Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Speaker: Janina Lopez
Since its founding in 1969, the Sacramento-based artist collective Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) has played a vital role in creating a visual vocabulary representative of Chicano/a/x identity from the 1970s to the present day. In this paper, I illuminate the role of RCAF members in developing a distinct visuality, simultaneously rooted in Mexican heritage and contemporary lived experience in California and Greater Mexico (Américo Paredes’s conception of an expansive geographic reading), through the lens of their contribution to the Calendario de Comida 1976. RCAF members’ contributions combine Pre-Columbian iconography with food motifs and bilingual text. Rooted in early twentieth-century Mexican art and advertising traditions, the calendar format underwent what Terezita Romo calls Chicanization and was infused with Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s concept of rasquachismo to become a uniquely Chicano/a art form that asserts the presence of Chicano/a/x culture in the U.S. This paper demonstrates how, by engaging with questions of gender, class, and race in the context of food, the RCAF mobilized the calendario format to grapple with questions of cultural survival that were central to the Chicano Movement and remain relevant today.
https://pitt.zoom.us/my/haadept
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