Figure 5.1. Cover of José Montoya’s El Sol Y Los De Abajo and other R.C.A.F. poems (1972). Author’s collection.
FROM FRONT TO FORCE
The RCAF’s Air Force Persona and the Performance of an Archive
If you don’t exploit your own sense of what is humorous, you’re going to be defeated. So our sense of humor, which we call our locura, our insanity, was precisely what allowed us to move on and to accomplish the things that we accomplished.
José Montoya,
in Pilots of Aztlán (LaRosa 1994)
I was the pack rat. I put stuff away. . . . I had all the stuff I needed, so that was good, but I never knew why I was doing it.
Ricardo Favela,
interview, July 20, 2004
Ricardo Favela created Huelga! Strike!—Support the U.F.W.A. in 1976, a silkscreen poster that visualizes the central political context in which the RCAF’s air force persona took shape. Adding “¡Boycott Gallo Wines!” and “¡Boycott Sunmaid Raisins!” to the lower left and right borders of the poster, Favela announced multiple requests for viewers to not buy nonunion foods and revealed that the RCAF held the lines of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union over time and amid numerous campaigns for labor equality (see plate 21). Aestheticizing a photograph made by Harold Nehei, Favela used blocks of primary color to dramatize the picture of Royal Chicano Air Force members riding in a military jeep and dressed in leather jackets, aviator sunglasses, and officers’ hats.1 RCAF members recall that the group had been driving through Woodland, California, and after making a stop, they accidentally drove into a Mother’s Day parade. They later received word that they won second place in the parade’s float competition (LaRosa 1994).2 The poster adhered to the jeep’s grille and the number 213 in the corner of its windshield suggest that there is more to the story.
The RCAF’s air force persona began as an accident shortly after the group’s founding. Asked one too many times if they were the Royal Canadian Air Force by people who encountered their acronym on posters or at art shows, members began to announce they were a Royal Chicano Air Force (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). Ricardo Favela adds that sometimes they even embellished their mistaken identity with witty one-liners: “Yeah, we fly adobe airplanes, man, we make them out of earth” (LaRosa 1994). The artists extended the air force persona through visual art like Favela’s poster, which he adapted in 1989 for In Search of Mr. Con Safos, the announcement poster for his MFA exhibition. The image appeared again in 2007 as the announcement for R.C.A.F. Goes to College, a retrospective exhibition at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS). While the different versions of Favela’s poster reflect the RCAF’s intersecting histories of labor activism and artistic production, it also recalls the institutional exclusions to which the group’s air force persona responded. Certainly, calling their CSUS retrospective show R.C.A.F. Goes to College, nearly forty years after the group’s founding on that very campus, was tongue in cheek. The RCAF had always been at college and, specifically, at CSUS. The title was sardonic in the sense that it spoke to the absence of institutional acknowledgement of the RCAF—from collection, display, and analysis of their artwork to recognition of their contributions to the intellectual environment at CSUS.
While the RCAF developed the air force persona through visual puns in their art, quips in the media, and impromptu performances, the air force persona was also supported by the Chicano/a community. Like La Cultura (1970), the mural painted on CSUS’s campus with the intention of bridging the gap between Chicanos/as and the university through artistic collaboration, the Royal Chicano Air Force was built through collaboration within the Chicano/a community. Ricardo Favela recalled that “everybody contributed to the mythmaking of what the RCAF was. It was very easy to do because it was all in fun” (LaRosa 1994). Some of the fun the community had with the RCAF, according to José Montoya, was in the selection of their wardrobe and props: “People began to bring us things that made us look even more air force–ish: uniforms, flying helmets, bandoliers, leather jackets, jeeps. The regalia that was provided for us became a natural thing for us to use in our locura” (LaRosa 1994).
Locura, or craziness, was a key term for the RCAF, whose members used it in interviews with the media and in conversations with each other to solidify the air force persona. “Our sense of humor,” José Montoya explains, “which we call our locura, our insanity, was precisely what allowed us to move on and to accomplish the things that we accomplished” (LaRosa 1994). But the air force persona also positioned craziness as a survival tactic for the sociopolitical ills of the Chicano movement. The RCAF used the air force identity to support the UFW and, specifically, to protect César Chávez when he and the UFW campaigned in Sacramento and surrounding areas. Subsequently, the history of the RCAF’s air force persona reveals a self-mythologizing process that responded to real danger. An artistic anomaly, the air force persona fit somewhere between security patrols performed by Brown Berets during Chicano/a community events in Sacramento, El Teatro Campesino’s farmworker actos, and vanguard Chicano/a performance art.
This chapter examines each of these aspects of the RCAF’s air force persona to account for its artistic evolution as well as the larger contexts to which it responded. Using humor “as a means of resistance,” which Ricardo Favela describes as “doing something to your oppressor where he doesn’t understand or know what you’re doing to him,” the RCAF’s air force persona engaged performance art elements, but ones that were rooted in a Chicano/a theater tradition (LaRosa 1994). I briefly compare the RCAF’s air force persona with street performances by Asco, as well as a theatrical performance by the RCAF Band in conjunction with El Teatro Campesino in 1978, to track the RCAF’s theatrical progression in dialogue with other Chicano/a theater productions.
As a response to institutional invisibility, the air force persona became the mode through which the RCAF presented their art, history, and political orientations. The chapter concludes with an examination of the RCAF collections and archives at universities that make analyses of the air force persona possible. Prior to the establishment of an RCAF collection at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), the RCAF preserved its own archive because members carried, stored, and, really, embodied the history of the collective in the absence of institutional recognition (Taylor 2003).3 By “institutional recognition,” I mean invitations for RCAF members to deposit their records, which include visual art, photographs, film, oral histories, and a prolific collection of administrative documents, all of which play a role in the canonization of an artistic movement.
In the late twentieth century, the Chicano/a art collections at UC Santa Barbara’s CEMA led to the RCAF’s broader visibility through inaugural exhibitions of Chicano/a visual art. Now, in the twenty-first century, the access provided by Calisphere, the Online Archive of California, and other web-based tools make analyses of the RCAF’s contributions to American art, poetry, history, and culture possible. Most significantly, what the institutional collections reveal about the RCAF is that members like Ricardo Favela started saving materials from meetings alongside posters. The collections further reveal that the RCAF did not create the air force identity in a vacuum, but rather in dialogue with Chicano/a theater taking place on the front lines of the farmworkers’ strike and inside community centers where RCAF members taught, made art, and served breakfast to children. Thus, the chapter concludes by providing another level of mapping to the RCAF’s history, fostering a virtual map of Chicano/a art that expands Guisela Latorre’s (2008) notion of the Chicano/a mural environment. Ultimately, the RCAF’s virtual mural environment, which includes posters and photographs of theater and performance, does what the RCAF intended with the collections they deposited at CEMA: it makes art for people’s sake.
The Pilots of Aztlán
In 1994, a documentary film entitled Pilots of Aztlán: The Flights of the Royal Chicano Air Force produced by Steve LaRosa aired on Sacramento’s PBS station. The film opens with footage of a UFW procession on April 24, 1994, which the film captions “Peregrinación” to explain the pilgrimage made by thousands of marchers reenacting the 343-mile march from Delano, California, to the state capitol building in 1966. The march commemorated the life of César Chávez by marking the first anniversary of his death and signaling a recommitment to UFW goals.4 Opening shots from the film capture RCAF member Juan Carrillo walking amongst the procession. Several minutes later, UFW president Arturo Rodriguez comments that “the Royal Chicano Air Force has been once again tremendously supportive of this effort, as they have been throughout the years of the United Farm Workers. They’re making flags, making T-shirts. They’ve helped us by getting food and getting housing and getting all the arrangements made here” (LaRosa 1994).
The RCAF was able to help coordinate the march in 1994 because individual members had been active in the farmworkers’ strike from its inception. The majority of RCAF members navigated several front lines throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Members served in the armed forces during the Korean War and Vietnam War, leading to their antiwar activism; they were Brown Berets and community activists committed to building Chicano/a community infrastructure through breakfast, art, and cultural programs; they were student organizers at CSUS as Mexican American Education Project (MAEP) fellows or undergraduate students involved in Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) and its forerunner at CSUS, the Mexican American Youth Association (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004); but, most importantly, several members grew up in farmworking families and were active in the farmworker movement prior to joining the RCAF. They came together as an art collective in support of Chávez and the UFW. Late Sacramento mayor Joe Serna Jr. recalls that “César would give us impossible tasks and we would fulfill them” (LaRosa 1994). RCAF member Juanita Ontiveros (Polendo) elaborates that “it could’ve been two o’clock in the morning or midnight” when Chávez called the RCAF, and the group would coordinate housing and food for union farmworkers who descended on Sacramento for an event, a protest, or a rally (LaRosa 1994). Mass-producing posters to announce UFW actions, Ricardo Favela and Luis González made UFW flags with the “Mayan-inspired American eagle” (Calisphere, n.d.), a Chicano/a fusion of a pre-Columbian symbol with a hegemonic sign of the nation.5
Aside from infrastructural support, several RCAF members served as security personnel for Chávez when he campaigned in the Sacramento area. RCAF photographer Hector González explains that “César Chávez and the RCAF were brothers. Every time he came to town, he would always call on them for security” (LaRosa 1994). The significance of this job was not lost on Hector’s brother Luis González, who recalls, “Here we are, a group of crazy artists doing security for one of the most important Chicano leaders we ever had. Many nights we would stand watch in cars, in bushes, all night long, just amazed that we were here doing this for César Chávez” (LaRosa 1994). Resonating with the Brown Beret motto, “To Serve, To Observe, and To Protect,” the capacity in which RCAF members supported Chávez overlapped with the objectives of other Chicano/a organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. As discussed in chapter 2, Irma Lerma Barbosa’s activism in the Chicano movement began with the Brown Berets as she worked security at community events in Sacramento, an experience she recorded in her poster Sacramomento (1987).
RCAF members quickly discovered that working as security for the UFW could be as dangerous as fighting on any battlefield. Juan Carrillo remembered an occasion where he was guarding César Chávez at a local speaking engagement in Davis, California, and someone was spotted with a rifle. “There’s certainly enough stories of people dying in this country on freedom marches of one kind or another,” Carrillo reflected, adding, “there’s a sense of your mortality when you’re involved in politics in this country . . . but you’re moved by the spirit of knowing that that’s the only way change comes: if you put it on the line” (LaRosa 1994). Serving as Chávez’s security was a response to real danger for the RCAF, but it should also be explored for its performance elements because it took place in the context of dramatic social events (Elam 1997, 25). Harry Elam Jr. writes that the drama of the 1960s and 1970s included “protest demonstrations, draft card burnings, and acts of civil disobedience on the Delano picket lines,” which were “public performances before audiences,” placing “actual bodies in live performance” (1997, 25). The RCAF’s performance falls into this category. Working as security for Chávez was both real and theatrical, performing and participating in the drama and reality of the picket line (Huerta 1982, 13).
The RCAF’s performance of a security force also resonates in early El Teatro Campesino (ETC) performances, which dramatized “the politics of survival” through farmworker actos (Huerta 1989, 5). Collaborating with farmworkers as actors and as a primary audience, Luis Valdez formed ETC in 1965 after he approached César Chávez and Dolores Huerta about creating a farmworkers’ theater (Elam 1997; Huerta 1982). ETC staged performances that were live actions, relying on physical gestures, performers’ bodies, and comedic timing (Elam 1997, 3). Neither scripted nor written down, actos were created collectively and, Harry Elam Jr. writes, “used to dramatize the social inequities of the farm labor system and to generate support for the Grape Strike” (Elam 1997, 20; Broyles-González 1994, 5–10). Originally presented on the flatbeds of farm trucks, actos were flexible: they could be performed on-site in the agricultural fields and be improvised, with props being pantomimed (Elam 1997, 75).
In addition to flexible staging, the physical comedy used in actos also defined ETC’s performances. Luis Valdez described the troupe’s comedic techniques as a “serious humor” because they were pedagogical and political; the humor served a utilitarian purpose for the UFW by offering the morale needed to sustain the striking farmworkers (Bagby 1967, 77). Seeing the everyday exploitation of farmworkers acted out had a way of “turning on” farmworker audiences because it publicly acknowledged their social reality (78). The humor of actos also responded to immediate threats of violence during ETC performances. In the presence of police, farm owners, and growers, as well as union members attempting to persuade nonunion workers to leave the fields and join the strike, farmworkers who crossed over to El Teatro’s stage often faced brutal consequences (Elam 1997, 76).
Luis González’s and Juan Carrillo’s recollections of guarding César Chávez parallel the experiences of farmworker audiences amid the dangers of the picket lines (Elam 1997, 76). Both men were aware of the risks in performing their duties as they watched it unfold around them (Huerta 1982, 13). The idea that as security guards, González and Carrillo simultaneously watched and participated in the dangerous scene brings to mind Tiffany Ana López’s (2003, 33) notion of “critical witnesses” in contemporary Chicana/o and US Latina/o theater, where audiences “understand themselves to be distinctively implicated in the fate of the person or persons they are watching.” As he was “moved by the spirit of knowing that that’s the only way change comes” (LaRosa 1994), Carrillo, along with González, put his life on the line to protect Chávez, bearing witness to the farmworkers’ demands for social and economic justice amid threats of personal harm.
Further, the RCAF produced visual art with a sense of urgency on the front lines of UFW events that in turn informed the collective’s air force persona. With their mass production of silkscreen posters for UFW activities, the RCAF made posters in front of their target audience. “The poster was probably the fastest way that we were able to get the point across to the people,” José Montoya explained, adding, “we could set it up in a Volkswagen van and start putting out multiples of images, announcing important events: who’s coming to town, what route is going to happen, there’s a band here, and so on” (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004). Montoya’s memory of setting up silkscreen stations in Volkswagen Buses suggests that poster production was a performance. Volkswagen vans became traveling studios and were “easily transportable to each new performance site” (Elam 1997, 75). Just as the ETC staged actos on the beds of farm trucks, the RCAF moved silkscreen poster production out of the academy and into Volkswagen Buses, identifying the collective’s art as political labor and a rebellion against traditional notions of where art can happen (see plate 22).
From Front to Force: The Content and Form of “El Sol y los de Abajo”
During the RCAF’s era of protecting César Chávez and making posters on the front lines of UFW events, members worked as an art front for the UFW’s political platforms and the culturally nationalist principles of the Chicano movement, all of which were at the center of their collective praxis of making art for people’s sake. But through the group’s air force identity, the RCAF simultaneously produced art in service to the Chicano movement and engaged in elements of performance art. This is evident in the transformation of individual members’ work into shared representations of a Chicano/a air force. The RCAF encompassed members who composed music, poetry, and prose alongside their creation of visual art. The free association of RCAF members allowed the collective to do many things to support different endeavors and to create chains of artistic repetition and succession. Put another way, the RCAF made different types of art and authored individual works, many of which were brought back together to produce collaborations that now document the centrality of the air force persona.
José Montoya’s long poem “El Sol y los de Abajo” exemplifies how individual works were re-created under the collective brand. Written and recited before it was published and used as the title of his first book of poetry in 1972, Montoya’s verse is well known in Chicano/a literary studies (Binder 1985, 129–130).6 While the poem was critiqued by José Limón (1992, 97) for its “prosaic language” and Limón’s claim that it “opens with little to recommend it is a poem, at least in the first thirteen lines,” its style actually demands that it be read out loud. Mapping the historical evolution of the Chicano/a farmworker from the nineteenth-century Mexican hacienda system, the Bracero Program, and the pre-Columbian past, Montoya charts the Chicano/a farmworker’s social reality by invoking several cultural forms of expression that permeated the Chicano/a farmworker’s sensory and psychological experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Montoya does so because he had been a farmworker. Like poster production in VW vans on the front lines of UFW protests and other Chicano/a events, Montoya’s poem came into being amidst his labor in the fields and the labor of his mind.
Montoya’s struggle with “El Sol y los de Abajo,” then, was how to make visual sense of his acoustic rhythms, or what he said and heard, on the printed page. Montoya mixes elements of the modern long poem and corridos—the border ballads that disseminated through northern Mexico and its territories that became the US Southwest—with visual references to architecture of the pre-Columbian past. He also responds to popular portrayals of Mexican America in the US mainstream media. He brings each of the cultural influences together not so much to fuse them into a Chicano/a poem, but to position them as the fragments that Chicanos/as pieced together psychologically, socially, and politically in the 1960s and 1970s, fragments that are reflected in the “quadrangle shapes” he used in the poem’s publication (Limón 1992, 97).
Thus, the textual organization of the poem’s stanzas visually echoes Montoya’s spoken lament over the cultural fractures and spiritual disconnects that were yielded by colonial forces of racism turned classism in the era of the farmworkers’ exploitation (Limón 1992, 97). Montoya says,
Darker than most
Lighter than others—
Moreno enough not to have
Made it as an haciendado[sic]
Como Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar.
Descendant soy de los de abajo
arrastrandome voy por la vida
y arrastrado fue mi padre like
his own before—except that
my compounded the grief by
abandoning his land for another
so foreign and at once so akin
as [to] be painful. (J. Montoya 1972, 34)7
Montoya initiates a Chicano/a origin story within a Spanish colonial order and the great land tracts owned by criollos, a term that in Mexico’s colonial period referred to Spanish landowners born in Mexico. But while Montoya refers to Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar, a light-skinned hacendado born into colonial privilege, that is not whom Montoya really describes.8 Rather, it is Montoya’s Chicano/a ancestor whom he describes as a person who lives in the shadows of the landed elite, too dark to reap what he sows, and working the land for someone else’s economic prosperity. Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar is an abridgement of the colonial law and order of pre-1821 Mexico and the racial hierarchy of colonial Spanish rule that reverberates in the Chicano/a collective memory.
In the next stanza, which is visually set apart from the first section by a double indentation, Montoya skips ahead two generations (his grandfather and father), and turns to the twentieth century’s Bracero Program that created the impetus for the farmworkers’ movement. But he acknowledges the nineteenth-century US annexation of northern Mexico to remind Chicano/a listeners that they are both physically near to and far from a homeland made foreign not only by annexation, but also through landlessness and exclusion in the era of Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar. Thus, the “compounded” grief Montoya claims as his own, or the legacy of his father’s “abandoning his land for another,” is abstract and psychological. Montoya states elusively, “so foreign and at once so akin / as [to] be painful” (1972, 34). In performances of the poem, Montoya pronounced “akin” as “aching,” an aural element that is lost in reading the published poem because it omits the bilingual wordplay that conveys the embodiment of the figurative loss of land felt by Chicanos/as as they struggled to define their identity as native people in the United States.
To establish Chicano/a indigeneity, Montoya turns to a fleeting memory, or a dreamlike state of magnificence and grandeur: “I have dragged / Myself and soul in some / Unconscious, instinctive / Search for the splendor / De los templos del sol” (1972, 34). The dream of splendor is an escape as well as a nightmarish longing amid the reality of “los de / Abajo,” whom Montoya tells listeners they will find in “the gutters / The prisons, the battlefields, / y los files de algodón” (34–35). These visual allusions to desolate locations build in later stanzas when Montoya addresses the traps of social diagnoses and mainstream portrayals of Chicanos/as in the United States, or the “patronizing / Do-gooders who understand / Us—or rather an image of / Us—decomposed and rearranged / Between eye-piece and lens” (35). In the images of objects for looking and inspection—the eyepiece and lens—Montoya signals the medical observations and social diagnoses of Mexican American degeneracy alongside the literary and popular stereotypes.
“How often have I performed / Inside that ocular tube?” Montoya asks in the next stanza, building his resentment in front of the lens of entertainment and of scientific study. He then travels through the “societal telescope” (Limón 1992, 98), mapping several locations of the Chicano/a experience:
Heights and in Barelas.
In the fields of Fresno and
the orchards del condau de
Yuba y con guardia nacional
De Nuevo Mexico en Las Filipinas
Y en las cantinas deje mi
Primavera—en la cantina de
La China en Fowler, and the
Boulevard Tavern in Honolulu—
Y en las prisiones también (J. Montoya 1972, 35)
Referring to his own experiences in California’s San Joaquin Valley and service in the US Navy during the Korean War, Montoya becomes every Chicano/a everywhere—from residents of San Diego’s Barrio Logan who fought back against spatial encroachment to the downtrodden workers in a railroad community in Barelas, a barrio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that Rudolfo Anaya explores in the novel Heart of Aztlán (1976). Montoya’s “prosaic listing” of “unmediated memories of oppression dominate here,” Limón writes (1992, 98), but in listing them in such a way, Montoya ensures that the memories of oppression not only dominate the lines of the poem but that they dominate Chicano/a listeners with an unrelenting history of forces beyond their control.
While I underscore the oral and aural elements of Montoya’s poem, key to my analysis of “El Sol y los de Abajo” is its publication as a book because it reflects the transformation of individual RCAF artworks into a collective creation that revolved around the group’s air force persona. Montoya and his RCAF colleagues designed a book format that was inspired by the group’s collective values and air force persona. For the cover of the anthology, Montoya’s RCAF colleague Armando Cid adapted a photograph made by Hector González of Montoya dressed in aviator sunglasses, a flying cap, and a pilot headset (see fig. 5.1). In its interior, the anthology includes drawings by Cid interspersed between Montoya’s verses.
The book is also reversible; if one flips it over and begins at the end, the anthology includes poetry and prose by Alejandro Murguia, whose text is complemented by photographs by Adal, a photographer given the byline “New York Puerto Rican” (J. Montoya 1972, 37). The poetry collection, then, reveals that RCAF members extended their collective praxis to other artists to explore nonconventional textual forms and publication designs. In its fusion of poetry, drawings, and photography, the book requires readers to become viewers and to physically change their orientation of the text to read the verses—literally to move the book in order to finish reading it. El Sol Y Los De Abajo and other R.C.A.F. poems was a prototype for future Chicano/a publications that contemplate the tactile experience of reading poetic lines.9 The RCAF artists merged the verbal with the visual to reorient the reader-viewer experience of Chicano/a cultural production, necessitating physical engagement with poetry beyond the traditional act of reading.
Figure 5.1. Cover of José Montoya’s El Sol Y Los De Abajo and other R.C.A.F. poems (1972). Author’s collection.
The cover image of José Montoya as a pilot also illuminates the role of the air force persona in the RCAF imagination, since they reproduced the image in different visual mediums for several purposes. As discussed in chapter 3, Armando Cid created the mural Por la Raza United Flight (1973) on the window of La Raza Bookstore (see plate 23). Under the word “libros,” Cid replicated his version of Hector González’s photograph of José Montoya dressed as a pilot. The repetition of the image of Montoya in both Cid’s mural and on the cover of his poetry anthology brings together the RCAF’s different encounters with military service, anti–Vietnam War activism, and the Chicano movement’s culturally nationalist claims. In Cid’s mural, for example, a young Chicano wears a UFW emblem and is connected to the pilot through a system of breathing tubes, which are also linked to a pre-Columbian warrior. The past and present are part of the Chicano/a air force’s dream of community enlightenment, much in the way that Montoya ends “El Sol y los de Abajo” with a vision of the Chicano/a future in the pre-Columbian past (J. Montoya 1972, 40).
Further, the pilot’s attachment to the pre-Columbian warrior and Chicano activist in Por la Raza United Flight was an intentional duality posed by Cid. The pilot’s relationship to the young Chicano and the pre-Columbian warrior suggests that his “flight” not only takes place though political activism, or as Juan Carrillo recalled, putting one’s body “on the line” for political change (LaRosa 1994), but it also occurs through intellectual elevation. In other words, while the pilot is airborne amid contemporary political struggle, or between the war at home and the war abroad, the mural shows viewers on the street that there is a way out—an “outer space.” Through “libros,” the Spanish word for books, Cid signaled that the books inside the store are Chicano/a ones. Knowing that the portrait of the pilot is based on a photograph of José Montoya further expands the meaning of the mural. In purchasing a copy of El Sol Y Los De Abajo and other R.C.A.F. poems, Chicano/a audiences were buying the image of Montoya and the RCAF as an air force, but one charged with a different kind of mission and service.
Against the “Ocular Tube”: The Air Force Persona as Creative Counterpoint
The multiple uses of Hector González’s photograph of José Montoya as a pilot of Aztlán offered Chicanos/as in Sacramento’s barrio an alternative image of themselves. The desire to represent Chicanos/as differently is a central theme of “El Sol y los de Abajo,” contextualizing Montoya’s references to the eyepiece, lens, and ocular tube through which he resents being observed and interpreted. The RCAF’s construction of the air force persona was a creative parallel to the Chicano movement’s call for a self-determined identity. The persona combined the historical context—both the Vietnam War abroad and the antiwar movement at home—with the experiences of RCAF members who were veterans of war. The air force identity allowed the collective to appropriate the military stance of the state to undo state power.
One way the RCAF did so was through creatively lampooning media coverage of the Chicano movement and popular portrayals of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in literature and film. In 1979, for example, a photograph of the Royal Chicano Air Force ran in the Los Angeles Times alongside an article by staff writer Charles Hillinger. Captioned “Generals,” the photo shows RCAF members decked out in captain’s hats, flight goggles, bomber jackets, and aviator sunglasses. Two members, Esteban Villa and Juanita Polendo (Ontiveros), hold opposite ends of a plaque emblazoned with the RCAF’s acronym and a pair of pilot’s wings. In the article, Hillinger quotes José Montoya on the origins of the group’s name, and Montoya recounts the familiar story of the confusion that was caused by the collective’s acronym (Hillinger 1979). Writing nearly a decade after the RCAF’s founding, Hillinger reports on the Chicano/a art infrastructure that the group helped build in Sacramento—El Centro de Artistas Chicanos, the Barrio Art program, Breakfast for Niños, and the RCAF’s prolific muralism. But the photograph of the air force generals, smiling at the camera and at each other while proudly displaying their RCAF insignia, suggests an ironic inside joke that reverberates in Montoya’s closing remarks on the origins of the group’s name. “It is a serious organization,” he quips, “but we use this RCAF kind of insanity to keep from getting too serious” (Hillinger 1979). Montoya’s statement is a circular one, concluding where it begins, intentionally remaining elusive on the meaning and function of the air force persona and performing in English what the motto “locura lo cura” means in Spanish (see fig. 5.2).
The RCAF balanced the more serious side of the air force persona with a routine that relied on humor and farce to pose a creative counterpoint to state power. Well-known amongst Chicano/a artists for their locura, the RCAF gestured to their motto in legendary ways. In a 1989 tribute, Luis Valdez described an RCAF performance at a statewide gathering of artists in San Juan Bautista, California.10 As discussed in chapter 4, Luis Valdez, along with the RCAF and other Chicano/a artists, established El Concilio de Arte Popular in 1976. Meeting in different cities during the council’s formation, the RCAF arrived in San Juan Bautista “one night in ’71,” Valdez recalls, as a
bunch of vatos dressed up as World War II pilots . . . in a noisy squadron of Volkswagen Buses and parking in an empty lot, one by one, as José Montoya, wearing goggles and one of those dog-eared pilot’s caps, flagged them in, vigorously, like a flagger on some aircraft carrier at sea. It was brilliant vacilada, a little sardonic and more than satirical, but a helluva a lotta laughs . . . que curada. In fact the motto of the RCAF said it all: locura lo cura. Craziness heals. (Valdez 1989)
Complete with squadron gestures and a runway-style entrance, the RCAF circled the gathering of artists and parked. They opened the van doors and, as Juan Carrillo recalls in Pilots of Aztlán, spilled out “wearing World War II helmets. It was like instant theater” (LaRosa 1994). Their routine echoed El Teatro Campesino’s early performances of farmworker actos because it was ad-libbed, physical, and pantomimed.
Figure 5.2. “Generals.” From L: Esteban Villa, Elias Alias, Lala Polendo (holding child), Ricardo Favela, José Montoya, Malaquias Montoya, and Juanita Polendo (Ontiveros). Photograph by Fitzgerald Whitney. Copyright © 1979 Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.
The gathering of artists, Ricardo Favela explains, had come together “to discuss how we were going to use and implement our art to help our people” (LaRosa 1994). In the midst of listening to a lecture by Andres Segura, a captain of Aztec dancing from Mexico who helped catalyze the cultural tradition in the US Southwest during the Chicano movement (Ceseña 2009, 80–96), Juanishi Orosco recalls that there was “a nice fire and moonlight. [It was] very magical . . . and we come in crazier than hell, tooting our horns, yelling and screaming” (LaRosa 1994). Interrupting Segura’s presentation, RCAF artist Rudy Cuellar jumped out of a van and relieved himself on the fire (LaRosa 1994). The impromptu performance captivated Luis Valdez, who agreed with Juan Carrillo that it was instant theater, adding that “the entire RCAF pose was performance art” (Valdez 1989). Just as El Teatro Campesino’s actos turned on farmworkers in the early years of the farmworkers’ strike, Valdez was enthralled by the brash and absurd arrival of the Chicano air force (Bagby 1967, 77).
Although they had stunned their audience in San Juan Bautista, the RCAF’s performance actually began before they arrived. While traveling to the meeting, the artists started performing the air force persona for each other. Recalling the incident in the documentary Pilots of Aztlán, Orosco explains that as they were driving to San Juan Bautista, the group was “getting pretty crazy.” “That’s when we went into our flight formations,” Rudy Cuellar recalls, adding, “I know this might sound strange, but we were into Volkswagen Buses and vans.” Ricardo Favela remembered that “Volkswagen Buses, for José, especially those old ones . . . where you slide the window back and forth—that was José’s cockpit on his V-29. And he had his hat on, his officer’s hat on, and he had his earphones and little mouthpiece” (LaRosa 1994). Getting into character prior to their performance in San Juan Bautista, the “flight formations” that Montoya, as an RCAF general, commanded and other members, as pilots, implemented also suggest that the artists were taking their cues from each other, responding to their ad-libbed gestures and synchronizing their actions. They not only acted out the air force persona but they witnessed it. Members were the performers and the audience, using the protocol and training that some had learned in the military to serve other ends—namely testing the creative potential of their mistaken identity as the Royal Canadian—now Chicano—Air Force.
Luis Valdez’s claim that the entire RCAF pose was performance art resonates in the work of another groundbreaking Chicano/a art collective in the 1970s. Better documented in Chicano/a art scholarship for early interventions on the genres that came to define Chicano/a art,11 Asco was a Los Angeles–based group whose street performances continue to influence the work of contemporary artists (Shaked 2008, 1059). Asco members witnessed the front lines of Chicano/a youth activism and the high school student walkouts that led to the formation of the Brown Berets.12 Stations of the Cross (1971), for example, pushed definitions of performance and Chicano/a art when Asco members dressed in “outlandish make-up and costumes,” simulating the “Mexican Catholic tradition of the Posada” as they proceeded down Whittier Boulevard and placed a fifteen-foot cross at the door of a US Marines recruitment center (Chavoya 2000, 242–243). First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974) involved Asco members eating dinner at a table placed on a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard, the site of an earlier violent clash between the police and protestors (Noriega 2010).
Asco mixed and matched artistic mediums in order to disrupt state surveillance and police enforcement of public space, producing art that was not defined by genre (Noriega 2010). The year before painting Black and White Mural (1973), for example, Asco recognized the performance element of “mural making as an art form in itself,” Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino (1993, 98) asserts.13 In Walking Mural (1972), Asco fashioned themselves as familiar images from Chicano/a murals, “seeking to free themselves from their formal and cultural restrictions as they walked down Whittier Boulevard” (Sanchez-Tranquilino 1993, 98). Asco also created Instant Mural, a guerrilla-style street performance in which Gronk taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandóval to a wall, challenging the one-dimensional form of Chicano/a murals (98). Testing the boundaries of Chicano/a visual art, Asco also challenged the patriarchal or heteronormative limitations of artistic production during the Chicano movement through their glamorous poses, dramatic makeup, and gender-bending fashions, often captured in Harry Gamboa Jr.’s photography.
The RCAF, on the other hand, performed and visualized the air force persona within the patriarchal ethos of the Chicano movement. The air force persona aesthetically functioned inside dominant codes of military imagery and attitudes as members used a vocabulary of rank to communicate their artistic contributions to the Chicano movement and, literally, to defend Chicano movement leaders. But the RCAF’s air force persona did not serve a state agenda or defend dominant political ideologies in the group’s reconfiguration of androcentric and fraternal ethos. Instead, the RCAF created a verbal-visual persona within the dominant codes of the military that burlesqued the state’s power, a power that had deeply impacted their lives.
The RCAF’s air force persona was a Chicano fantasy in the 1970s, comprised of myth and aesthetic possibility, as well as a desire for political visibility. In the same way that the Chicano/a community played a role in creating the air force persona from its inception, Chicano/a artists beyond Sacramento also participated in its self-fashioning. In the fall of 1976, a photograph appeared in Chismearte, a Chicano/a art magazine produced for several years through the Concilio de Arte Popular and that the RCAF helped found.14 The photograph accompanies Carlos Almaraz’s essay “The Artist as a Revolutionary” and parodies the idea of a “flight,” or a small unit of personnel that is part of a larger air force squadron. The idea is conveyed by the three rows in which the men stand and sit in front of an airplane.15 The men wear military attire, and the propeller plane that is parked behind them has the acronym “RcAf” superimposed on its front. While the image quality is poor (perhaps intentionally), one can tell that the letters have been added to the photograph after the fact and that the men’s mustaches have been drawn on, signaling Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s (1991b, 156) description of “rasquache” in Chicano/a art as an aesthetic strategy of “resilience and resourcefulness” that comes “from making do with what is at hand.” The photograph, possibly a stock image, and its alterations demonstrate the cropping, splicing, and photomontage techniques that reshaped Chicano/a serigraphy in the 1960s and 1970s (Davalos 2008, 40–44). Drawing on the visual conventions and tools of dissemination for underground press in the 1960s and 1970s, the RCAF’s locura permeates the picture, as a handwritten and misspelled caption informs viewers that it is of the “RCAF members while on a secreat [sic] mission” (Almaraz 1976, 53) (see fig. 5.3).
A doctored photograph such as this one, however, was not merely funny or satirical in its homage to the RCAF’s persona. The altered photograph appropriates symbols of state power, disseminating a fraternal vision of the collective. The androcentric structure of the US armed forces adhered to the patriarchal ethos of carnalismo, or the sense of brotherhood that military service taught and demanded, which aligned with Mexican American cultural values of manhood through military service. But, as Lorena Oropeza (2003) and George Mariscal (2004) have written, the traditional pastime of Mexican American military service and Chicano/a antiwar activism converged in the 1970s as the Chicano Moratorium protested the disproportionate death toll of Chicanos and other men of color serving as GIs. Chicana activists proclaimed “¡La batalla está aquí!” in a pamphlet entitled Chicanos and the War (1970) that repositioned expressions of Chicano masculinity in service to Chicano/a communities (Oropeza 2003, 210–211). Drawing parallels between third world solidarity, colonized peoples, and Chicano/a autonomy in poetry, posters, plays, and processions, Chicano/a artists redefined Chicano masculinity by exposing the risk and reality of using military service as a means by which to achieve full citizenship (Mariscal 2004, 116–117). In the space of an art magazine for artists and, more than likely, Chicano/a ones, the photograph was a copy of the real thing—a simulacrum, literally a “flight” simulation—tinged with humorous undertones that did not showcase state power. Instead, the image appropriated the visual codes of the military arms of the state to make Chicano/a artists laugh—many of whom were veterans of war.
Stepping back from the photograph’s context, its appearance in a Chicano/a art magazine in 1976, and turning to the mainstream culture and social reality in which Chicano/a artists created art, the Vietnam War ended for the United States in 1975 with a demoralizing death toll of GIs and Vietnamese civilians. Media coverage of Vietnam changed American impressions of war, and it was the most heavily documented and broadcast war in US history. The impact of the Vietnam War, coupled with violence during the Chicano Moratorium, sent a message to Chicanos/as, and to artists in particular: governments, their militaries, and their wars were crazy, with their “annihilating epidemics” that were both physical (think napalm, police violence, and M16s) and ideological (economic agendas of capitalist imperialism masquerading as patriotic campaigns against communism) (Muñoz 2000, 100); the photograph made sense in its strangeness.
Figure 5.3. Fall issue of Chismearte 1:1 (1976), 53. Appears in Carlos Almaraz’s essay “The Artist As a Revolutionary.” No Photo Credit. In library collection at Cornell University.
The anonymity of the group of air force men and the seriousness of their expressions behind sunglasses and handlebar mustaches, coupled with the handwritten caption addressed to Carlos, committed to the fantasy of a Chicano air force and struck a chord for Chicano/a artists in 1976. The US government had pursued anticommunist wars through the red scare of the 1950s, first with the Korean War and then with the Vietnam War. Both wars coincided with the uprising of disenfranchised communities in the United States who adapted military uniforms, symbols, and militant personas to dismantle the master’s house with his own tools. The Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and Young Lords used elements of the US armed forces to protect themselves and to serve their communities; so did the RCAF, but in 1976, in a photo-fantasy of a Chicano air force, the exaltation of the earlier fraternal vision of Chicano/a decolonization was more than a nostalgic escape into the earlier years of the Chicano movement. It was a performance of memory, romanticizing the past to critique the present and what the Chicano movement had not achieved for Chicanos/as by 1976 (Muñoz 2000, 97–114).16
Moreover, Chicano/a artists needed a break by 1976, and not only from the real dangers of the Chicano movement, but from its mainstream depictions. Examining the negligible coverage of issues facing Mexican American communities in the early years of television, Randy Ontiveros (2010, 904) writes that César Chávez and the California grape strike was the first Chicana/o story and possibly the only one “that networks covered substantively.” But the mainstream media’s focus on Chávez was not in service to the farmworkers’ movement or the progressive politics of the Chicano movement. Rather, it broadcast a visual binary in which Chicanas/os were perceived either as suffering saints or as dangerous revolutionaries. “On one side was the figure of Chávez,” Ontiveros observes, and “on the other side were those violent, undifferentiated masses threatening to bring the American experiment to an end” (2010, 904, 909).
The lack of coverage and historical contextualization of the Chicano movement also undermined the credibility of Chicana/o activists. Ontiveros cites ABC Television’s report on land rights activist Reies López Tijerina and his “theatrical effort to make a citizen’s arrest” of Supreme Court nominee Warren Burger in 1969 (908). López Tijerina staged the event to draw attention to his organization, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (also known as Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres) and the ongoing struggle for Hispano/a land rights in New Mexico (Rosales 1997, 154–170). But in the television news story, López Tijerina “came across as a lunatic,” Ontiveros (2010, 908) writes, and made his cause seem absurd. Between Chávez, the docile saint who staged a hunger strike in 1968, and López Tijerina, the threatening militant who attempted to arrest a Supreme Court nominee, the media projected the madness of the Chicano movement. It was this visual binary to which the RCAF responded. After all, craziness cures.
RCAF air force performances offered a solution to an important issue for Chicana/o artists; or, rather, they offered them a cure for the insane notion that Chicana/os, and gatherings of Chicana/os, posed a threat to US society. Acting out the mantra locura lo cura, the RCAF mocked the media’s portrayal of the Chicano movement’s militant madness as well as depictions of its passivity (via the sanctified Chávez) for Chicano/a audiences well aware of the mainstream assumptions versus their social reality.
Thus, the RCAF’s air force persona united members and other artists like Carlos Almaraz in a “symbolic overthrow of oppression” from the mainstream media’s depictions (Elam 1997, 17). The artists lampooned news reports of Chicano/a activism that, in essence, were part of a long line of literary and cultural stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “not only ‘aliens,’” Alicia Gaspar de Alba (1998, 40) writes, “but dirty, thieving, lazy, drunken, lecherous, treacherous, ignorant ‘mess-cans.’” The RCAF’s locura, as it was utilized in the San Juan Bautista performance, exemplifies the “resistance aspect of the Chicano movement” that Gaspar de Alba claims was “both a reaction against these derogatory stereotypes and a counteraction to the assimilationist tactics of the dominating culture” (40). One way to defeat the oppression of a dominating culture is to make fun of it. The RCAF captured this sentiment in San Juan Bautista but also eight years after that performance, in 1979, when members posed as an air force for the Los Angeles Times and José Montoya teased that the RCAF was a serious organization but used its RCAF insanity “to keep from getting too serious” (Hillinger 1979, 20).
Through their dynamic visualizations, performances, and articulations of the air force persona, RCAF members mirrored the visual irony that Asco’s mural performances encompassed. Concerned with form and style over messages of cultural nationalism, Asco’s mural performances anticipated what was to come in Chicano/a art, or the emphasis on the “postmodern art forms (parody, irony) by Chicana and gay artists” (R. García 2006, 213). The RCAF’s air force persona also gestured to postmodernism in Chicano/a art because group members mixed and matched dramatic, visual, and poetic genres and styles in a collective production of their public persona. The group’s air force performances transformed over time from defensive acts (guarding César Chávez) to acts of resistance (guarding their humanity) amid disparaging and reductive representations of Mexican America. While there are numerous points of rupture in Chicano/a art history concerning postmodern aesthetics, and what is camp or what is rasquache, a genealogical relationship exists between the tactics and strategies of 1960s and 1970s Chicano/a artists and contemporary queer Chican@ and Latinx artists.
Performance in the Archive: Xic-Indio y el Fin del Mundo
Understanding the genealogical relationship between the RCAF and contemporary Chicano/a theater and performance is only possible through the RCAF collections that have been digitized and made available online. Moreover, the institutional collections reveal other Chicano/a performances in Sacramento that influenced the RCAF’s air force persona early on. While RCAF members performed the air force persona for different reasons, it remained attached to the Chicano movement values of community service, and this element of the air force persona was bolstered by the Chicano/a theater taking place in community spaces where RCAF members taught art, made art, and watched art happen. Within the RCAF’s online archive, several photographs document a theater showcase in October 1978 held as a fundraiser for Breakfast for Niños. According to a slide notation, “The evening’s entertainment included a poetry reading by José Montoya, a performance of a segment of Freddy Rodriguez’s ‘Xic-Indio,’ and Teatro Campesino’s performance of ‘El Fin del Mundo.’”17 What is noteworthy about the evening of Chicano/a performances is that while it was produced to support one of the RCAF’s original community services, it presented new directions in Chicano/a theater, from different types of drama by El Teatro Campesino to a Chicano/a rock opera conceived by a musician and founder of the RCAF Band, Freddy Rodriguez (see fig. 5.4).
Rodriguez founded the RCAF Band in the early 1970s following his service in the Vietnam War and activism in Sacramento’s Brown Berets. Music was always a major part of the RCAF’s environment and the spaces they created in Sacramento’s Chicano/a community. Several members, including José Montoya and Esteban Villa, wrote and played original music, joining with Rudy Carrillo to form Trio Casindio and producing the album Chicano Music All Day (1985). But in the early 1970s, a large ensemble named the RCAF Band became a local staple at Chicano/a community events. José Montoya recalls in the film Pilots of Aztlán that the band performed a variety of musical genres, from cumbia to blues and, most loudly, rock and roll, and they “did an incredible number of benefits, fund-raisers, for all kinds of organizations and causes” (LaRosa 1994).18
For the fund-raiser in October 1978, the Cultural Affairs Committee, an affiliate of the RCAF working under the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, organized the theater showcase. Juan Carrillo was a committee member at the time of the fund-raiser and recalls that the major event was El Teatro Campesino’s performance of El Fin del Mundo. By 1978, El Teatro Campesino (ETC) was an award-winning theater troupe, having left the front lines of the farmworkers’ movement in 1967 to establish a permanent location, where they began teaching and honing “a more aesthetically astute company of actors” (Huerta 1982, 43). Outside the immediate context of the farmworkers’ movement, ETC also inspired the formation of other Chicano/a theater groups (Huerta 1994, 38). Changes in the original venue and audience altered the subject matter of farmworkers’ actos and reshaped their form.19 Jorge Huerta, for example, directed and produced Guadalupe (1974) and La Víctima (1976) with Teatro de la Esperanza, a company composed of students at UC Santa Barbara.20 Both plays were a new type of Chicana/o theater called docudrama (Huerta 1977, 37–46; 1989, 210). Docudramas restaged actual events within the Chicana/o community and examined issues beyond a shared labor experience. Luis Valdez also pushed the bounds of Chicana/o theater, creating Zoot Suit in 1979 and adapting it to film in 1981.
Figure 5.4. Royal Chicano Air Force and Breakfast for Niños program fund-raiser, El Teatro Campesino’s performance of El Fin del Mundo (1978). Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
For the troupe’s performance of El Fin del Mundo in Sacramento, ETC “came in and set up the stage with an enormous calavera assembled from parts,” Juan Carrillo recalled. “Their work was crisp and well-rehearsed, with music, dance and storytelling in their physical theater style. It was a spectacular show. The main character was called Mundo, so the meaning of the play, as I remember, was a double meaning of the end of the world and the end of the person” (Juan Carrillo, e-mail to author, December 30, 2014). Luis Valdez’s El Fin del Mundo (1978) follows the main character, Mundo Mata, who overdoses from drugs and enters the world of the dead, encountering former acquaintances that are condemned to repeat their actions. The premise paralleled the plot of the RCAF Band’s Xic-Indio rock opera, which dealt with the perils of drug abuse, following the demise of its antihero, Xic-Indio. On one level, both Luis Valdez’s play and Freddy Rodriguez’s rock opera served a pedagogical purpose, as both communicated the consequences of drug abuse beyond the individual. On another level, the costumes, sets, lighting, and other effects reflected the evolution of Chicano/a theater and the shift from ad-libbed gestures, pantomimed props, and unscripted lines to ornate scenery, costumes, and well-rehearsed productions (see fig. 5.5).
As a Cultural Affairs Committee member, Juan Carrillo volunteered to “handle the spotlight from the back of the auditorium to follow the performers in Xic-Indio” (Juan Carrillo, e-mail to author, December 30, 2014). Moving from his earlier role as a security guard for César Chávez and one who both witnessed and risked the danger of the front lines of the farmworkers’ strike, Carrillo, along with other RCAF members, now witnessed the evolution of a theatrical tradition imbued with the “air of urgency” that had inspired farmworker actos (Huerta 1994, 38). There was no imminent threat or danger involved in helping to produce the theater showcase, but the subject matter was still urgent, and, further, the play and rock opera were both performed to raise funds for an immediate need in the Chicano/a community. While it had changed, Chicano/a theater was still necessary (Huerta 1989).
Moreover, this was the first time that the RCAF saw Xic-Indio. Carrillo explained that while the RCAF Band had always performed choreography during concerts, “this was a musical with costumes and a story line” (Juan Carrillo, e-mail to author, December 30, 2014). In Pilots of Aztlán, Juanishi Orosco recalls the RCAF Band’s concerts at Southside Park, one of which is briefly shown in the documentary. He remarks that Freddy Rodriguez “had whole crews of dancers doing this whole thing behind the music . . . in costume. [It] just was wild. . . . I guess at that point, [Rodriguez] was warming up in his mind probably for Xic-Indio, the Chicano rock opera” (LaRosa 1994).
Figure 5.5. Xic-Indio, a Chicano/a rock opera (1980). Royal Chicano Air Force Archives. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Special Collections Department, the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
In many ways, the RCAF Band emerged in the same way as El Teatro Campesino and the RCAF, on the front lines of the Chicano movement and in support of its sociopolitical platforms. Hearing the same call put forward in “El Espiritual Plan de Aztlán” (1969) to create art that was “appealing to our people,” Freddy Rodriguez and the RCAF Band evolved their musical shows into an elaborate staging of a social drama that mirrored many of their lives, particularly that of Rodriguez. In a rare interview with Rodriguez in Pilots of Aztlán, he explains that Xic-Indio is “a story that goes in every culture” because it centers on a self-fulfilling prophecy through Xic-Indio’s demise. “I and the band wrote some things,” he explained and added that “I am living it, and some of my friends and family that wrote it and played it are in jail right now doing what Xic-Indio did. We all knew the story line, but we did it anyway” (LaRosa 1994). In 1980, the RCAF Band performed Xic-Indio in its entirety at the Sacramento Community Theatre for a national conference of bilingual educators that was later aired on local PBS.21 In footage from the 1980 performance that is included in Pilots of Aztlán, an actor in a calavera costume dances around several actors, holding a large syringe. Representing death, the calavera communicates the perils and ripple effects of drug abuse as each of the actors fall to the ground upon contact with the syringe. The RCAF Band plays in the background.
Like later forms of Chicano/a theater, Xic-Indio demonstrated the social problems in the Chicano/a community beyond the labor and economic injustices in California’s agricultural fields (Huerta 1989, 7–8). But as a theatrical art form that developed out of the struggles of oppressed people, the necessary theater that emerged on the front lines of the farmworkers’ strike was not limited to the farmworkers’ cause. Instead, it used performance to direct audience attention to various types of social injustice and ongoing societal ills, like gang warfare and drug abuse. While the humor with which Chicana/o theater informed people about their rights and united them as an audience remained essential to its dramatic structure, the absence of specific dangers present in the original context of the farmworkers’ acto allowed other societal dangers to be performed, contemplated, and witnessed by Chicano/a audiences who were still committed to Chicano movement goals (Huerta 1989).
Without the photographs and the documentary film Pilots of Aztlán, the 1978 theater showcase in Sacramento and the RCAF Band’s rock opera would be lost to posterity, omitting an important part of the milieu in which the RCAF developed the air force persona. Xic-Indio is integral to the story of the RCAF’s air force persona—along with El Teatro Campesino’s staging of El Fin del Mundo—because it reflects the experimental performances with which the artists were surrounded, as well as the development of Chicano/a theatrical forms in the post-front-lines phase of the Chicano movement. One wonders what impressions the combinations of music, costuming, and scripted lines had on RCAF members, many of whom rehearsed air-force-inspired one-liners over the decades, adapted photographs of air force performances in multiple visual art mediums, and created art based on shared memories of air force–inspired events.
Archival Instincts and Institutional Recognition, 1989–2007
The RCAF’s institutional collections at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) reflect an important shift in Chicano/a art history that has been explored by scholars for the transition it marks in the 1980s, when the Chicano/a poster’s intrinsic political value was eclipsed by a new market value based on institutional interest (S. Goldman 1984; Gaspar de Alba 1998; Romo 2001). Scholars do not necessarily agree that the changes in value or function of Chicano/a art, and specifically of posters, is completely accurate or total, especially in regard to the historical periods that have typified the transition from a political to a culturally celebratory art (Davalos 2008). The issue certainly impacted the RCAF, but their art, produced well into the twenty-first century, attests to more permeable boundaries between political purpose, cultural affirmation, and institutional recognition in the work they made at the height of the Chicano movement and in subsequent decades.
Furthermore, since its founding, the RCAF had always been a part of a university in Sacramento, displaying Chicano/a art whether or not it was exhibited in compliance with institutional customs. Several members other than José Montoya and Esteban Villa also instructed in the Art Department and ethnic studies programs at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), and surrounding community colleges and schools after earning degrees.22 While the RCAF’s relationship to CSUS had been a fraught one—from departmental exclusions and attacks against the RCAF’s campus murals in the 1970s, to an ongoing lack of awareness on campus about the group’s contributions to university history—the RCAF was in dialogue with institutional processes, including art and historical canons as well as academic procedures for archival documentation.
This is an important point to make because in foregrounding the RCAF’s core values of making art in service to the Chicano/a community, it is important to not position the RCAF outside of institutional systems of knowledge. The RCAF was part of the political demands for educational access and parity at CSUS, and the collective maintained a deep concern for Chicano/a identity formation based on the rethinking of geopolitical and intellectual borders throughout the late twentieth century. Influenced by traditions of knowledge production at the university, the RCAF had also witnessed itself as an art collective on the front lines of the Chicano movement, particularly through the group’s development of the air force persona. The air force persona was unique and special, and the RCAF knew this. Members like Ricardo Favela also knew it had to be preserved.
Favela began collecting his RCAF colleagues’ doodles from “every Wednesday Centro meeting” early in the 1970s. Referring to El Centro de Artistas Chicanos, he added, “What I would do is I’d clear the table, and I’d put a clean piece of butcher paper on it and leave pencils there, and then we’d have our meeting. And then at the end of the meeting, I’d take off the butcher paper, and I had all these drawings that were done by the artists.” Favela stored his colleagues’ drawings, explaining that he “was the pack rat,” or “the person who has the stuff. [It] worked out real well, because for my art show, I had all the stuff I needed, and then for other things, I had all the stuff I needed, so that was good, but I never knew why I was doing it” (Ricardo Favela, interview, July 20, 2004). While Favela claims he didn’t know why he was collecting his colleagues’ drawings, he actually did know why. He was surrounded by reasons at CSUS, where he worked within a university and was exposed to academic processes and collecting culture. He was also in the middle of building Sacramento’s Chicano/a art infrastructure through the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, and the documentation of historic meetings at a historic Chicano/a art center mattered.
In his recollections of holding on to RCAF ephemera, Favela mentions his MFA art show, which benefitted from his proclivity for collecting; thus, the RCAF’s archive actually started when the group formed and Favela began storing its records, especially RCAF posters. Favela’s poster collection was exhibited for the first time in October 1989, when he coordinated In Search of Mr. Con Safos, an exhibition of RCAF serigraphy from the 1960s to the 1980s. He developed the show as the final project for his graduate degree and in doing so, established the RCAF’s first comprehensive poster catalogue and finding tool. Favela also prepared a historical synopsis of the RCAF’s posters in which he commented on changing attitudes toward Chicano/a art in the late twentieth century:
As galleries and museums begin to open their doors, Chicanismo will undeniably become a distinct and unique asset to the American art scene. The RCAF Retrospective Poster Art Exhibition allowed the public awareness, exposure, understanding and appreciation of Chicano art, as well as insight into Chicano art heritage by seeing and meeting the artists which were actually involved with the production of the posters. (Ricardo Favela 1990, 5)
The preservation of Chicano/a art’s historical past, and specifically the history of the RCAF during the Chicano movement, was the central objective of Favela’s show. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the “multicultural” movement in the United States had yielded an academic and somewhat mainstream audience for Chicano/a art, especially in California and the US Southwest. Although Favela welcomed new audiences for Chicano/a art, he did not want to forsake “Chicano art heritage,” or the community for which it was created and that it first served. “The subsequent appeal and enjoyment of the exhibit,” Favela concluded, “added insight into a culture little known in the ‘art world.’ But more importantly the exhibition acknowledged the past and existing artistic Chicano accomplishments” (Ricardo Favela 1990, 5). Favela’s exhibition goals later resonated in the thematic intentions of Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (CARA), the first nationally touring exhibition of Chicano/a art in the 1990s (Gaspar de Alba 1998, 96).
Favela’s curatorial objective and context for the exhibition also centered on the RCAF’s air force identity, which he visualized in the poster he designed and printed with Luis González to advertise the show. In Search of Mr. Con Safos (1989) was based on Favela’s earlier announcement poster Huelga! Strike!—Support the U.F.W.A. (1976), in which RCAF members ride in a World War II–era jeep through a Safeway parking lot in Woodland, California, later learning that they won second place in a Mother’s Day parade. In Search of Mr. Con Safos announced Favela’s exhibition in October 1989 at the Lankford and Cook Gallery in Rancho Cordova, California. As was typical of early RCAF art shows, all donations and money from poster sales went to the Barrio Art program and its “Art Student Supply and Materials Fund,” grounding the show in Chicano movement values (see plate 24).23
In Search of Mr. Con Safos reappeared again as the advertisement for the RCAF’s 2007 show, R.C.A.F. Goes to College. The exhibition in CSUS’s University Library Gallery from February to March 2007 featured a collection of RCAF posters and contemporary works. The brief exhibition also included an RCAF artist roundtable discussion and several scholarly lectures on Chicano/a art. While there had been smaller shows on campus and certainly self-produced exhibitions by the collective throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this institutionally supported retrospective of RCAF art and contemporary work was the first major survey of RCAF art at CSUS in eighteen years, following Ricardo Favela’s MFA show (see fig. 5.6).
Figure 5.6. Announcement card for R.C.A.F. Goes to College exhibition, February–March 2007. Author’s collection.
The RCAF’s lack of recognition at CSUS reflected the larger predicament of Chicano/a art in the 1980s and 1990s. The RCAF had made many strides in regional visibility, but CSUS did not seem to notice. In fact, the CSUS library made no major efforts to collect RCAF art or historical records until 2007, long after the group had donated its collection to UC Santa Barbara on May 5, 1988. Ricardo Favela “signed for the RCAF” when archivist Salvador Güereña approached the collective about depositing their records (Salvador Güereña, e-mail to author, February 22, 2010).24 In 2001, Favela explained why the RCAF decided on UC Santa Barbara as a depository: “Number one was very simply, they asked us. And this is something that CSUS can’t get over. They never ask us. If they would have asked us, they would have had it. But they never asked us because we were hidden in plain sight” (Lemon 2001). Despite the RCAF’s visibility on campus through student murals, art shows that broke art world rules, and reactions to the university’s policies against campus murals in the 1970s, the RCAF seemed to fly under the university’s radar. The presumption of simple oversight, however, is highly suspicious given that by 1989, the RCAF had major public artworks in Sacramento, including Southside Park Mural (1977), Metamorphosis (1980), and L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. (1984).
Nevertheless, depositing their collection at UC Santa Barbara’s CEMA proved to be a good decision for the RCAF because it contributed to the group’s regional visibility in the first multi-city Chicano/a poster show between 2000 and 2003. Organized by UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum, ¿Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California relied heavily on the RCAF posters in the CEMA collection. The exhibition toured the University of Texas at Austin, the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara, and Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum.25 The title of the show, Just Another Poster was based on Luis González’s 1976 silkscreen This Is Just Another Poster, which also adorns the cover of the exhibition catalogue.26
But there was another RCAF poster circulated by UC Santa Barbara as the announcement for the ¿Just Another Poster? show held at the University Art Museum in January 2001. The poster that advertised the Santa Barbara show was one that Ricardo Favela created for El Centro de Artistas Chicanos in 1975. The serigraph features two calaveras dressed in contemporary clothes. One of the calaveras holds a frame, still dripping with paint, up to the other’s face, playfully suggesting the production as well as the exhibition that took place at the Centro. Intended as a business advertisement, Favela’s poster also notes the services provided, “Posters, Murales y Clases de Arte Para la Gente,” as well as the Centro’s address on S Street and its phone number (see plate 25).
In its original context as an advertisement for El Centro de Artistas Chicanos, Favela’s poster gestured to the “spiritual support” that the center offered artists and the community who used it (S. Goldman 1990, 35). In the central image of two comical calaveras attempting to hang a picture, Favela included dual cosmological symbols that reference the cardinal directions in Mesoamerican thought—north, east, south, west, and most important, the center, which is indicated by smaller circles within larger circles. While all Mesoamerican civilizations referenced the cardinal directions, in Aztec representations, the center symbolized the “fifth sun,” or the current epoch. Juan Carrillo recalls “that the year [Favela] did this poster was possibly the same year we all went to New Mexico to visit. It was ’75 or ’76.” Adding that the symbols on the poster “always reminded me of the symbol in the New Mexico state flag,” Carrillo noted that Favela’s “reference to the four corners is stark. Through our growing knowledge at that time of indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions we learned of the greater meaning of the four directions” (Juan Carrillo, e-mail to author, November 17, 2014). A fusion of Mesoamerican and Pueblo spiritual signs, Favela’s poster documents his “growing knowledge” of indigenous spiritual orders and the Chicano/a sense of place in the Western Hemisphere. Making a visual pun on the idea of the center—through his representation of two small circles within larger circles—Favela’s poster advertised the location of the Centro de Artistas Chicanos while signifying its importance to the RCAF and the people who made art in it.
As an announcement for a university exhibition of Chicano/a art, Favela’s poster also takes on another meaning, as one of the skeletons attempts to capture the other in a frame that still drips with paint. In this new context—advertising a Chicano/a poster show in 2001—the image comments on the new appeal and collectability of Chicano/a art in the twenty-first century. Ironic and bittersweet, the poster in this context resonated with the uncertainty that many RCAF members felt concerning institutional collections. Amidst the success of their records at UC Santa Barbara’s CEMA, the RCAF grew increasingly aware of their lack of recognition at CSUS, which directly related to their historical absence in the university’s archives and collections. Echoing Favela’s sentiment that CSUS never asked them for their records, José Montoya remarked on the uneven development of Chicano/a art collections in general:
We’ve been interviewed and researched, and there’s very little out there that we can send our students to go and read those books—even at Sac State. For all of the things that we accomplished as the Royal Chicano Air Force, they’re finally—just barely—beginning to say, “Well, you guys came from here. Why is your archive in Santa Barbara?” Well, no one asked. Now they’ve got new librarians [at CSUS] who are saying, “You have to have your stuff here.” So I’m having to, you know . . . give them some of the Barrio Art materials because it’s still going on and still a CSUS affiliated program. The poster making—Favela, who teaches in the Art Department, has turned the collection over to them, or set up an archive. Nothing is as expansive, or close to having everything we’ve ever done, like Santa Barbara. (José Montoya, interview, July 5, 2004)
As Montoya indicates, institutional efforts to collect RCAF art and records at CSUS did not get underway until their CEMA collection was well established at UC Santa Barbara. Sheila O’Neill was one of the “new librarians” whom Montoya refers to as advocates of RCAF archives at the CSUS university library. O’Neill joined the CSUS faculty as director of the special collections and university archives in 1999 and oversaw the processing of the Joe Serna Jr. Papers, which became available to the public on October 21, 2007. During the same month, the CSUS library hosted an exhibition titled Our Mayor Forever: Joe Serna, 1939–1999 (Sheila O’Neill, e-mail to the author, October 1, 2009). Along with the Joe Serna Jr. Papers, O’Neill and her staff prepared the Sam Rios Jr. Papers, which include documents from the formation of the Chicano/a studies program at CSUS, the early years of Breakfast for Niños, and the development of the Washington Barrio Education Center (see fig. 5.7).
Figure 5.7. Events during R.C.A.F. Goes to College, 2007. L: José Montoya introducing documentary film by Joe Camacho. R: Esteban Villa at screening. Author’s photograph.
During this moment of institutional focus on the RCAF, including the planning and exhibition of R.C.A.F. Goes to College, the CSUS university library made another important acquisition related to the group. Between August 2006 and January 2007, La Raza Galería Posada donated its poster collection to the CSUS library.27 The collection includes numerous works by the RCAF and other Chicano/a artists of the region. In March 2008, the University Library Gallery exhibited a selection of 150 Chicano/a posters.28 Terezita Romo, a former La Raza Bookstore worker and a founder of Galería Posada, played an active role in the 2008 exhibition of the posters. Romo also participated in the 2007 R.C.A.F. Goes to College show, presenting an abbreviated version of her 2001 catalogue essay from ¿Just Another Poster?, discussing the impact that “fine art” status made on the iconography and production of Chicano/a posters once university museums and libraries came calling (see fig. 5.8).29
Figure 5.8. RCAF artist roundtable, March 1, 2007. L: Stan Padilla reading petition to save Barrio Art, sitting next to Juanishi Orosco. R: Armando Cid and Lorraine García-Nakata. Author’s photographs.
Commodification of Chicano/a posters in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a fundamental shift in their function and value. Several factors were involved in moving the Chicano/a poster out of the barrio and into galleries, museums, and university collections. Romo was sensitive to all of these conditions in her talk but paid particular attention to an important, and perhaps unexpected, aspect: the “nature” of Chicano/a art. The Chicano/a poster, Romo (2001, 112) explained, “also contributed to the development of the Chicano art movement’s unique course. The early poster workshops at various universities attracted participants from other disciplines [and] posters created within centros also solidified the community-building aspects of the movement.” The production of Chicano/a posters had always involved an exchange of ideas and a blending of images and techniques resultant from the free association of the artists who made them. Further, the poster collaborations took place in shared and multipurpose space; whether the spaces were in centros or within university art classrooms, the making of Chicano/a posters produced concepts that ranged from interdisciplinary ones to community-driven philosophies. Thus, the conceptual process inherent to Chicano/a art influenced its transition from art for the people to art for art’s sake. In terms of a Chicano/a aesthetic, then, Romo contends that the 1980s shift was not necessarily negative, but reflected another stage in the poster’s evolution: “The poster format offered artists the freedom to transmit messages solely by aesthetic means—to intentionally create poster art” (2001, 112).
Despite the conceptual nature of Chicano/a posters, Romo concedes that “it was multiculturalism and the art market of the 1980s and 1990s that forever changed” their value, or how they are valued (112). Multiauthored works, which reflected critical collaborations, did not inform the system within which Chicano/a art was collected.30 In other words, Chicano/a art became more collectible during the 1980s and 1990s, but only on an individual basis. While multiculturalism had promised more diversity in US art museums and galleries, the category remained based on Western market values of art; thus, collective art practices and community-based ideas of production did not produce fine art according to the status quo.
The RCAF’s art show in the University Library Gallery in 2007 sent mixed messages. While the RCAF had been officially allowed inside one of the university’s premiere exhibition spaces, the display of RCAF posters and contemporary works was occurring amidst a funding crisis for Barrio Art, the community-based art program conceived by José Montoya in the early 1970s and directed by Ricardo Favela from 1977 to 2007. On the evening of the artists’ panel discussion, Sam Rios Jr. started the conversation by circulating a petition to save Barrio Art, a program that had been operational for over thirty years. The contradiction was palpable. Although CSUS had recognized the RCAF and Chicano/a art, the university did not value the processes or community spaces in which the RCAF made art, taught art, and passed on Chicano/a art traditions (see fig. 5.9).
The RCAF’s response to the institutional attention and accolades during 2007 further substantiates the persistence of their collective theory and praxis over time—despite the multicultural art market for their work. Following the momentum of the R.C.A.F. Goes to College, several RCAF members established the R.C.A.F. Centro Dos.31 “We’re reviving the Centro,” Juanishi Orosco explained in an update to the Pilots of Aztlán documentary (LaRosa 2008). The RCAF envisioned a center like their earlier Centro de Artistas Chicanos; it would encompass a working studio and resource center for professional artists and would include space for arts classes and workshops.
On August 3, 2007, the RCAF held their first art auction and fundraiser at their new centro location in the Brickhouse Gallery and Studios on Thirty-Sixth Street and Broadway in Sacramento.32 In the company of friends, collectors, and longtime members, several RCAF artists auctioned off their “fine art” to raise money for the burgeoning center. Centro Dos activities continued through 2008 with events like Chicano Movie Night at the Guild Theater on Thirty-Fifth Street and Broadway.33 The evening featured documentary films by Sam Quiñones that captured Chicano/a ceremonies at Southside Park in the 1970s and 1980s. The feature film was Joe Camacho’s El Pachuco: From Zoot Suits to Lowriders (ca. 1983), which chronicles the planning, implementation, and opening night of José Montoya’s 1977 exhibition Pachuco Art: A Historical Update in downtown Sacramento.
Figure 5.9. Petition to save Barrio Art, distributed by Sam Rios Jr. during R.C.A.F. Goes to College and artist roundtable. Author’s photograph.
The Centro Dos lasted for two years, but the RCAF’s decision to establish a center during a wave of institutional recognition reveals how their previous “experience of marginalization and displacement proved to them that urban space was never neutral or devoid of meaning” (Latorre 2008, 141). The RCAF’s community art practice had been a response to circumstances that were not always their choice, but it became essential to the group over time, and in 2007, they returned to the idea of creating alternative space for Chicano/a art production, suggesting that during a period of institutional visibility, they needed a home base.
Future Flight Paths: The Photography of Hector González
Alongside posters and administrative records, the RCAF deposited a number of photographs at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) that provide a comprehensive record of the neo-indigenous ceremonies, the art workshops, and the making of RCAF murals.34 For the majority of photographs, however, authorship is unknown. Hector González is listed as the photographer on only a handful images. As mentioned in preceding chapters, Hector González was a principal photographer in the RCAF, but the scant traces of his name on the collection at CEMA make one wonder about the context and the formal choices that were made in the digitization of the photographs now available on Calisphere. These questions resound in Harry Gamboa Jr.’s (2011, 63) essay on Oscar Castillo’s 2011 photography exhibition Icons of the Invisible, in which Gamboa observes that “only a few photographers of this culture . . . have successfully shared their images with a global audience.”
Remarking on the likelihood that many of the pictures at CEMA were taken by Hector González, RCAF artist Lorraine García-Nakata raised an important point about changing definitions of photography in the late twentieth century and the different roles photography serves in scholarship across academic disciplines. “A lot of photographs were taken as documentation in the 1960s and seventies,” she explained, “literally documenting the movement, and unfortunately, this is how the photographs often continue to be thought of” (Lorraine García-Nakata, conversation with author, September 15, 2013). While Chicano/a art scholarship now considers the aesthetic qualities of documentary photography from the Chicano movement, RCAF artists had already noted the visual potency of Hector González’s work in the 1970s. RCAF artists used González’s photographs in their silkscreen posters, from his portraits of José Montoya organizing for the United Farm Workers union to his action shots of Chicana RCAF members in tense exchanges with the police. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, both Luis González and Ricardo Favela adapted Hector González’s work in their posters, aestheticizing the photographs to draw attention to what he observed through his lens. Both Luis González’s Announcement Poster for International Women’s Year (1975) and Ricardo Favela’s Announcement Poster for Veteranos (1981) cite Hector González as the central image maker. In fact, the image description on Calisphere for Luis González’s Women’s Year poster reveals that he did not sign the serigraph but rather credited his brother’s image.35 The description tells a story about the photograph, or rather, a story about Luis and Hector González. It states, “Unsigned. Inscription on the purple area located in the lower right corner of the image area reads: ‘Photo Hector Gonzalez, RCAF, Sacra.’” The RCAF used “Sacra” as shorthand for “Sacramento,” but it was also a bilingual wordplay. Used here, it evokes the RCAF collective and their homeland or home base in Sacramento. The sacredness the word conjures and its appearance at the end of the photo credit suggests that Luis was paying homage to Hector, who, as Harry Gamboa Jr. (2011, 66) observes when discussing Oscar Castillo in Los Angeles, “produced an extensive body of work that enhances our understanding of a complex and nuanced culture that has often been relegated to invisibility by mainstream media and cultural regulators.”
Along with photo credits given to Hector in Luis González’s and Ricardo Favela’s posters, three pictures of an auto shop cite Hector González as the photographer and capture a glimpse of RCAF artist Juan Cervantes’s mural Aeronaves de Aztlán (1979).36 The automotive co-op was administered by the RCAF’s Centro de Artistas Chicanos. Painted on the garage’s facade, Cervantes’s mural “depicted a proud Chicano mechanic holding a wrench,” Shifra Goldman (1990, 35–36) writes, adding that the figure was “surrounded by billowing clouds, a blazing sun, and an eagle.” The Aeronaves de Aztlán mural fused pre-Columbian imagery with Chicano/a iconography, announcing that a Chicano/a establishment was open and ready for business, but it also sent a particular message to Chicano/a viewers about autonomous labor in (or as) Aztlán (Sanchez-Tranquilino 1995, 59).37 The Chicano mechanic’s outstretched arm anticipates the arrival of the eagle that hovers to his left, recalling a pre-Columbian motif on the founding of Tenochtitlan, or the image of an eagle perched on a cactus with a serpent in its mouth. In Cervantes’s mural, the founding story of this pre-Columbian city is reconfigured to address the spatial needs of a Chicano/a storefront and “the more concrete claims for public space that their work required” (Latorre 2008, 141) (see plate 26).
Cervantes’s mural is fascinating because it beckons the militant posture of the earlier years of the Chicano movement. On the mechanic’s outstretched arm, he wears a United Farm Workers flag as an armband. The hand in which he holds his wrench is clenched, reminiscent of the power fist associated with the Chicano movement as well as the Black Panther Party. The mechanic’s posture is one that is familiar in historical photographs of 1960s civil rights protests, connoting a militant performance or a frontline stance, further adding insight into what the auto co-op meant to the RCAF as the political fervor of the Chicano movement subsided and the institutional collecting of Chicano/a art began.
The RCAF’s Virtual Mural Environment in the Twenty-First Century
Through access provided by online archives, the implications of seeing RCAF art, including murals like Aeronaves de Aztlán (1979) that have been destroyed, expand the spatiotemporal map of Chicano/a art history. Sacramento becomes a major site of Chicano/a art history through the RCAF’s online collection, or one of the “mural environments” that Guisela Latorre (2008) locates in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Mural environments are areas with “a series of murals in close proximity to one another,” Latorre writes; they are not “supposed to be seen as single works of art, but rather their position and iconography should be understood in function of the surrounding murals and in relation to the space in which they reside” (142). Sacramento offers an important Chicano/a mural environment because many of the RCAF’s murals correspond with the conditions Latorre describes. Numerous RCAF murals were located in the Alkali Flat district, a Chicano/a barrio in the late twentieth century. RCAF murals were commemorative of spatial takeovers in Sacramento, they were in close proximity to one another, and several of them have been renovated or changed.
On the other hand, the RCAF created a mural environment that is unique to Sacramento, especially in regard to their murals outside Chicano/a barrio space, like Metamorphosis in 1980, and L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. in 1984, renovated in 1999. Both of these murals were created in public spaces with municipal funds and are viewable on Calisphere.38 Over time, RCAF murals were not exclusive to a particular area of the city, and in a sense, all of Sacramento is the RCAF’s mural environment.
Because of the digitization of RCAF art on Calisphere, the framework of the mural environment takes on more meaning because it simultaneously creates a more accurate history of Chicano/a art and a virtual mural environment in itself. After all, through Calisphere, Chicano/a murals in Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco are in close proximity to each other, creating new spatial relationships that are available for comparative analysis—and not only analysis of murals, but also of posters, theatrical performances, and community-related events. Access to the virtual mural environment, in conjunction with images of RCAF air force performances and other art productions, is the backdrop of the RCAF’s murals in the twenty-first century, the Memorial Fountain for Joe Serna Jr. and Isabel Hernández-Serna (2001) and Eartharium (2003). If the online collections function as gateways to the past, or living histories that continue to shape historical consciousness and understandings of Chicano/a art, the RCAF’s mural environment includes these twenty-first-century works that merge contemporary design with early Chicano/a iconography.
Figure 5.10. Esteban Villa sitting at Joe Serna Jr. and Isabel Hernández-Serna Memorial Fountain (2001). Author’s photograph.
On October 5, 2001, the Serna Memorial Fountain was dedicated at CSUS. Following the death of Joe Serna Jr. and that of his wife, Isabel, nearly a year later, Esteban Villa and Ricardo Favela designed the fountain for the Serna Plaza located at the east entrance of the CSUS campus (Wagar 2001). The fountain is actually a three-dimensional mural, incorporating bold colors, an aerial view of the San Joaquin Valley, and other identifiable objects that not only honor Joe and Isabel Serna but commemorate the local Chicano movement. Both sides of the fountain, for example, have brick benches that hold two open books. The pages of the books contain poems written for Joe and Isabel by English professor Olivia Castellano and José Montoya, who were classmates in the Mexican American Education Project (MAEP) and colleagues at CSUS. According to Ricardo Favela, the books “signify the fact that they were scholars and academic people” (Wagar 2001), but they also symbolize the Chicano movement’s call for educational equality through a visible presence on college campuses as well as in the figurative spaces of US history (see fig. 5.10).
The fountain’s brilliantly tiled basin presents an aerial view of Sacramento’s agricultural lands. In collaboration with Larry Ortiz and Scott Conlin, Esteban Villa and Ricardo Favela produced three hundred tiles that depict “vineyards, farm fields and produce” (Wagar 2001). Water pours down into the pool from overarching columns painted white and blue at their bases to emulate the sky and clouds. The tops of the columns are crowned by two strikingly black United Farm Worker (UFW) eagles. The presence of the huelga birds, along with the books and the tile mosaic of Sacramento’s agricultural fields, is not lost on the knowing viewer. From educational equality to labor rights, the social and political mandates of the Chicano movement are incorporated into the monument. Where once numerous student and Chicano/a murals were whitewashed and destroyed, now a bold, colorful, three-dimensional mural honors the Sernas’ legacy and the legacy of the UFW at a major entrance to the Sacramento campus of the state university.
Following the Serna Memorial Fountain’s dedication in 2001, Esteban Villa, Stan Padilla, and Juanishi Orosco created Eartharium in the lobby of the State of California’s General Services Department, located at Sixteenth and L Streets in Sacramento.39 Completed in January 2003, Eartharium was “the first 360[-degree] mural that we’ve ever done,” Villa remarked (Esteban Villa, interview, June 23, 2004). Juanishi Orosco was contacted by an Art in Public Places consultant after she heard about the RCAF’s successful renovation of Southside Park Mural in 2001.40 Orosco met with Stan Padilla to develop a landscape motif that would accurately represent the four directions: “We were true to the purpose,” Orosco explained, adding, “east is east and west is west.” Orosco painted the landscape’s skyline, complete with references to the “Hopi Twins,” a detail he incorporated into the south wall renovation of L.A.S.E.R.I.U.M. in 1999. Padilla painted the landscape and a rainbow. Villa designed the agricultural lands of the Sacramento Valley (Juanishi Orosco, interview, July 6, 2004).
Eartharium is a nature mural and seems pretty tame in comparison to earlier RCAF murals. Its motif recalls the controversy that surrounded Metamorphosis in 1980 over the latter’s apolitical imagery. But Eartharium engages a Chicano/a perspective of space and the complexity of that space’s construction—from land, the history of land, and one’s sense of belonging to both. Juanishi Orosco made this point when he emphasized that the four directions are accurate in relation to the mural. The precision of the mural’s location, according to the Artists’ Statement, was central to the concept of Eartharium as a “bio-compass” for “the Sacramento Valley and beyond, from the Sierra foothills to the Pacific coast.”41 The design centered on Sacramento as a place where the rivers meet, creating a “sacrament,” referencing the city’s name after European colonization.
Understanding nature as the origin of all health is certainly a political point of view in the twenty-first century, but the artists’ attention to the four directions gestures to the indigenous peoples who lived in the Sacramento Valley prior to European contact. Moreover, their recognition of the Spanish renaming of the “Feather River” to “Rio del Santissimo Sacramento” in 1808 reveals that the artists valued the convergence of these civilizations, and the resulting spiritual and religious mixtures that create the Chicano/a worldview (see plate 27).
The artists’ emphasis on Eartharium as a “bio-compass” for the Sacramento Valley and beyond raises another point of consideration about the mural’s location. Eartharium is housed in a state government building directly across the street from the state capitol. In 2004, I stood next to Esteban Villa in the building’s lobby as we looked at the mural. I sensed the officialdom of the space. Across the street from the building in which I stood, the state capitol is preceded by the capitol park, which features a garden full of native plants from the “Golden State,” war memorials honoring Californians killed in service during foreign wars, and a statue of Junípero Serra standing on top of a bronze carving of the state of California. As I looked at Eartharium, Villa pointed to the locations that he and his RCAF colleagues painted. “We’re standing in Sacramento,” he explained, “and you’re looking at the four directions.” “You can see the Sierra Nevada over there,” he continued, “and the river, the American River, coming up there towards where you live, and then some of the foliage—like a poppy, the state’s flower.” Referring to my parents’ home in Auburn, California, Villa next turned south and added, “That’s where the sun is at high noon. Up there, you see the sun sets south. It’d be like looking towards San Diego and then moving up. And then we’re looking west, and you see the buttes and you see Contra Costa [and] Mount Diablo over there.” Then Villa lowered his voice as he pointed to the section he painted. “See this green valley?” he asked me, “just off the record here, you see those quilted patches? The fields, and there’s the thunderbird—there’s an eagle. . . . See the tail down below and way up at the top, the head of the eagle? Very subtle. So it’s like, la vida de las farmworkers.” Villa had painted a UFW eagle within the agricultural lands of the Sacramento Valley. “It’s a pretty safe mural,” he remarked, but “even still, I put the huelga eagle where I wasn’t supposed to, but it’s still hidden . . . in a green field” (Esteban Villa, interview, June 23, 2004). The eagle is discernable through brushstrokes and shadowing in the patchwork of Villa’s green field. The triangular shape of the bird’s tail and the rounded angle of its head are the most prominent details of its body. Once detected, the angles of the eagle’s wings become clear. The UFW symbol’s presence in the “nature” mural is profound. In the lobby of a government building, within walking distance of a hegemonic symbol of public space, visibility, and power, a Chicano/a symbol flies under the radar, honoring Chicano/a labor and contributions to the building of California’s capital city (see plate 28).
