The Royal Chicano Air Force was a community-based, art collective centered in Sacramento founded in 1969. The group was focused on creating a bilingual and bicultural arts community, using the mobilization of their artistic work to organize in conjunction with the larger Chicano civil rights and United Farm Workers movements. The collection is a series of 192 posters crafted to advertise and promote different community events and programs put on by the RCAF. The archive was created between 2008-2009 as part of a San José State University grant funded project, directed by Danielle Moon and archived by Erin Louthen.
The material contained in the collection, with titles such as “UFW Community Meeting,” “Menudo Benefit,” and “International Women’s Year,” relates the scope of activities that the RCAF was involved in organizing. When looking at the posters themselves, one would get a sense of the aesthetic mission statement of the group – what artistic influences were behind the artists’ decisions. The narrative this collection tells might be one of solidarity with Chicano/a communities in California, farm workers, students and artists. Working to serve and represent an underprivileged minority community in Sacramento and the surrounding local area. The historical note details that the group pressured the nearby colleges and universities to create a more diverse staff, which resulted in two founding members of the RCAF to be hired at California State University of Sacramento. Several of the posters are listed as sponsored by the CA State Department of Mental Health, showing a level of engagement and involvement with governmental organizations and public policy. While the posters may depict the artistic breadth of the RCAF, they also reveal a cogent political practice that uses coalition-building and networking to create change in the larger community.
Though these posters contain both visual and textual information about the events and programs held by the RCAF, documentation of the actual event would not be included. One wouldn’t be able to find out who attended these events, if they were successfully put on, and perhaps who in particular was organizing them. In order to recover these lost narratives, one might look through archives that contain more than just the posters. There is another archive that contains administrative documents regarding the group, as well as collective and personal writings, and photographs, which might fill in the gaps left from the posters’ lack of informative detail.
Having information about who attended the event would be interesting to know, especially to complete the narrative of workers during this time. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the number of posters printed, and the actual number of people who showed up. It would be good to understand the collaboration between the government and workers during this movement.
This is amazing! I’m so glad to know about this collection, which I’d never heard of. The number of archival collections is really overwhelming — I wish we had all quarter to just look in them!
I too was unaware of this coalition and am fascinated by the archival collection as a whole! It was cool to learn about the connections this group made with the community and other networking groups even with the question of how successful it was. I too would support looking into alternative sources like you mentioned to be able to figure out the rest of this narrative.