacted “the space between the aesthetic and the instrumental” to make art for the Chicano/a community and, more broadly, for people’s sake (Noriega and Tompkins Rivas 2011, 75).
Chon Noriega and Pilar Tompkins Rivas use “free association” to describe the ways in which Chicano/a artists established a “pedagogical political culture” that visually expressed demands for social change (2011, 75). The free association of Chicano/a artists reflected “two major modes of critical thought in the twentieth century: psychoanalysis and Marxism” (75–76). Merging the psychoanalytic method of self-expression without censorship and the Marxist goal of creating “social relations among individuals outside the constraints of private property, social class, and the state,” Chicano/a artists freely associated through creative, political, and professional channels (75). Chicano/a artists collaborated on posters and murals, allowing for “nonlinear, unplanned, and intuitive connections aimed at addressing social problems” (75). They also “associated with one another across social groups, organizational affiliation, and artistic mediums” (75–76).
Free association is an important framework for thinking about the RCAF’s creation of Chicano/a art infrastructure in Sacramento because it demystifies the appearance of Chicano/a murals. In the second edition of Toward a People’s Art, Ben Keppel (1998, xxvii) recalls the Chicano/a murals that “appeared” to him in the 1970s, a phrasing that obscures the work involved in the creation of public art. RCAF murals did not simply appear; they resulted from collective groundwork implemented over several decades. By 1979, the RCAF had created fifteen murals in Sacramento, and Keppel must have seen many of them, including Armando Cid’s murals Olin and Sunburst (ca. 1976) at Zapata Park and Reno’s Mural and Para la Raza del Barrio (ca. 1976), which Cid painted with students on the exterior walls of the Reno Club at Twelfth and D Streets (Hillinger 1979, 20).
While RCAF murals located in Sacramento’s Chicano/a barrios were not painted over until demographic shifts occurred due to urban redevelopment, murals the RCAF created in spaces deemed public, like Villa’s unauthorized tunnel mural, did not survive the 1970s, let alone the year they were created (Weber 2003, 5). In fact, Villa’s remark in the local press about the removal of murals without artist permission refers to a whitewashing campaign that took place at CSUS in 1976. The removal of campus murals was followed by a battle in the 1980s over designs for L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. Both events led Villa to position the RCAF as a militant arts organization: “For every mural whitewashed or demolished,” he declared, “we will paint two more” (Walls 1984). While Villa publicly proclaimed the air force persona, other members worked behind the scenes with SMAC and the Art in Public Places ordinance to support the RCAF’s mural campaign throughout the late twentieth century.1
As a Chicano/a art concept, free association explains the RCAF’s collective praxis, which differed from student art collectives in the 1960s and 1970s. While RCAF artists originally signed posters and murals with the collective’s acronym, a practice that changed toward the late 1970s, RCAF murals like Southside Park Mural (1977) evidence the group’s emphasis on artistic range. Rather than aesthetic uniformity, the RCAF centered their collective values on labor equality and educational access.
This chapter examines the rise of the RCAF’s Chicano/a art infrastructure through the free association of members whose communities, political orientations, and professional circles varied—to the benefit of the collective. The RCAF was not alone in building a Chicano/a sense of place in Sacramento, and I use archival records to document their “symbolic takeovers” of space through murals that were part of a larger Chicano/a community (Latorre 2008, 142). As the stories of several RCAF murals reveal, the group’s navigation of barrio, institutional, and public space was not seamless. The different receptions to RCAF murals in Sacramento’s Chicano/a neighborhoods in the 1970s, and in public places in the 1980s and 1990s, are important chapters in Chicano movement history and are relevant to cultural analyses of spatial production in Chicano/a literature.
While RCAF murals forged and embellished spaces for Chicano/a performances, community actions, and projects, they were also cause for controversy concerning access to walls managed and supervised by government agencies and university administrations. I analyze RCAF murals in conjunction with poetry, interviews, photographs, and other records to move the RCAF to the center of public art controversy in the United States in the late twentieth century. The concept of “site specificity” factors into the relationship between RCAF murals, poetic performances, and the free association of members, but it is not frequently considered in analyses of 1970s Chicano/a murals.2 Generally, site specificity contextualizes the spatial demands of national public art during the late twentieth century, which came to a head in the United States with George Sugarman’s sculpture Baltimore Federal (1977) and the different receptions to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982). The removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) from the New York Federal Building Plaza in 1989 also framed a national conversation on public art through a coded language concerned with public safety.3
There were other battles over public art in the late 1970s and 1980s that shaped the national discourse. The RCAF’s designs for L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. were initially rejected by officials in the 1980s and redesigned by the lead RCAF artists on the project. In 1999, the designs were symbolically realized as the decolonial vision that the RCAF originally intended through the work’s restoration. The historical backdrop of the making and remaking of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. was a national backlash against multicultural trends in public art funding, which also impacted nationally touring Chicano/a art shows like Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (CARA) and the patronage of queer and women artists.4 The end of the twentieth century in the United States witnessed a war on public art as a (mis)representation of the nation. But the RCAF’s public art battles, negotiations, and victories are missing from this history. When these events are returned to the historical record, they suggest that public art conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s extended the demands of the US civil rights era and the reach of community murals that recognized Chicanos/as and other people of color in the spaces in which they live, work, and struggle for inclusion in both real and symbolic spaces of US history and culture.
Claiming Space through La Cultura: A Chicano/a Student Body at CSUS
In 1978 Esteban Villa took his students to paint a mural in the K Street tunnel in response to the whitewashing of Chicano/a and student murals on the California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), campus in 1976 (Barnett 1984, 433). Considering that the RCAF developed as a Chicano/a art collective between 1969 and 1972, members who were university students and teachers witnessed enormous changes to the student population and curriculum at CSUS amid the Chicano movement. Not only was CSUS, formerly Sacramento State College, located in the state’s capital city, but in 1969 it was one of the few colleges in California’s agricultural valleys. With the rise of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union in the 1960s, the financial aid provided to veterans through the Vietnam War GI Bill, and the implementation of the Mexican American Education Project (MAEP), Chicanos/as entered CSUS as a student body that would have been unfamiliar to white college students, many of whom were from Northern California families that, perhaps, worked in agricultural industries but rarely as farmworkers.
The murals destroyed at CSUS included the institutionally sanctioned La Cultura (1970), which had been painted on “six wooden panels” and “mounted onto the front of Lassen Hall,” formerly the university library. In 1976, it was “cut up into library shelving” (Kuss 2006). According to university archivist Kurt Kuss, La Cultura was painted by art student Ed Rivera, sponsored by the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., and donated to the campus. RCAF member Sam Rios Jr., however, remembers that in addition to Rivera, the original La Cultura “was painted by students in the Mexican American Education Project. And there was an inscription on it that read, ‘This mural is to bridge the gap between the community and the university’” (Sam Rios Jr., interview, April 24, 2007). CSUS president James Bond presided over the mural’s destruction in 1976 and two years later apologized to the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., contracting Ed Rivera to replicate the piece (Arceo 1999).5
The story of La Cultura is important to RCAF history not only because several members were MAEP students at the time of its first painting, but because the RCAF had a role in its restoration. La Cultura reflected the Chicano/a sense of place that was emerging on campus through the efforts of students in organizations like the Mexican American Youth Association (MAYA) and the MAEP, which catalyzed new relations between the Chicano/a community and the university. Supporting Sam Rios Jr.’s recollection of the original mural’s intent, minutes from a “Sacramento State College (SSC) Planning Meeting” evidence that as early as 1968, “Ed Rivera and Mexican American Youth Association (M.A.Y.A.) asked to paint mural on front of library” (“I. Mural Chronology” 1977).6 With the support of the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., MAEP students “and Rivera from M.A.Y.A. asked for approval to place mural on front of the library building” on June 5, 1969. The campus planning committee quickly approved the project (“I. Mural Chronology” 1977).
Supported by an off-campus Chicano/a community council, La Cultura was a symbolic takeover of university space. It signaled the presence of a new kind of student from a farmworking and working-class background. Many such students were Korean War or Vietnam War veterans and were active in Chicano movement politics through the local chapter of the Brown Berets and the proximity of the farmworkers’ strike (Latorre 2008, 142). Asserting their presence with a vivid mural, Chicano/a voices grew louder through poetry recitals also taking place in the campus commons.
In tandem with La Cultura, MAYA members planned a poetry event that led to José Montoya’s arrival on campus “in ’69,” he recalled, adding, “I came to read poetry and show my work to the Chicano students. They weren’t called MEChA at that time. . . . The students really loved my poetry, and they liked my artwork, and they told me about a program . . . where they would teach the Chicano teachers.” Referring to the MAEP, Montoya remembered enrolling in the graduate program and also facilitating Esteban Villa’s participation “as the artist, illustrator, and designer of the Mexican American Project” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004).
Institutional Access and Professional Desires: El Concilio de Arte Popular
The MAEP aimed to reverse dropout rates and underachievement for Mexican American youth in public schools by training culturally competent educators. The program also catalyzed the careers of several RCAF members. Certainly, working in the community was the central motivation for Chicano/a students enrolled in the MAEP during or shortly after the 1969 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference and, later, the endorsement of “El Plan de Santa Barbara.” But the desire for more education led to leadership roles in various organizations, transforming the professional trajectories of MAEP fellows and informing the free association of RCAF members.
Juan Carrillo’s “chance to go to Sac State for a master’s program” not only led him to the RCAF but also to his career as an instructor at Cosumnes River College in 1970. In 1978, Carrillo took an entry-level position at the California Arts Council (CAC) and later became a deputy director of programs. By the end of his twenty-seven-year career, Carrillo had served as the CAC director. Institutional access for Chicano/a students and artists created professional circles in the 1960s and 1970s, as Carrillo explained: “When Chicano groups began to appear, centros began to also appear up and down this state, and we met as artists.” Meeting in different cities throughout California, Chicano/a artists coalesced a shared point of view regarding their work, following the initial decade of the Chicano movement. “I wish I could re-create for you the excitement, the hope, the energy of all these people who would gather,” Carrillo remarked, adding, “the debates, the arguments, the fistfights on occasion, even the love affairs. . . . People were meeting each other, and a world was formulating. It was a coming together of people [who were] creating a sense of peoplehood.” The series of meetings led to a statewide organization called El Concilio de Arte Popular, and “every centro up and down the state had two members on the board of directors.” Carrillo recalled that when he was unable to attend an important meeting in Santa Barbara, “true to RCAF custom, they nominated the guy who wasn’t there to represent them on the board” (Juan Carrillo, interview, July 13, 2004).
In serving on the board for the popular arts council, Carrillo became acquainted with Gloriamalia Flores (Pérez), who “worked at the California Arts Council, which was established in 1976. She came in right at the beginning, pretty much hired by Luis Valdez, who was on the council; he was appointed by governor Jerry Brown. Gloria [was] part of the RCAF circle.” In 1977, Carrillo resigned from Cosumnes River College. Upon informing Flores, she asked if he was interested in interviewing for a job at the CAC. “So that’s how I fell into it,” Carrillo surmised, “by way of the RCAF, the Concilio de Arte Popular board, getting to know Gloria, and then interviewing for a position” (Juan Carrillo, interview, July 13, 2004).
Carrillo’s memories illuminate the intersections of creative, social, and professional circles that developed during the Chicano movement and culminated in Chicano/a art infrastructure. It is not coincidental that the meeting at which El Concilio de Arte Popular was endorsed took place in Santa Barbara, the site of a monumental educational plan. Like “El Plan de Santa Barbara,” the name El Concilio de Arte Popular gestured “toward what these artists were bringing into existence,” and in this case, a “popular,” meaning populist, arts council (Noriega and Tompkins Rivas 2011, 74). As part of a new vocabulary that expressed Chicano/a identity and culture—a language that included adaptations of postrevolutionary Mexican phrases like “la raza cósmica,” references to a pre-Columbian homeland, or “Aztlán,” and political calls to “decolonize” the Chicano/a mind—El Concilio de Arte Popular was an infrastructural idea that articulated “a sense of peoplehood” (Juan Carrillo, interview, July 13, 2004).
Established in 1976, El Concilio de Arte Popular became headquartered in Los Angeles following several meetings in different locations, including Sacramento’s Washington Neighborhood Center in February 1975 (Noriega and Tompkins Rivas 2011, 73; “Una Junta” 1975). A planning document for the Sacramento meeting announced the group’s intentions “to solidify Chicano/Latino artists into one body that can more effectively deal with the urgent questions of economy, health, culture, sexism, racism, legal, and all other needs basic to the artist as a worker” (“Concilio de Arte Popular” 1975). The Concilio de Arte Popular was founded the same year as the California Arts Council, for which Luis Valdez served as a board member and Gloriamalia Flores (Pérez) served as director in 1978.7 The inception of a formal Chicano/a arts organization and the establishment of the California Arts Council were interrelated events, revealing the influence of grassroots efforts to build Chicano/a art infrastructure on the administrative body that presides over all public art in California.
The professional advancement of RCAF members also commenced directly through the MAEP because of the relationship the program fostered between students and the Chicano/a community. Juan Carrillo explained, “We were told by a community advisory council connected to the project that we were expected to be activists.” As Esteban Villa and José Montoya became “the focal point for the artists’ portion,” Carrillo continued, “other programs began, because we were connected to a larger community of activists” (Juan Carrillo, interview, July 13, 2004). Along with working in local Chicano/a neighborhoods, MAEP students and activists on campus helped establish ethnic studies and Chicano/a studies programs (Campbell 2005–2006, 7). Larger academic changes included new faculty positions. José Montoya recalled that “we went with enough community supporters, including Brown Berets and community activists, and demanded that they hire us. So they ended up hiring me, they hired Esteban [Villa], and then Eduardo Carrillo” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004).8 Esteban Villa was hired as an art instructor at CSUS in 1969. Montoya, who completed his MA in 1971, was hired in the Education Department to teach art and arts education.9
Decentering the Monolingual Literary Tradition in Public Space
When Esteban Villa, José Montoya, and Juan Carrillo arrived at CSUS, other Chicanos/as were already enrolled as undergraduate students. Ricardo Favela, for example, was a CSUS art major and was listening in the audience on the day Montoya came to campus to read poetry and show his art (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). Recalling “a thing called Cinco de Mayo that was happening here on campus,” Favela “went out to the quad with my two Anglo friends, which I had been palling around with for all that year.” Favela came upon the event as “José was reading poetry,” and the verses astounded him. Favela explained,
He read “La Jefita,” which is “The Little Mother,” y “Los Vatos,” which means “The Dudes,” and when he read those, I was flabbergasted. I said, “How does this guy know me? How does he know where I came from? I don’t even know him, but he’s talking about me.” Because “La Jefita” was certainly my mother, and the vatos were certainly the vatos I hung around with. That’s why I left Dinuba—because I was hanging around too much with the guys. And I turned to Jimbo, and I was going to tell him something [but] I say, “Nah.” And I turn around over to Jerry, and I go, “Nooo.” And I just stood looking, and I just said to myself out loud, “I’m going to meet this guy. I don’t know where or when, but I’m going to meet this guy,” and about two weeks later, I had the opportunity. (Ricardo Favela, interview, July 20, 2004)
Favela experienced Montoya’s poems as a call-and-response, merging his recollection of the recital with the people, places, and events that both poems conjure. For Chicano/a students like Favela, the memories Montoya expressed in his poems were not audible or visible ones at CSUS, and it is important to reflect on what it must have felt like to hear such poems spoken out loud. Perhaps it was an experience akin to seeing La Cultura on the library’s facade.
“La Jefita” (1969), for example, was “certainly” Favela’s mother, and Favela later learned that Montoya also grew up in a farmworking family in the San Joaquin Valley (Ricardo Favela, interview, July 20, 2004). “La Jefita” catalyzed a connection for Favela with Montoya, but in hearing Montoya’s poem “Los Vatos” (1969), Favela journeyed with the poet to a period of Mexican American history directly preceding the Chicano movement. Montoya returns to the 1940s and 1950s in “Los Vatos” to pose a social critique in the contemporary moment in which Chicano/a poets, artists, and activists demanded institutional and mainstream attention—a recognition of their humanity that had long been distorted through a visual archive of racial stereotypes. Opening the poem with a prelude, Montoya establishes that he is the narrator, locating himself amongst the listeners that have gathered to hear his tale:
Back in the early fifties, el Chonito and I were on the
Way to the bote when we heard the following dialogue:
Police car radio: Pachuco rumble in progress in front of Lyceum
Theatre. Sanger gang crossing tracks heading for
Chinatown. Looks big this time. All available
Westside units . . .
Cop to partner driving car:
Take your time. Let ’em wipe each other out.
That attitude was typical then. Has it changed?
Below I sing of an unfortunate act of that epoch. (J. Montoya 1992, 6)
Montoya’s prelude informs listeners that he is present in their time and space but in the midst of a memory from the 1950s, when he and his friend were on their way to jail. Concluding the prelude with, “Below I sing of an unfortunate act of that epoch,” Montoya announces another spatiotemporal shift, specified in the first lines of the poem’s main text: “They came to get him at three o’ clock / On a Sunday afternoon that summer of ’48. / Five of them and a guitar in a blue ’37 Chevy” (6). The details overwhelm listeners, disorienting their sense of time and pushing them toward a sensory experience of the immediate story.
As the poem begins, young Pachucos head out on a “cruz,” or meandering journey, and listeners see them through the details of “long, sleek hair” and “hidden eyes squinting”; they watch their “cat-like motions, bored and casual”; they hear them whistle and the “gurgling sounds inside the car” (6–7). With a filmic rhythm, Montoya cuts to Benny, the poem’s protagonist, who also hears his friends arriving and watches “them from the window of the tiny bedroom” (7). Benny’s anticipation is ominous as he observes his younger sister with “huge, slanting eyes—eyes that / Surely witnessed in another time, in another land now / Foreign, Moctezuma slain” (7). Unfolding the magnitude of the moment, Montoya hints at Benny’s impending doom but also alludes to the end of something bigger, as he likens his sister’s physical features to pre-Columbian ancestry and imagines her bearing witness to sixteenth-century Spanish conquest.
Building a movielike sequence through words, Montoya relies on a universal theme of man versus man to articulate Benny’s experience of his imminent death: “His brain, his stomach his feet—all of him— / Was not himself at all, and he could stand outside / And look in. He was at once a rock and a lump of jello / Something—a thing, but not himself” (7). Exploring Benny’s corporeal sensations, Montoya disrupts the dehumanization of young Pachucos to address the contemporary gang crises and police surveillance of Chicano/a youth in the 1960s and 1970s.
Meant to be spoken, “Los Vatos” echoes the “border form” of the corrido, a Mexican musical tradition of story songs that disseminated throughout the US Southwest over three centuries (Saldívar 1997, 57–58). In his remapping of American culture, José Saldívar argues that “Los Vatos” is a contemplation of “racial formation” in the United States and the reduction of human experiences to both stereotype and paradigm. Saldívar concludes that by merging the corrido’s “border form” with the “individual and collective experience,” “Los Vatos” is a “social text that bridges the gap between the world of the mind and the world of real affairs, between past and present, between desire and action” (61). Connecting the construction of racial difference to the historical consequences of that construction, “Los Vatos” links the social dangers faced by the Pachuco and his Chicano descendant during different epochs of US history.
Poetry Performance as Symbolic Takeover of Public Space
The filmic quality of José Montoya’s poem “Los Vatos” also reveals influences from US popular culture that shaped Chicano/a social reality, expanding the poem’s formal elements to account for the cross-cultural and visual Chicano/a experience. Through his attention to sound, image, and physical sensation, Montoya inverts the stereotype of Pachucos as criminals (read: Cholos in the 1960s and 1970s). In doing so, he dares his audience to answer a question: “Let ’em wipe each other out. / That attitude was typical then. Has it changed?” (J. Montoya 1992, 6). Recalling that Montoya heard the exchange in the 1950s and shared it with his audience in 1969, his query suggests that Benny is more allegory than historical figure, but an allegory with flesh and bone. Ricardo Favela’s memory of hearing the poem makes this especially clear.
Favela was not a Pachuco from “that epoch” (J. Montoya 1992, 6), but he responded to Montoya’s question, recalling that the vatos in the poem were the ones with whom he had been friends growing up in Dinuba, California. Thus Favela’s connection with “Los Vatos” was tangible, made real by Montoya’s oration, which allowed Favela to crisscross historical epochs, identifying his individual experience within the collective of Mexican American history. It is important to linger on the performance origins of Montoya’s poem and the environment in which it, and numerous other bilingual poems, was recited to decenter the “monolingual Anglocentric literary tradition” (Saldívar 1997, 58). Montoya’s early poems were not meant for readers but for listeners. They were proclamations of a particular racial-ethnic consciousness and working-class sensibility.10 Emphasizing the readership of Montoya’s poems obscures the history of poetic performance as political consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s.
José Montoya’s poetry recital shifted the experience of public space for Chicano/a students like Ricardo Favela, articulating a bilingual identity in 1969 that, like the mural La Cultura, bridged the gap between the Chicano/a community and the university. Published in the 1969 anthology El Espejo—The Mirror, “La Jefita” and “Los Vatos” expressed the intellectual and creative milieu of the Chicano movement as it unfolded on university campuses.11 When Montoya’s 1969 recitation is considered as a political performance, it becomes part of a larger discursive history of poetic declarations demanding visibility in the US civil rights era (Noriega and Tompkins Rivas 2011, 74).
Further, there are aural elements in Chicano/a poetry that are essential to the sensory experience of consciousness-raising. The “alliterative power of sound texture” in Chicano/a poetry, Tino Villanueva (2000, 694) writes, triggers corporeal sensations that the poetic content demands. Villanueva considers “The Lion Roars” (1971), a trilingual poem by Chicano poet Alurista (Alberto Urista) that relies on the sounds of consonants between Spanish, English, and Nahuatl to drive the poem forward. Between the poem’s three languages, Villanueva counts “twenty-two r’s, strong t’s and the k sounds of ‘calaca,’ ‘skeleton,’ ‘con,’ ‘quétzal,’ ‘cuadros,’ ‘square blocks, and rock,’ in their aggregate carriers of vigorous sounds that complement and sustain the idea of strength,” which translates into ancestral pride (Villanueva 2000, 694).12
The role of the narrator in moving audiences between spaces and times in “Los Vatos” is underscored by the particular voice of the bard. Montoya’s poem was rooted in a corrido tradition intended for listening audiences. This is an important distinction for all bilingual poetry, both near and far, to Montoya’s reading in 1969, which marked a year of ethnopoetic performances that decentered the “Anglocentric literary tradition” in public space (Saldívar 1997, 58).
Prior to the publication of “Puerto Rican Obituary,” for example, Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri recited it in 1969 at a rally to support the Young Lords Party (Monthly Review 2004).13 Pietri structures the poem around an unremitting refrain of names, “Juan / Miguel / Milagros / Olga / Manuel,” but before he introduces his chorus of names, Pietri uses the pronoun “they” sixteen times in the first stanza, hammering his audience with the dejected existence of the Puerto Rican working class. While Pietri’s long poem was published in 1973 as part of his first book, Puerto Rican Obituary, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (2002, 212) asserts that in order to experience the work’s “defiant language” and “relentless repetition and flowing raps,” one must hear them aloud, not in “comfortable solitude and silence” but in “emphatic public performance.”
Meanwhile, in Denver, Colorado, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” was delivered at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969 (Ontiveros 2014, 24). The plan’s preamble, written by Alurista, set a mood for a gathering of Chicanos/as. Commencing with, “In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage, but also the brutal ‘Gringo’ invasion of our territories,” the preamble elicited an awakening, Randy Ontiveros asserts, revealing the simultaneity of consciousness-raising through evocations of indigenous and Mexican histories and the “moment when Mexican Americans at last decided they had had enough abuse” (24).
Pedro Pietri’s, Alurista’s, and José Montoya’s poetic performances were essential components of consciousness-raising because of the sensory experiences the bilingual components conjured for listeners. While Pietri’s poem and Alurista’s preamble were recited in front of homogenous audiences in 1969, Montoya read his work at a university campus where a program had been established to increase Mexican American student enrollment. A varied audience heard Montoya recite “Los Vatos,” many of whom may not have known a person like Benny, the poem’s protagonist. For Ricardo Favela, Montoya’s code-switches elevated his consciousness because he was not used to hearing the blend of Spanish, English, and caló at his university. The immediate distance Favela felt from his “Anglo friends” suggests that hearing Montoya’s poems disrupted the assimilative forces that minority students endured through the invisibility of their cultural, linguistic, and racial-ethnic differences on college campuses in 1969. From nicknames of people and places like “el Chonito” and “el bote,” to references to sixteenth-century Spanish conquest via “Moctezuma,” Montoya’s words complemented the pre-Columbian allusions, summoning feelings of ancestral pride (Villanueva 2000, 694). University campuses, public streets, and public parks in the late 1960s and 1970s were occupied by students, artists, and activists of color to stage events, hold protests, and engage in creative expression. Like the mural La Cultura, Montoya’s poems activated a sense of place on campus for Favela. But the feeling of ownership fostered by such poems for Chicano/a students was perceived by administrators, law enforcement, and mainstream media as verbal threats to the status quo and an expression of militant activism.
The Reno Club and One More Canto: A Verbal-Visual Chicano/a Sense of Place
The sound textures in José Montoya’s bilingual poems manifested in the visual textures of RCAF murals, which fused cultural symbols and historical periods across geopolitical borders for Chicano/a viewers, cultivating their sense of place in an environment of images, words, and oration that Guisela Latorre (2008, 140) calls “decolonizing creative expressions.” RCAF murals communicated the Chicano/a artists’ desire “to overturn historical processes in order to exact radical change” (Latorre 2008, 2). Armando Cid’s tile mosaic murals Olin and Sunburst at Zapata Park and Esteban Villa’s Emergence of the Chicano Social Struggle in a Bi-Cultural Society at the Washington Neighborhood Center were decolonizing expressions because they reclaimed “physical space on behalf of the Chicana/o community,” Latorre writes, and “asserted metaphorical spaces for said population” (2008, 141; emphasis in original). Created in the Alkali Flat district of downtown Sacramento, they were not the only RCAF murals in the city’s Chicano/a barrio. From La Raza Bookstore’s storefront mural, Por la Raza United Flight (1973) by Armando Cid, to the murals that the RCAF created between 1974 and 1976 at the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., many of these works were destroyed when property ownership changed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Villa’s and Cid’s incorporation of pre-Columbian motifs, spiritual signs, and Mexican imagery changed the meaning and function of the spaces in which the murals existed and in which a handful of murals remain. Cid’s murals provided context for the cultural and spiritual performances that took place at Zapata Park, while Villa’s mural engaged viewers in a complex rumination on the historical processes of racial and cultural mixtures that formed Chicano/a identity and now informed Chicanos/as on local issues.14 In content, form, and location, such murals were site-specific, responding to “pragmatic and conceptual concerns” and presenting “a solution to the disparity between abstract ideas and immediate needs” (Latorre 2008, 142).
Armando Cid’s murals at the Reno Club also exemplified the intersection of the visual, poetic, and political in RCAF artistic production. In 1976, Cid and his student team created Reno’s Mural and Para la Raza del Barrio on the exterior walls of the Reno Club at Twelfth and D Streets. The murals marked the café as an “ethnically bounded sanctuary” in the Chicano/a barrio, a space that David R. Diaz (2005, 3) describes as “a zone of segregation and repression” to counter romanticized notions of what a barrio is for the people who work, live, and socialize in one. Barrios do not emerge as idyllic or inspirational spaces, but originate in economic, social, and political exclusions. By creating murals alongside community infrastructure, Chicano/a artists and their communities re-created barrios as places of belonging through graphic embellishment and community programming centered on commonality and cultural affirmation. Latorre (2008, 143) terms the re-creation of barrio space through murals as “mural environments,” exemplified by Estrada Courts in East Los Angeles, Chicano Park in San Diego, and Balmy Avenue in San Francisco.15 Similar to Chicano/a poems that code-switch and rely on consonance between Spanish and English to instill strength and cultural pride, mural environments do similar visual work through the intertextuality of pre-Columbian, Mexican, Latin American, and US signs and symbols. Most importantly, Chicano/a mural environments enact the idea of Aztlán, or the ancestral and symbolic homeland of the Chicano/a diaspora (Latorre 2008, 146) (see plate 16).
Reno’s Mural performed Aztlán by bridging the intellectual and historical experiences of Chicanos/as with their social reality, as Saldívar (1997, 61) claims for José Montoya’s poem “Los Vatos.” The mural told a story about Chicano/a poetry through the musical history that had evolved between the United States and Mexico. It also identified a Chicano/a refuge in the 1970s by marking a place in which Chicano/a poetry was performed. Emblazoned with Indio colors and a Mexican flag, Reno’s Mural fused pre-Columbian imagery with portraits of Mexican mariachis, cantadores, and Mesoamerican symbols and deities (Latorre 2008, 2).16 The Reno Club was the official home of José Montoya’s One More Canto, a Tuesday night Chicano/a poetry series that attracted poets from all over California and beyond. “Frustrated at being denied access to campus facilities for poetry reading,” Montoya “started holding ‘flor y canto’ sessions at a legendary local Chicano nightspot, the Reno Café, in the early 1970s” (Inside the City 2002, 11). Established in 1977 and coordinated by RCAF member Terezita Romo, the series lasted for four years at the Reno Club (see plate 17).
At the height of the poetry series in 1979, over two hundred people crammed into the Reno Club to listen to “16 Chicano poets” who were “unpublished or had several anthologies to their credit,” resonating with the RCAF’s approach to collapsing hierarchy in the production and display of visual art (J. Diaz 1979). Although One More Canto ended at the Reno Club, Terezita Romo continued to run a poetry series at La Raza Bookstore and Galería Posada throughout the 1980s, and Ricardo Favela recalled that it continued in the “poetry nights over at Luna’s,” a café still in existence and “where the Reno Club went” (Lemon 2001).
Armando Cid’s murals at the Reno Club elevated the ethnopoetic performances that took place there by linking them to an ancestral past that was deeply rooted in song. In defining what mural environments often catalyze for Chicano/a communities, Latorre claims that mural dedication ceremonies are a “more performative form of the mural environment” (2008, 171; emphasis in original). Upon completing murals in the 1970s, Chicano/a artists and communities dedicated the work with elaborate services involving blessings, danzas indigenas, and various addresses from the artists and community members. In the case of Reno’s Mural, the poetic dimension of the space on which the mural was painted coincided with the artwork, revealing literal verbal-visual architecture for Chicano/a poets, musicians, and audiences in a sanctuary in Sacramento’s downtown barrio.
An important component of the RCAF’s creation of a Chicano/a mural environment was their collapse of artistic hierarchy in opposition to the idea of beauty and artistic genius as the realm of the individual artist. Adjacent to Reno’s Mural, Armando Cid and a student team created Para la Raza del Barrio, in front of the café’s parking lot. Cid’s mural team consisted of students from the Washington Barrio Education Center at 1512 C Street, an outreach program that began through classes held at the Washington Neighborhood Center in 1975 (“Pamphlet for the Washington Barrio Education Center,” n.d.). Cid and José Montoya taught art-related courses at the education center (“1978 Summer Session Schedule,” n.d.), while Cid and Sam Rios Jr. worked with Sacramento City College to provide free academic services in the Washington neighborhood, highlighting another example of RCAF members’ free association (“Pamphlet for the Washington Barrio Education Center,” n.d.).
Figure 4.2. Detail of Para la Raza del Barrio (ca. 1976) with Armando Cid’s students’ signatures. Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
As the mural’s title suggests, Para la Raza del Barrio showcased the lives of working-class Chicanos/as. Using street art and elements of Pop Art, the mural included images of farmworkers, calaveras, the Virgen de Guadalupe, and a mixture of Chicano/a calligraphy. Cid’s students created their own images and visual signatures in the mural, most notably Yolanda Tarin and Joe González, who designed a mandala-like circle that included four faces (see fig. 4.2). Tarin and González signed their names above two of the faces, and the faces left unsigned may have represented Kenneth Munguia and Javier Torres, the other students involved on the project, according to an image description on Calisphere. Tarin and González painted a power fist in front of a huelga eagle in the middle of the mandala. The image not only marked the Reno Club as a working-class oasis, but it politicized the space, since the club was in proximity to the Alkali Flat’s business district and served as an informal meeting center for Chicano/a laborers and union workers.17
The Art of Conversation: Free Association and Collective Brainstorming
Painted with students and allowing them to take ownership of the work by designing and signing it, Para la Raza del Barrio achieved its title in both content and form. The mural reflected the RCAF’s theory and praxis of collectivism, which was an approach to mural making for many Chicano/a artists and collectives in the 1970s. Alicia Gaspar de Alba (1998, 10) writes that by opposing “the ideology of individualism at the core of ‘art for art’s sake,’” Chicano/a artists expressed “the symbiotic relationship between art and its social context,” producing “a unique aesthetic and social practice” through collaborative work. The RCAF artists took their cue directly from Chicano movement manifestos that called for art in service to the political goals of the movement. In doing so, they freely associated, gaining “insights into social relations” that Noriega and Tompkins Rivas (2011, 75) assert offer deeper understandings of the creative process “than those offered by literally illustrating a political platform.”
The RCAF’s theory and praxis of a Chicano/a art collective opposed a hierarchy between teachers and students, individual ownership of artwork, and the idea that political activism lacked creative potential—all values and practices that are intimately bound to the group’s formation at CSUS. Esteban Villa recalled, “We were with a group of teachers and students, and at some of our get-togethers on campus, we started talking about [a collective]. It was just kind of like, ‘Hey, let’s start an art collective in Sacramento. What are we going to call it?’ . . . Somebody said, ‘The Rebel Chicano Art Front,’ because of the times, you know, ‘rebel’ and ‘Chicano’” (Esteban Villa, interview, January 7, 2004). The collective brainstorming over the RCAF’s name signals the role that free association played during their informal conversations. Several artists and students, including Juan Cervantes, Armando Cid, Rudy Cuellar, Ricardo Favela, Luis González, and Juanishi Orosco, joined José Montoya and Esteban Villa in these informal gatherings on campus. The group also included Max Garcia and Luis González’s brother Hector, who transferred from Sacramento City College to CSUS (Martínez 1997, 234).18 Already active in the Brown Berets, Irma Lerma Barbosa enrolled in the MAEP’s 1969 undergraduate class and joined the RCAF after talking with Juanishi Orosco and Rudy Cuellar (Irma Lerma Barbosa, interview, June 26, 2013). Celia Herrera Rodríguez, who earned a bachelor’s degree in art and ethnic studies at CSUS, also participated (L. Pérez 2007).
Echoing Esteban Villa’s memories of the conversational nature of the collective’s formation, José Montoya reflected on the brainstorming sessions in which members defined what the name of the RCAF would mean. Recalling that “the Juanishis and the Celias and the other students wanted to have an organization like the one that Esteban and I had belonged to in the Bay Area,” the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALA-F), Montoya explained, “We couldn’t use that here because that was a Bay Area–based program. So we threw it out to the students, you know, ‘What would you like to call it?’ It’s hard to remember who decided to be the Rebel Chicano Art Front.” Unable to remember who proposed the original name because of the informal nature of the discussions, Montoya added that “one of the things we signed on to was that no one was going to sign their name to any artwork. It was going to be like the old regiment of the Toltecs—you don’t see who built the pyramids. There are no leaders. Everybody is an artist. Everybody is a teacher. This is kind of a Marxist idea, that everybody’s on the same level” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). The RCAF’s collective philosophy formed in an exchange of ideas and a fascinating fusion of historical and cultural references as well as political ideologies and values. Drawing on the broader student and anti–Vietnam War protests to which several RCAF members were exposed, José Montoya conveys that members merged their knowledge of pre-Columbian cultures and their investment in the politics of the Chicano/a movement with their concept of an art collective that rejected power differentials between students and teachers; yet they did so while enrolled in or instructing at a university. The group’s rejection of the protocol and culture of the university was a central point of the RCAF’s oppositional consciousness and defined much of its artistic rebellion.
The RCAF’s institutional background is important in outlining its version of an art collective, which attempted to circumvent ownership and hierarchy in the production and exhibition of art, resonating with the “Marxist idea” to which Montoya refers. But it is also important to note because early scholarship on 1960s and 1970s student art collectives does not address the RCAF as being founded at a university and thus influenced by institutional culture, art traditions, and curatorial methods. In Toward a People’s Art, originally published in 1977, Eva Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft (1998, 68) explain that the student art collective was “the direct expression of a political philosophy advanced by New Left organizations [and] came to the fore mainly with the student movement, the counterculture, and certain community organizations.” The New Jersey People’s Painters exemplified the art collectives that emerged directly from these sources, operating like a “brigade” and consisting of “students or youths located at or around a college campus” whose “primary commitment is political” (68).19 Advised by professor James Cockcroft, the People’s Painters practiced “artistic anonymity,” resulting in a “single collective style distinct from individual styles of the group’s members” (68–69). The aesthetic uniformity enforced equality amongst members as the People’s Painters created murals at Livingston College in the early 1970s, now the Livingston campus of Rutgers University.
Although the RCAF was highly visible by the 1977 publication date of Toward a People’s Art, it is not mentioned in the book.20 Further, the original La Cultura mural, created by Mexican American Youth Association (MAYA) and Mexican American Education Project (MAEP) students at CSUS, is also absent. To establish a connection between the collective ideas practiced by the People’s Painters and Chicano/a art collectives, the authors of Toward a People’s Art claim that the latter operated under community and not aesthetic values: “Within the Chicano movement, which is sensitive to the many historical precedents for communalism in its Indian and Mexican heritage, the collective form has been a frequent mode of organization. Rather than at a university setting, the national or ethnic collective tends to work within the neighborhood of its people” (Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1998, 70). The authors demonstrate their claim with Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán, an art collective that formed in the 1970s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and developed “directly out of the local barrio,” practicing aesthetic uniformity to “attain a group expression” (69).21 Although the RCAF worked within Chicano/a neighborhoods, as evinced by Para la Raza del Barrio as well as Cid’s Zapata Park murals and Villa’s Emergence mural, the group slips through the authors’ description because it emerged on a college campus with a majority of trained-artist members working inside and outside the university. The RCAF also included members who were educators, state workers, community service leaders, and politicians, all of whom were occasionally tasked with making art.
While numerous RCAF posters and murals were signed with the collective’s acronym in the early 1970s, the artists’ individual styles are identifiable. As I explored in chapter 1, variances in RCAF art styles often mirrored differences in the artists’ political and spiritual beliefs as well as their biographies, but artistic differences also reflected members’ professional training. José Montoya and Esteban Villa had studied at the California College of the Arts in the late 1950s, encountering lingering art world trends among leading styles like Pop Art. Armando Cid trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and earned his MFA in printmaking at CSUS. Stan Padilla completed his BFA and MFA degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute. Ricardo Favela completed both his BFA and MFA degrees at CSUS. Lorraine García-Nakata first studied sculpture in 1974 at CSUS and was a sculpture major between 1976 and 1977 at the University of Washington. Juan Cervantes and Rudy Cuellar studied art at CSUS, and Luis González majored in English there, focusing on poetry, which is reflected in his numerous serigraphs that incorporate original verses (Romo 1993). Irma Lerma Barbosa graduated from CSUS in 1975 with a BA in ethnic studies and a minor in art as well as her master’s degree in counseling education. Juan Carrillo and Sam Rios Jr. completed graduate degrees at CSUS and, like Lerma Barbosa, were exposed to pedagogical frameworks for community-based learning and collaborative models. The educational backgrounds of RCAF members counter assumptions of untrained artists not invested in quality, unaware of art traditions and trends, or unconcerned with testing the boundaries of art world norms through social approaches to aesthetic innovation. RCAF artists were at the center of intellectual discourse on the arts as they moved back and forth between the university and Sacramento’s Chicano/a neighborhoods.
More central to the RCAF’s collective theory and praxis than a uniform artistic style was their shared identity as Chicanos/as, an identity that operated under a broad-based political movement that pivoted on self-determination. Instead of a standardized art style, the RCAF’s collective idea revolved around collaboration both among the members themselves—often in support of one another’s projects—and with various communities. Armando Cid elaborated on this point, moving beyond the aesthetic variations of the individual artists in the collective to emphasize an RCAF future:
Anytime you have a collective that thinks and expresses themselves in terms of working for the community, working for your own people, and making these connections happen because there’s many different communities that were involved. There’s students, there’s elders, there’s farmworkers, you know, we got people in prison. . . . The more you look at how we started and how we continue is that you have to not stop and look at the past, but look at how we’re going to keep this thing going. (Quiñones and Flores 2007)
Cid asserts that the future of the RCAF was more important to him than its past; nevertheless, he underscores that “there were many different communities” involved in the RCAF’s formation of a collective idea. Not all RCAF members worked with the communities Cid mentions, but each member attributed the collaborative process of making art for people and sharing ownership of the work to their involvement in the RCAF.22
“The Barrio Artist/Teacher”: Decolonizing Art World Rules
RCAF members relied on university resources to implement the Barrio Art program in the early 1970s, further illuminating their collective theory and praxis as well as their movement between university and Chicano/a community spaces.23 Known as Barrio 138 because it was offered as a college class at CSUS, the program brought university students into Chicano/a neighborhoods to learn and train in arts education but, more importantly, to work with Chicano/a youth and the elderly. Barrio Art was José Montoya’s vision made real by his RCAF colleagues. It was initially managed by Montoya and Esteban Villa, along with their CSUS colleague Eduardo Carrillo, prior to his departure from the university. Ricardo Favela became the director in 1977 and supervised the program until his untimely death in July 2007.
Rejecting the individual act of painting on canvas in the solitude of one’s studio with the intention of exhibiting the work in museums or selling it in commercial galleries, Barrio Art centered on the art of building relationships. This concept is now referred to as relational art, which proposes that the artist is not the source or center of creation but a catalyst for making art that takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Bourriaud 2002, 14; emphasis in original). While numerous records abound on Barrio Art in the RCAF collection at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Montoya offers a different record of the program in his poem “The Barrio Artist/Teacher” (1975). Dedicated to the RCAF, Montoya’s poem espouses the collective idea of merging aesthetic practice with sociality and education. “Because to create / Is to give life,” Montoya states, “The barrio artist/teacher / Commits acts of love . . . / And risks / seeming selfish” (J. Montoya 1992, 114). Using the extra space between stanzas, Montoya interjects on his supposition, writing “But” as a one-word line to emphasize the three stanzas that support his conclusion:
To look into
the eyes
Of a child
Discovering
The magic
Of color
Amidst squalor—
To see
A stone
Vato loco
Caressing
A ball of clay—
To discern
As wrinkled
The pain of aging—
It has to be a
Selfless
Selfishness. (114)
Verbally turning in three directions, Montoya’s stanzas are reverential gestures toward his primary audience. More confession than poem in its delicate vulnerability, “The Barrio Artist/Teacher” is a counterpoint to Western understandings of altruism because it discloses the shared benefit of consciousness-raising between teachers and students. Diverging from Christian ideals of selfless generosity as the individual’s pathway to communing with the Holy Spirit, Montoya evokes the Chicano movement’s adaptation of the Mayan concept of “In Lak’ech,” or the communal sense of collective responsibility that was poeticized by Chicano/a poets and authors in the 1970s.24
Alongside the reference to “In Lak’ech,” Montoya’s poem highlights the convergence of institutional training and Chicano movement principles. Montoya’s meditation on the inspiration he received from teaching and collaborating in the community is, after all, a single-author poem. His organization of the three stanzas that offer a confession on behalf of the poet reveals tension between the identities of “The Barrio Artist/Teacher,” visually conveyed through the forward slash in the poem’s title that signifies division between the identities. The “Selfless Selfishness” of “The Barrio/Artist Teacher” is a negotiation of institutional desires—the longing for individual artistic recognition in the mainstream art world and the experience of creating art that transforms the source of artistic genius into a communal consciousness and sense of shared ownership. For choosing the latter over the former, the RCAF often received criticism of their art as being more social work than aesthetic innovation (Noriega 2001b, 21).
Barrio Art exemplifies the RCAF’s development and refinement of a collaborative approach to making art, but it was also a response to institutional exclusion, which José Montoya, Esteban Villa, and their students experienced at CSUS. “We all came to the consensus that we were really not that well received at the university,” Montoya recalled, adding that because the RCAF “had entered into activism . . . we knew the community very well, and we talked to some community leaders of various referral programs and [asked] their help in providing space and in some cases, a little bit of money” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). Together with the RCAF’s Centro de Artistas Chicanos, Barrio Art developed beyond a reaction to institutional marginalization, primarily through the group’s discursive framework.25
RCAF members worked as instructors for Barrio Art and El Centro de Artistas Chicanos and served as administrators for both organizations as they evolved. Members also served on the board of the Concilio de Arte Popular and as representatives of the Sacramento Concilio, Inc. Thus, the RCAF professionalized through parallel infrastructural systems as its members entered official channels for public art and community relations. The RCAF’s knowledge of art instruction and administrative processes most definitely impacted their rejection of art world rules. Along with art exhibitions at tEl Centro de Artistas Chicanos that included works by untrained artists and children, the RCAF organized shows at CSUS that broke exhibition protocol. “Sac State went crazy when we had our first RCAF exhibit,” Montoya explained, adding that other faculty “freaked out; they thought it was going to be me, [Eduardo] Carrillo, and Esteban [Villa], but we said, ‘No, it’s the whole RCAF.’ Remember, they were our students. But the Sac State Art Department said, ‘You can’t show an exhibit with students. You have to keep that teacher-student relationship’—whatever that meant.” Despite pushback, the RCAF staged “a show of the whole collective and young people” in which the “signature was the RCAF [the acronym for the], Rebel Chicano Art Front. And people would see ‘RCAF’ and they would wonder what connection we had with the Royal Canadian Air Force, the real RCAF. And somebody just at one point said, ‘Hey, we’re not the Royal Canadian Air Force. We’re the Royal Chicano Air Force.’ And everybody dug it, and it stuck” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). The RCAF’s curatorial decisions undermined implicit understandings of authorship and property rights, and through the enigmatic group logo, the collective announced their rejection of art world rules.
Coinciding with RCAF university exhibitions, Esteban Villa began painting murals on campus with students in the early 1970s, disrupting the regulation of institutional space by not pursuing administrative approval. Subsequently, many of these murals were destroyed. Sam Rios Jr. lamented that only one student mural from the 1970s remains on school grounds (see fig. 4.3): “There’s Tlaloc by Henry [Enrique] Ortiz in Sacramento Hall. That’s the only community mural left” (Sam Rios Jr., interview, April 24, 2007). Ironically, in 2002, a line of photographs hung above the mural Tlaloc and displayed former university presidents, one of whom is particularly important to the period of student mural removal. President James Bond (1972–1978) oversaw all public art projects after the CSU Board of Trustees passed a policy on September 26, 1973, requiring public art proposals to receive the “approval of a special committee designated by the president” and then the consent of “the president himself.” After receiving the proper approvals, the designs were “submitted to the Chancellor’s Committee on Campus Planning, Buildings and Grounds for recommendation to the Board of Trustees for action” (Austin 1974).
Figure 4.3. Enrique Ortíz, Tlaloc (1972), California State University, Sacramento. Author’s photograph.
In 1974, Esteban Villa and his students were in the midst of painting Pandora’s Box on the exterior of a campus pub when “a security officer arrived to tell them that it couldn’t be done.” The mural “was to represent the story of Pandora’s Box . . . but with a modern twist, as can be ascertained with representations of rockets, jets, hyperdermic [sic] needles, etc.” Deemed by campus officials as a “defacing [of] the walls,” the mural was painted over “within the hour.” Villa commented in the university newspaper that the administration either didn’t “want anything controversial or they don’t like color” (Austin 1974). All kidding aside, Villa and his students did not have permission to paint on university walls (see fig. 4.4).
Figure 4.4. Photograph of the whitewashing of mural by Esteban Villa and students. Jim Austin, “Mural Does Vanishing Act,” State Hornet. Department of Special Collections and University Archives. University Library, California State University, Sacramento.
Recalling his remarks in 1974 about the removal of Pandora’s Box, Villa contextualized his actions in more serious terms to lay bare what was at stake for the RCAF in the 1970s as they struggled for a sense of place on campus by using art to demand equal access. For Villa, the question of who had legitimate access to public space was central to the creation of Chicana/o art. Wanting to “go on record that we definitely do not—with our art—want to destroy this country,” he positioned the RCAF as “educators” (Esteban Villa, interview, December 23, 2000), echoing the “pedagogical political culture” that Noriega and Rivas Tompkins (2011, 75) assert was central to Chicano/a artists and art centers in Los Angeles. Instead of the destruction of space, Villa concluded that he and the RCAF were attempting to construct Chicano/a space by reconnecting with pre-Columbian and Mexican history through murals. The right to public space and the rights of students and faculty to pursue their studies—for example, by making murals—was part of their right to access Chicana/o histories and cultural memories (Barnett 1984, 433). Official recognition of these rights was a huge concern for Villa as an instructor within an institution that was exerting censorship.
Thus, the stakes were high when Esteban Villa, RCAF members, and students returned to school in fall 1976 and discovered that “seventy student murals” had been whitewashed over the summer (Barnett 1984, 433). According to Alan Barnett, Villa “flew into a rage and began painting an impromptu mural until restrained by security personnel. The mural survived only forty-five minutes, he says, and Villa himself hardly lasted longer, since efforts were made to fire him for defacing public property” (433). In another report, Villa was said to have been “outside of the SSU [CSUS] cafeteria” painting an unsanctioned mural when he “was stopped after about an hour by campus police. He said campus painters promptly blotted out his beginning” (Mendel 1978).
The summer whitewashing also led to the destruction of La Cultura, the mural that had been created with the administration’s approval in 1970. La Cultura was destroyed following President Bond’s policy in 1973, as well as a directive to remove campus murals that “had come from the Chancellor of the State University System, Glenn Dumke . . . as the result of an ‘offensive’ mural done by Black students at Long Beach. Executive Order 113 required the removing of murals on all state campuses and established a moratorium on all wall art” (Barnett 1984, 433).26 The university’s eradication of murals in 1976 raises questions about the politics of representation in US history and art, or what is valued nationally as history, preserved as historical artifact, and treated as valuable American art.
These questions were also posed by a mural restoration committee formed by the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., following La Cultura’s destruction. Comprising RCAF members, CSUS students, and CSUS faculty, the committee drafted reports on the mural’s history.27 In a “Statement of Need,” the committee explained that under the supervision of Ed Rivera “and Jorge Macias, a large number of people of all ages participated in developing the mural, with the understanding that this cultural gift would be accepted and respected by the people of CSUS.” The committee asserted that negotiations for the mural had been “in compliance with official procedures” and that the understanding reached by the administration and original mural makers was “solidified by a public ceremony . . . in which the President [Otto Butz, 1969–1970], the artists, and community representatives dedicated the creation.” Consequently, the committee “and a significant portion of the CSUS academic community was shocked when in August of 1976 and without warning the mural was destroyed” (“II. Statement of Need” 1977).28
Further substantiating that La Cultura was created collectively, the report conveys that the creators did not perceive the mural as ephemeral art or a temporary solution to larger problems between the institution and the Chicano/a community. Emphasizing the “public ceremony” that inaugurated the mural’s symbolic claim to university space for Chicano/a students and their sending communities, the committee underscored the Chicano/a infrastructure that the mural had created, resonating with Sam Rios Jr.’s recollection that La Cultura was meant to build a bridge between communities inside and outside the university.29
The mural committee pressed on in their cause following the statement of need. Isabel Hernandez (Serna) and her colleague José Pitti wrote a letter to President Bond regarding the destruction of the mural. Bond responded with a request for more “background information on [the] mural” (“I. Mural Chronology” 1977). In October 1976, Isabel Hernandez (Serna), Juanishi Orosco, Ed Rivera, and others toured the remaining mural panels. The committee continued to meet with Bond, and meeting minutes convey that they wanted to repaint the mural in the exact place where it had been destroyed: “Location: we still want old library” (“Mural Proposal Meeting Minutes” 1977). In a letter to President Bond, Sacramento Concilio director Henry Lopez emphasized the need for La Cultura’s “rebirth,” which required that restoration “be designed by Edward Rivera, assisted by local community people and students” (H. Lopez 1977). Not only did the Chicano/a community want the mural back in its specific location, but they wanted to replicate the collaborative process that had been used in the creation of the first mural.
Whether or not the destruction of La Cultura was an administrative mistake, the racial and ethnic implications, as well as the political and cultural tensions exposed by the event, were real upon the mural’s removal; the mural became symbolic of the larger struggle for inclusion and educational access during the 1960s and 1970s civil rights era. The terms and context in which the committee framed their statement of need makes this clear. Pointing out the “conflict and violence” that had “occurred on many campuses during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,” the committee claimed that CSUS “survived turmoil with a minimum of destruction” because of “the active involvement of ethnic students and faculty and community agency personnel” who brought “services of the university to their respective communities.” Because “the destruction of the old mural has been seen by Chicanos as a sign of disrespect,” the committee concluded that a “new mural will help rebuild the image of cooperation and respect on the CSUS campus between the entities involved” (“II. Statement of Need” 1977). The mural committee’s statement was strategic, highlighting the fact that CSUS remained secure during a volatile period at many college campuses and suggesting that they were responsible for that stability. “Ethnic students and faculty” were key ambassadors for CSUS in inner-city neighborhoods and included RCAF members who represented CSUS as MAEP fellows and worked in services that operated under the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., and the Centro de Artistas Chicanos. With the “disrespect” caused by La Cultura’s destruction, the committee pointed its finger: keeping the peace at CSUS was now up to campus officials.
Spatial Metamorphosis: The RCAF’s Entry into Public Space
The removal of student murals at CSUS led Esteban Villa into other spaces deemed off-limits to Chicano/a art, like the tunnel under Interstate 5 on November 7, 1978. Villa’s actions prompted official correspondence from his RCAF colleagues Juan Carrillo and Ricardo Favela. Both of their letters suggested that Sacramento mayor Phil Isenberg was not only familiar with the RCAF but a political ally. In fact, Isenberg supported the United Farm Workers union throughout his political career and knew the RCAF as “the graphic arts arm of the union in the Sacramento Valley” (LaRosa 1994). Isenberg also worked with Joe Serna Jr., who was an RCAF member, Mexican American Education Project instructor, and government professor at CSUS. Joe Serna Jr. began his political career as a United Farm Workers organizer, a representative on the Sacramento Concilio, Inc., and the director for the Chicano Organization for Political Awareness. He became Sacramento’s mayor in 1992, serving until his death in 1999.
In 1978, coinciding with Esteban Villa’s unauthorized tunnel mural, the RCAF entered a competition to create a mural adjacent to the K Street tunnel. The call for public art proposals was sponsored by the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission (SMAC) via the Art in Public Places ordinance. Both the governing entity and ordinance materialized through legislation in 1976 that required percentages of “City and County capital improvement project budgets be set aside for the commission, purchase, and installation of artworks throughout the City” (Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission 2016).30 Once the Art in Public Places ordinance was active, SMAC requested applications for public art to accompany a new parking structure on a lot bounded by K, L, Third, and Fourth Streets (“Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission Announces a Competition,” n.d.).31 Through the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, the RCAF proposed a sixty-five-foot-long, four-story mural to adorn the east wall of the garage on Fourth Street (J. Goldman 1980b). SMAC approved the design in 1978, and Esteban Villa, Stan Padilla, Juanishi Orosco, and a crew of RCAF members and students began work on Metamorphosis, an enormous butterfly mural featuring cosmic imagery, local landmasses, and indigenous figures (Centro de Artistas Chicanos 1980a). Dividing the mural into sections, Padilla, Villa, and Orosco maintained the butterfly’s shape but added distinct visual elements (see fig. 4.5).32
Figure 4.5. Metamorphosis in progress (ca. 1979–1980). José Montoya Papers. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
Completed by 1980, Metamorphosis departed from the culturally nationalist imagery of earlier RCAF murals, like Emergence of the Chicano Social Struggle in a Bi-Cultural Society (1969–1970). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chicano/a artists began broadening their interests in political and contemporary issues, including environmental concerns (Latorre 2008, 57). Metamorphosis replaced openly political messages with scenes from the natural world unfolding on the wings of a giant monarch butterfly. Metamorphosis also differed from earlier RCAF murals in terms of its location, which made it visible to multiethnic and interracial audiences.
In a news interview, Juanishi Orosco described Metamorphosis as “the physical manifestation of the ‘primal energy on the earth’s surface,’” demonstrating the shift from culturally nationalist vocabulary to more general environmental concerns (J. Goldman 1980a). Orosco noted the mural’s “Tree of Life,” which sprouts from the right side of the second level “as animals and plants pick up the vibrations from the central figure of a drummer . . . ‘beating out the heartbeat of the earth mother.’” A giant tortoise in the mural “reminds us that ‘in ancient myth this continent was called Turtle Island.’ . . . And the twin towers of Rancho Seco show ‘what man is doing with the energy that’s at his disposal. Whether that’s good or bad is left to the viewer’” (J. Goldman 1980a). Referring to Sacramento’s power plant, Rancho Seco, Orosco avoided taking a position on nuclear energy.33 His description of the indigenous imagery and figures is also extremely general and not specific to the Nisenan or Miwok peoples who inhabited the Sacramento Valley (Avella 2003, 12). Although Orosco seemed concerned with man’s relationship with nature, technology, and spirituality, his interpretation in the news article is ambiguous, lacking the direct political message evident in earlier RCAF murals (see fig. 4.6).
Interviews like Orosco’s suggest that Metamorphosis exemplified the RCAF’s turn toward decorative murals without the politically charged themes of the 1960s and early 1970s. As the community mural movement transitioned to subsidized art projects, “critical imagery virtually disappeared after 1980,” John Pitman Weber (2003, 9) claims. Chicano/a muralists were not alone in the transition; African American muralists were also impacted by government funding. Michael D. Harris (2000, 30–36) characterizes African American murals after the 1960s and by the mid-1970s as marking a transition “From Revolutionary Effort to Creative Decoration.” According to Harris, African American murals were no longer based on community consensus or reliant upon the collaborative approach that William Walker and Organization for Black American Culture artists enacted with Chicago residents in the selection of images for and the painting of the Wall of Respect (1967). Instead, individual artists began receiving direct grants and commissions for public artwork, signaling the end of murals made without government funding and for the communities who wanted them.
Figure 4.6. Metamorphosis (1980). Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
Although municipal arts commissions and initiatives like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) generated important exposure and experience for young artists, Eva Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez (1993, 14) write that government support also “created an implicit (and sometimes real) threat of censorship that tended to dilute the content of these walls.” Cockcroft and Barnet-Sanchez connect the depoliticization of murals in the late 1970s to decreased social activism after the end of the Vietnam War (14). Government involvement in community murals was a double-edged sword for artists of color. Unlike the “force, specificity, and conviction” of earlier murals, those funded by government agencies carried “more general, wishful, positive images” (Weber 2003, 9). Likewise, the process changed from community collaboration to exclusively favoring the work of individual artists with name recognition (Goldman and Ybarra-Frausto 1985, 53).
But upon closer inspection of its content and form, Metamorphosis (1980) challenges assumptions of an apolitical mural devoid of the collaborative process the RCAF used in making art. Reflecting on the planning stages, José Montoya recalled that “even after we got them to OK our work . . . the restrictions were really detrimental to what we were trying to do [which] was, first of all, to get young people to understand the importance of art in general” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). The RCAF resisted the individualized process of the public art commission. An original roster for the mural team lists names of seventeen people involved in the project (Centro de Artistas Chicanos 1980b).
Moreover, during the six weeks of actual painting, the RCAF “invited the public to share the experience of creating a work that they feel represents ‘humanity as a whole’” (J. Goldman 1980a). Despite transitioning into the realm of government-funded public art, the RCAF used the Art in Public Places ordinance as a platform for engaging the central tenet of their collective philosophy—a civil rights–era concept that had led to works like the Wall of Respect (1967) and Emergence of the Chicano Social Struggle in a Bi-Cultural Society (1969–1970).
In addition to upholding the collaborative process, the RCAF requested a specific location for Metamorphosis in their mural proposal because of its meaningful Chicano/a history. José Montoya revealed that Metamorphosis honors the site of Ernesto Galarza’s first home in Sacramento (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). In Barrio Boy Galarza (1971, 197) recalls his experiences in Sacramento: “418 L St, our refuge in a strange land . . . my mother and I began to take short walks to get our bearings . . . we noted by the numbers on the posts at the corners that we lived between 4th and 5th streets on L.” Metamorphosis is well named; the mural honors what was once the “lower part of town” in Sacramento’s West End, where Mexicans, Chinese, and other working-class people lived during the early twentieth century (Galarza 1971, 197).
From a Chicano/a perspective of public space, Metamorphosis articulated a historical certainty, even the legitimacy, of a Mexican presence in Sacramento prior to the 1940s. Certainly, the RCAF was conscious of Sacramento’s original indigenous inhabitants, but Galarza’s early twentieth-century home in Sacramento exemplified the Mexican and Mexican American presence in the United States before the Bracero Program. “To be given that information when you are looking for your roots is very liberating,” José Montoya explained, adding that Metamorphosis is a historical marker for Chicanos/as that supports “a very legitimate claim to . . . being part of this land. And what keeps us viable is the memory, and it’s that memory that people are trying to eradicate” (LaRosa 1994). The RCAF used the concept of metamorphosis to symbolically express a spatial reclamation. Like the group’s murals in the late 1960s and 1970s, the RCAF’s murals in the 1980s continued to make Chicano/a lives, stories, and history visible. As the built environment and demographics changed, Metamorphosis reminded viewers that space is never neutral (Brady 2002, 7–8). Metamorphosis was not a barrio mural, but it commemorated a former barrio, reflecting the temporality of the built environment, which changes rapidly within a decade or two and then appears to onlookers as if it has always been there.
Toward a Chicano/a Future: Navigating Spatial Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis was concerned with a Chicano/a past—both native ties to Aztlán as well as Galarza’s first home in Sacramento—but it was equally concerned with a Chicano/a future. Stan Padilla’s memories of the criticism the mural received suggests that as a new, and perhaps unreadable, Chicano/a symbol, Metamorphosis reflected the growing pains of the Chicano movement. “Up to that time,” Padilla recalled, “so-called Chicano murals had to have a certain iconography: you know, a huelga bird, a pyramid, Aztec calendars—the old Mexican grocery store calendars and stuff. If it didn’t have that, well then it wasn’t Chicano” (Stan Padilla, interview, July 12, 2004). Metamorphosis reflected an expanding visual vocabulary, one that imagined outcomes for the Chicano movement. Painting out of bounds for Chicano/a art by the end of the 1970s and testing the “codified themes, motifs, and iconography” of Chicano/a visual culture (Ybarra-Frausto 1993, 67), Padilla continued that “the butterfly was a real turn around” because “we were critiqued heavily by everybody, including our own . . . and then our liberal supporters were going, ‘Well, that’s not a real Chicano mural. Where’s the power fist? Where’s the bird?’ We’re going, ‘I don’t speak monolingual here. I can speak several tongues’” (Stan Padilla, interview, July 12, 2004). Likening the evolution of imagery in Chicano/a art to an ability to speak multiple languages, Padilla reveals the role of free association in shaping individual members’ vision for the mural. Nevertheless, Padilla used the collective’s air force persona to ground his particular perspective. Explaining that his colleagues often referred to him as “the navigator in it all,” Padilla praised his air force title and extended it to describe the evolution of the Chicano/a verbal-visual architecture that Metamorphosis represented:
You get the planes flying, and you get the runway ready, but where in the hell are you going? You don’t know where you’re going, and you’re not leading your people towards something that is relevant and principled, and it doesn’t have a future. You know, it’s like a shooting star: great, it’s beautiful, but where does it go?
Returning to Metamorphosis, Padilla asked, “So, butterflies represent what?” and then moved through the steps of transmutation as a metaphor for Chicano/a art’s development over time. “We were changing [and] it was radical,” he added, “especially for our own people. Our own people were just going like, ‘What the hell are these people doing?’” (Stan Padilla, interview, July 12, 2004).
Metamorphosis moved beyond expectations of political Chicano/a iconography to present a vision of a future world in harmony with nature and humanity (Ybarra-Frausto 1993, 67). But with several representations of indigenous people in the mural, the RCAF continued to address “the question of their Indian heritage,” which Shifra Goldman (1990, 167) identified as one of the primary issues tackled in Chicano/a art of the 1960s. Amid redevelopment projects that further removed indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican American histories in Sacramento, the RCAF created Metamorphosis as a visual “embracing of pre-Columbian cultures in order to stress the non-European racial and cultural aspects of their background” in a vision of a Chicano/a future (S. Goldman 1990, 167). They landed their vision on the wings of a butterfly, and the delicateness of their hope for the Chicano movement’s future is captured by Stan Padilla’s example of a shooting star, which is beautiful, “but where does it go?”
The future world that Metamorphosis envisions was also not gender neutral. In response to criticism of the mural, Padilla claimed that the RCAF created the butterfly “to retrieve our soul, to retrieve back in time and pull back and get some of that gentleness—like our own yin and yang. You can’t have one without the other” (Stan Padilla, interview, July 12, 2004). Perhaps Metamorphosis reflected the numerous Chicana-led community initiatives and cultural programs in Sacramento, like Breakfast for Niños, or the Cultural Affairs Committee’s ongoing calendar of fiestas and ceremonies. Padilla’s memories convey that after nearly two decades of the Chicano movement, the RCAF was changing, pushing the boundaries of the group’s verbal-visual architecture to meet the needs of an evolving Chicano/a identity.
The butterfly that was perceived as apolitical in 1980 has emerged as a radical Chicana/o symbol in contemporary US Latina/o art. Alma Lopez created numerous digital images for her Our Lady, Lupe & Sirena series, which restages patriarchal creation stories from a perspective of female desire and autonomy, and most of the images include the strategic placement of a butterfly.34 Lopez’s incorporation of the butterfly anticipated the politicization of the symbol in the ongoing struggle for the human rights of undocumented peoples. Drawing on the idea of the naturalness of migration, Favianna Rodriguez uses the butterfly as a symbol of persistent migratory patterns despite violent disruptions caused by geopolitical borders. Rodriguez has adapted the butterfly image in several artistic genres, captioning the work with the motto “Migration is Beautiful.”35 The transformation of the butterfly into a readable sign in Chicana/o and US Latina/o art begins with the RCAF’s Metamorphosis, which is in need of serious repair as Sacramento’s K Street changes once again in 2016 through the removal of buildings to make way for a new sports arena. In June 2016, RCAF artists Stan Padilla, Juanishi Orosco, and Esteban Villa were selected to create a public artwork in the new Golden 1 Center and are negotiating the renovation of Metamorphosis with SMAC (see fig. 4.7).
Light Art in Sacramento, Energy Resources In Unlimited Movement
On the heels of Metamorphosis, the RCAF began inquiring with SMAC about the K Street tunnel, where police had prevented Esteban Villa from painting a mural in 1978. Connecting K Street to the city’s riverfront district, also known as the city’s West End, the underground walkway was created by the construction of an Interstate 5 on-ramp in the 1960s. City officials began razing and redesigning the riverfront district after it fell into disrepair and urban blight (Champion 1949; Burg 2013, 11). Moving through a thirty-year redevelopment plan that started in the 1960s, city officials turned their attention back and forth between the Alkali Flat district, the West End, and the reconstruction of the capitol mall area, which included the parking structure at K and L Streets on which Metamorphosis remains.36
The success of Metamorphosis created an opportunity for the RCAF to revisit the issue of access to the tunnel. The designs they submitted to SMAC for a mural in the tunnel reflected their commitment to Chicano/a art principles. “Regarding the original concepts,” Juanishi Orosco recalled, “we had just finished the butterfly mural . . . and everything that we were doing in the community, aside from these two particular murals, was very political, very huelga-this, [very] Chicano movement and ethnic studies” (Juanishi Orosco, interview, December 23, 2000). Bringing the two tunnel walls together under the concept of Light Art in Sacramento, Energy Resources In Unlimited Movement, or L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M., the RCAF rewrote the city’s biography from a Chicano/a perspective of historical development and urban change. In a series of meetings and written statements, the RCAF acknowledged that the area known as Old Sacramento had once been a barrio, and they explained to the Art in Public Places committee that they wanted “to leave something beautiful for the people who used to live there” (G. Montoya 1983).37 In an official proposal, the RCAF recognized “fully, the early importance of the river front area to the larger history of Sacramento” but were especially “cognizant of the fact that not too long ago, old town was the active trading, bartering and social center for most Chicanos in Sacramento” (Centro de Artistas Chicanos 1982) (see fig. 4.8).
Figure 4.8. Plans for L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. (1983–1984). Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
Esteban Villa and Juanishi Orosco were the primary muralists on the tunnel project, each designing one of the walls and assisted by Ricardo Favela and other RCAF colleagues, as well as their students and children. The area that the murals cover is enormous, with nearly two hundred feet of cement wall on both sides of the tunnel.38 Villa’s mural became known as the north wall, while Orosco’s mural is known as the south wall. Along with a SMAC coordinator, an Art in Public Places committee comprised of local artists and public servants oversaw the project.39 The committee requested a mural that was not overly ethnic or culturally specific; instead, a letter from the SMAC coordinator mandated that the RCAF’s “mural be abstract and geometric in nature” (Dowley 1982). Orosco and Villa delivered multidimensional designs that celebrated technological advancement in the Sacramento Valley as well as the area’s natural resources, but both artists did so from a Chicano/a perspective of local and hemispheric history.
Juanishi Orosco’s mural told a story about Sacramento that started much earlier than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He locally referenced the Nisenan and Miwok, as well as a larger Native American history within the Western Hemisphere.40 Perhaps emboldened by his insertion of indigenous imagery in Metamorphosis, Orosco now wanted to capture a pre-Columbian understanding of time and space in the tunnel, challenging the “political borders, geographic boundaries, and discursive categories” that Emma Pérez (1999, 3) claims “shaped late twentieth century historical knowledge.”41 Blending indigenous symbols and imagery from Aztec, Pueblo, and Maya peoples, Orosco focused on sacred places, such as the Mayan temple El Castillo at Chichén Itzá. Thinking about space and time three-dimensionally, Orosco planned a ceiling suspension system that would harness two large crystals. Orosco recalled that he collaborated with architect Roger Scott, “who worked with glass and stained glass,” and they planned to encase the “tetrahedron crystals” in fine wire mesh and suspend them on “two overhead shafts, which were water spillways from the overpass.” When light hit the suspended glass prisms, they would produce a rainbow at “sunrise, from the east, and then around 3:00 p.m., from the west” (Juanishi Orosco, interview, December 23, 2000). Orosco wanted to create site-specific art in the tunnel by replicating “the serpent shadow” that appears on El Castillo at Chichén Itzá during the spring and fall equinoxes. The desired effect, however, was more than aesthetic novelty. It rethought the function of public space as well as the experience of time while paying homage to pre-Columbian architectural design. In thinking about Energy Resources In Unlimited Movement, Orosco wanted to recognize an alternative history of technology, one that considered the resource management of earlier civilizations (see plate 18).42
The RCAF’s original plans were turned down, largely due to the crystal suspension system (“Internal Memo from Department of Engineering to City Manager’s Office” 1980). Orosco regrouped, and the RCAF resubmitted its plans, but it was the first of many battles. A clear conflict over historical representation, aesthetic preference, and definitions of public art unfolded in a series of meetings between the RCAF and the Art in Public Places committee.43 After the RCAF resubmitted its plans, SMAC’s liaison sent a letter to the Centro de Artistas Chicanos indicating that changes needed to be made, and if they were not made, “the Committee may discontinue negotiations with the Centro” (Dowley 1983b). The committee’s mandated changes included: “Reflect a positive attitude, emphasize the human scale and transitional nature of space,” “create a pleasant experience for pedestrians moving through the Underpass,” and “use abstract imagery” (“Information on K Street Underpass Mural,” n.d.).44 Juanishi Orosco recalled his frustration with their requests:
It wasn’t the city officials that censored it but the arts commission panel that were our peers [and some of whom] were also full professors at the university. . . . They were opposed to us doing the imagery that we normally do. What they wanted and dictated—they were very specific about it—they wanted us to design something very colorful, very general, very blah, that people would just walk through and not necessarily even look at the walls. That was what they wanted, but we’re going, “That’s not what we do.” They specified in the contract no faces, no identifiable imagery, no farmworkers, no words—nothing that was identifiable culturally or otherwise. And they did not want people to stop and look at it. They just wanted a sense of color, shape, and form—and thank you very much. So we fought that tooth and nail. (Juanishi Orosco, interview, December 23, 2000)45
Orosco’s memories span the four years it took the RCAF to get L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. made. Ultimately, to move the project forward in 1982 after the committee rejected his glass art concept, Orsoco revamped the south wall design. Orosco’s new design was full of color and had no identifiable imagery, but he maintained one aspect from the original proposal: a white line, representing a laser, which was also carried through to the north wall (see plate 19).
When the RCAF returned to the tunnel in 1999 to renovate L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M., Juanishi Orosco took the opportunity to create an entirely new piece, adding a crystal at one end to further signify the original “Light Art” concept (Romero 1999). The new south wall is replete with identifiable imagery, including Hopi twins moving through a celestial sky and an indigenous woman giving birth as her hair turns into the Western Hemisphere, connecting North America to Central America, South America, and Cuba. Interspersing his aerial views of the Western Hemisphere with local geography, Orosco painted an indigenous woman sitting at the junction of several rivers in Sacramento. He ended the mural with a woman warrior staring toward a tapestry that turns into a pre-Columbian calendar, an alternative measure of time that disrupts the linearity of European timelines.46
For Chicano/a artists in the 1960s and 1970s, grounding their identities in pre-Columbian ancestry was a “strategic assertion of racial difference in the struggle against disenfranchisement,” Rafael Pérez-Torres writes (2006, 16). Mestizo/a consciousness, or an awareness of racial and cultural mixtures amongst Chicanos/as, was both a reclamation of indigenous heritage and a political tactic for claiming “native” rights in opposition to “the privilege and power of the Anglo-European mainstream within the United States” (Barnet-Sanchez 2012, 244).
In describing the fusion of Mesoamerican imagery and Native American designs and figures in his original concept and, later, in his renovated mural, Juanishi Orosco turned “toward the Indian” to create a decolonial vision of history that he believes is his embodied experience as well as an intellectual one (Pérez-Torres 2006, 16; emphasis in original). “The influence of pre-Columbian culture and artists on Chicanos is evident,” Orsoco asserted. “Otherwise, why would we be doing what we’re doing? There’s got to be a gigantic DNA strain that is very much alive and goes back. . . . All we have to do is unlock it” (Juanishi Orosco, interview, December 23, 2000). The process of unlocking his pre-Columbian DNA involved artistic expression without censorship: “I believe when we write, when we draw, we open up our pre-Columbian veins—that through our hands, our ancestors speak. We’re probably opening up all of our synapses; and once you open up all your synapses, then you’re receiving. You’re suspending your conscious. It’s like a big lens” (Juanishi Orosco, interview, December 23, 2000).
Orosco’s contemplation of the artistic process brims with the free association that influenced Chicano/a artists in the 1960s and 1970s. The “big lens” through which he envisions his art historical influences is an alternative one for understanding Chicano/a art as a native production within the United States (Gaspar de Alba 1998). It also visualizes a decolonial imaginary that, in its very creation, decolonizes historical consciousness by imagining simultaneous points of origin or a collective brainstorming for understanding the history of the Western Hemisphere (E. Pérez 1999).
Orosco’s rendering of an aerial perspective of Chicano/a nativity in the Western Hemisphere was localized by Esteban Villa’s north wall design. Villa’s mural participated in the larger “Light Art” concept but focused on the removal of the West End’s working-class and multiethnic residents and the reinvention of the riverfront as a tourist attraction that framed Sacramento history in the mid-nineteenth-century California gold rush. Drawing on the familiar “Wild West” depiction of most Northern California cities and towns, the official website for Old Sacramento announces the city as founded in 1849. There are no traces of the West End’s history in the early and mid-twentieth century and the highly concentrated community of working-class railroad workers and day laborers who comprised a multiethnic and interracial center in the middle of the capital city.47
Figure 4.9. Esteban Villa, detail of north wall of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. after renovations in 1999. Author’s photograph.
While Juanishi Orosco redesigned the south wall of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. in 1999, Esteban Villa “worked very hard to keep [his] as it was (16) years ago” (Romero 1999). Villa had escaped the Art in Public Places committee’s objections in the first round of negotiations until 1983, when they requested that he make his mural more like Orosco’s revised south wall (Dowley 1983a). Villa relied on the committee’s demand for “abstract imagery” and barely altered his original design in 1983 (G. Montoya 1983). Thus, there was no need for Villa to reinvent his mural in 1999, because in 1983 he encoded the elements that the Art in Public Places committee wanted him to change.
In December 2000, for example, Villa pointed to a section of gold, angular shapes at the far west end of the mural and explained that “these buildings right here are Old Sacramento. . . . Now it’s a tourist place [but] they used to pick up farmworkers right here [where] nobody wanted to live.” Moving along the wall, Villa continued, “One cantina after another. So that’s what this depicts in my mural. And then over here, right here next to it, is how they started to destroy some of the old cantinas and bars” (Esteban Villa, interview, December 23, 2000). The creation of Old Sacramento in the 1960s and 1970s involved the removal of “entire neighborhoods, both the people who lived there and the buildings where they lived” (Burg 2013, 11–12).48 Villa used the Art in Public Places committee’s request for “abstract imagery” strategically, capturing the historical presence of Mexican businesses and workers in the West End before its redevelopment (see plate 20). Villa continued to expose the Chicano/a history hidden in the north wall as he moved along the white line, pointing out the “famous farmworker truck, where they used to stop over here. There are people sitting down on the bench” (Esteban Villa, interview, December 23, 2000). Difficult to discern at first, the truck is disarming once detected. Painted from a rear-end view, its gate is open and men sit sideways above the rear tires (see fig. 4.9).
Figure 4.10. Esteban Villa, detail of north wall of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. after renovations in 1999. Author’s photograph.
After describing the natural resources available in the Sacramento Valley, Villa commented on scenes from the local nightlife. He explained that “they used to have nightclubs over there, so that’s champagne or a martini. And then this is a stage with entertainment: ‘ET’—entertainment tonight. Some people, well they say [it’s] ‘extra-terrestrial,’ but no. They said, ‘Don’t put any letters like ET,’ so I said, ‘Okay,’ and then I put letters with stars” (see fig. 4.10). While Villa recalled the Art in Public Places committee’s reaction to letters in the mural, he avoided explaining what the letters originally stood for: “Eternal Tunnel.” In fact, Villa remained strategically ambiguous throughout our interview as he described images along the white line: “Now the whole time, the white laser beam is moving throughout nature, technology, [and] man’s building-up of the land. See here, below the nature? Some people think he’s holding a guitar; others say it’s a gun” (Esteban Villa, interview, December 23, 2000). Whether or not the man holds a gun or a guitar is inconsequential. For Villa, the ambiguity of the man’s instrument reflects the strategic ways in which Villa himself negotiated the official process once he was finally permitted to paint a Chicano/a mural in the tunnel.
Figure 4.11. Esteban Villa, detail of north wall of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. after renovations in 1999. Author’s photograph.
If elusive in his explanations of certain images, Villa was very specific about the labor history that takes place in the mural. In a final view of the north wall, he described a group of images as representative of “Sacramento athletics” and a view of the city at night. Directing my attention “above the football” and “the evening view of the buildings,” Villa pointed to the United Farm Worker (UFW) eagle surrounded by more obvious images. He concluded, “The mural focuses on land, labor, [and] the elements—fire, water, wind, earth—and then it ends with technology; see here, this computer chip.” For Villa, the UFW eagle symbolizes the labor that helped build the Sacramento skyline and makes possible “all the area has to offer,” from its athletics to its nightlife (Esteban Villa, interview, December 23, 2000). The north wall’s final scene, then, is not a random collection of images. Rather, it is a synthesis of ideas that centers on a Chicano/a perspective of Sacramento’s built environment. Villa pays homage to the hands that built the city as well as the industries that sustain it. From the most basic elements, “fire, water, wind, earth,” to the most complex technological achievement, the computer chip, Villa posits the worker as the catalyst that moves technology and society forward (see fig 4.11).
Esteban Villa’s act of hiding symbols within his mural, largely through color, illuminates one of the ways he used New World mestizo/a art as a critical tool for building a Chicano/a verbal-visual architecture on the tunnel wall, despite the Art in Public Places committee’s guidelines. “Outside racial discourses, in a cultural context,” Rafael Pérez-Torres (1998, 155) claims, “mestizaje foregrounds the aesthetic and formal hybridity of Chicano artistic formation.” A well-worn tool for Chicano/a artists, mestizaje is a means by which to move strategically “among distinct racial or ethnic groups (Indigenous, African, Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian) and strategic reconfigurations of cultural repertoires (mythic, postmodernist, nativist, Euro-American)” (Pérez-Torres 1998, 155–156; emphasis mine). Mestizaje not only articulates racial mixture for Chicano/a consciousness, it provides an aesthetic method for defining that consciousness.49
In their desire to tell Chicano/a history in public space, the RCAF maintained their collective theory and praxis in the creation of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. and also relied on a combination of artistic strategies that they learned along the way. The Art in Public Places committee created many obstacles for the RCAF’s vision for the tunnel, but the group navigated the politics of public art and space for nearly two decades, outlasting many of the committee’s members and remaining committed to their original design. Ultimately, by 1999, they achieved their vision when they returned to renovate the work. Thus, the tunnel had become a time warp. L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. is both a visual account of Sacramento’s development of the West End and a record of the artwork’s own creation. L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. challenges art historical claims that Chicano/a murals painted after 1975 were merely decorative and apolitical. As José Montoya remarked, “To us, the irony of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. is the fact that we reclaimed a territory that was ours on K Street, which had Mexican stores and restaurants. That was the connecting thoroughfare to Old Sacramento—to the river” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). The design, redesign, and renovation of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. are integral parts of the RCAF’s history and of the broader history of Chicano/a art. But they are also relevant to the history of public art controversies in the United States as the civil rights movements ended and the grassroots, community-driven murals subsided by the end of the twentieth century.
