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RCAF pilot’s scroll map [detail]. Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

Boom0204_13.indd 118 12/21/12 7:40 PM stephanie sauer The Accidental Archives of the Royal Air Force

Excerpts

n , there is a group of pilot-artists, largely unknown yet renowned for their fleet of adobe airplanes and their key role in the Chicano civil Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/118/381399/boom_2012_2_4_118.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 I rights movement. As Cesar Chavez’s bodyguards and poster makers for the Union, they created a vast repertoire of silkscreen posters, murals, poetry, performances, and public ceremonies that served to counteract the shame that once surrounded all things indigenous. Their air force stance and self-mythologizing has enshrined them in California lore. I was first introduced to the history of the Royal Chicano Air Force through Steve LaRosa’s original PBS documentary, Pilots of Aztlán. The story goes: The Rebel Chicano Art Front (RCAF) was created in 1969 by art professors José Montoya and Esteban Villa, along with a handful of committed students from California State University, Sacramento, whose ranks grew to include hundreds of artists, activists, community members, academics, politicians, and pilots. Intent on honoring the spirit of a true collective, they signed all their work with only the acronym RCAF. Soon the RCAF became confused with the Royal Canadian Air Force, until one day someone said: “No man, we’re the Royal Chicano Air Force!” And the mythology grew from there. There is no way to write an accurate historical account of the Royal Chicano Air Force; in fact, conducting official and unofficial research over the last ten years has led me to understand that there is no way to write an accurate historical account of anything. You may not agree with me, and that is exactly what I mean. We live in a world filled with multiple, coinciding, collapsing, reconstituted truths, a world in which “truths” are used to justify. The ways I see our world and its history are directly related to my own lived experiences and contexts, as are the ways you see them. You chose the historical narrative sequence that validates your life choices, world view, actions, and privileges, and I do the same. Despite our best efforts to remain “objective” or “scientific” or “rational,” our perceptions remain shaded, even if by objective scientific rationale. Worldwide,

Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 4, pps 118–125. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.118.

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Boom0204_13.indd 119 1/16/13 5:18 PM we have yet to fully investigate the cultural damage done In Pilots of Aztlán, RCAF member Stan Padilla says, “In by Victorian-era archeological practices and dominant a world that is out of balance, adding beauty and harmony Western lenses through which notions of otherness are does not restore the balance. Sometimes you have to add viewed, studied, and explained. Cultural institutions more craziness. That is the message of The Sacred Fools, adopt—and indeed pay for the rights to use—Indiana the tricksters.” Stan Padilla did not say exactly this, but that Jones-inspired stories in attempts to engage young is how I remember hearing it. The following excerpts are learners of history. And, in general, we agree to believe my hymn to this sacred locura (craziness). They are part of that those fantasies are facts. a larger book, a catalogue of field research conducted in I am not interested in perpetuating this narrative. This the neo-traditional RCAF locura lo cura (craziness cures) is not a colonial fantasy in which I forsake my cultural method. Using this approach and performing the character inheritance in order to prove my allegiance to an indigenous of La Stef, a turn-of-the-century World’s Fair archaeologist,

or urban noble savage population, and then report back to I blend myth and historical documentation without Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/118/381399/boom_2012_2_4_118.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 you, dear reader. This is my cultural inheritance. This is the prioritizing one over the other. Here I offer but one truth United States of America, and we are messy. that is not entirely fiction.

A Brief Introduction to the Royal Chicano Air Force preservation indigenous to this continent, as well as those introduced by European archivists in recent centuries. RCAF: [r c a f ] orig. SacrAztlán 1. acronym of the Rebel Con Sapos’ current team is led by Quetzalcoatl, who Chicano Art Front 2. acronym inscribed in place of individual pioneered tlacuiloismo (the historian’s art), and includes artist’s names on numerous silkscreen posters announcing various causes, boycotts, and fiestas found throughout Aztlán, John Rollin Ridge, Jean Charlot, Bertolt Brecht, Erich von beginning in the year 1969 of the Christian calendar 3. Daniken, and cartographer Miss Ella. Among our noted acronym of the Royal Canadian Air Force 4. pertaining to a services to the field are the recovery of lost and stolen widespread confusion between the Rebel Chicano Art Front Royal Chicano Air Force ephemera and our pioneering and the Royal Canadian Air Force, resulting in a subsequent applications of mitoarqueología. name change of the former to the Royal Chicano Air Force 5. acronym of the Royal Chicano Air Force 6. Cesar Chavez’s Air A Close Call as Cesar’s Security Force 7. an independent graphic arts wing of the United Farm Workers Union also employed to guard Cesar Chavez during This map, which was originally used in the cockpit of RCAF speeches and pilgrimages in the greater Sacramento region 8. Commander José Montoya’s C-29 adobe aircraft, is unique independent publishers in the silkscreen poster medium 9. an to the fleet of the Royal Chicano Air Force in that it was later air force within which rank is fluid 10. referring to a close knit utilized as a scroll to document one of the Force’s near lethal group of pilots not at the exclusion of the larger troops that encounters while serving as security for Cesar Chavez at a made up the organization of the Royal Chicano Air Force 11. United Farm Workers Union rally in Davis, California. The media reference to “The Robin Hoods of the barrio” 12. “. . . map itself blends the standard French aeronautical map a footnote in history” 13. founders of the Barrio Art Program, and holder model with that developed by the Eagle Knight Breakfast for Niños and Bookstore & Galeria Posada 14. Warriors serving under Moctezuma II, allowing pilots to phenomenon of international recognition while being ignored steer the aircraft with one hand while turning the scroll map in country of origin with the other. It is the same model used in World War I, CON SAPOS is an archeological collective over 500 years El Movimiento Chicano, and the Maguey Wars of 2012. in the making. Founded by world famous archeologist La With the help of a handful of code-switching scholars Stef, our mission is to record, collect, and preserve history and a series of meticulously transcribed oral history in the Americas as it happens. Since the colonial period, accounts, the Con Sapos archeological team has deciphered our approach has been unique in combining techniques of the pictographic language in which an unnamed scribe

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Boom0204_13.indd 120 12/21/12 7:40 PM the street from the park with a missile aimed straight for the union leader’s chest. The pilot motioned another Air Force member on Chavez’s right, who made the leader aware. “The Little Guy” immediately “went limp,” says fellow pilot Juanishi Orosco, then turned himself inside out so that all that was visible of his once petite but formidable self was his heart, exposed and beating for all to see. As another witness described the change, “it was as if he were just tempting the assassins to make a martyr of him in front of all those folks.” According to scholars, Chavez, following in the Aztec and Mayan traditions of human sacrifice, had updated the practice and used, instead of another human, himself as sacrificial victim. In the few split seconds— Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/118/381399/boom_2012_2_4_118.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 though it is recorded that all temporal measurement devices actually paused—the vulnerable heart tissue was swaddled in gauze and taken under the protection of two federal agents charged with avoiding the union leader’s martyrdom. They cleared a corridor in the crowd as pilots Louie ‘The Foot’ and Ramón Ontiveros hurried the organ into Chavez’s beat up Dodge Dart, summoning the RCAF squadron to follow, for they were legend to be useful in the reconversion process. RCAF pilot’s scroll map [detail]. Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

The Ancient Documentaries of Southside Park

recorded the day’s events. We have carefully translated its Near the end of the Fourth Sun, when the world was contents here and included archival annotations when about to split open and make way for the Fifth, members necessary: of the Royal Chicano Air Force, informed by scholars United Farm Worker Union leader Cesar Chavez had and elders, reinvigorated a series of ancient ceremonies, made his way to Davis, California, to address a crowd of including Día de los Muertos, Fiesta de Tonatzin, Fiesta sympathetic listeners. Members of the Royal Chicano de Colores y Fiesta de Maíz. The freestyle interpretation Air Force (identified by their green uniforms with the of the sacred rites infuriated some indigenist activists exception of General “Confusion” Esteban Villa, who came engaged in more authentic reenactments, but the RCAF attired in his usual lunar exploration suit) were providing and their comrades continued with their belief in the security for the union organizer, whom they affectionately greater need. The organizers had been informed by Dr. referred to as “The Little Guy.” Chavez’s personal secretary Reynaldo Solis, who in his own sociological research had Richard Ybarra secured the stage. During a rousing speech come to the hypothesis that certain cultural and historic on walkouts in Yolo County, the union leader became so wounds that plagued the local Chicano community and impassioned by his commitment to La Causa, or the plight continued to cause ingrained psychological, spiritual, toward social justice for all farm workers, that the body and even economic damage could be healed in part by guards noted a visible shift in the crowd that now rallied updating and reinstating ancient cultural ceremonies behind him after having been so moved. that both marked individual rites of passage and affirmed At that moment RCAF pilot Ricardo Favela, positioned and connected one in a positive way to the whole of one’s imperceptibly in the crowd for Chavez’s protection, noticed cultural history. He wanted to test this hypothesis and the two snipers poised atop an apartment complex just across RCAF was ready.

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Boom0204_13.indd 121 12/21/12 7:40 PM The Sacramento Concilio, led by Josie Talamantez, Tere Romo, Rosemary and David Rasul among others, took on the strategic planning for the ceremonias, including the securing of required legal permits and fundraising. For Day of the Dead, they even chartered a flight to Mictlán to extend personal invitations to key ancestors and submit a request for sacred visions from Mictlantecuhtli and Huitzilopochtli without the need for sacrificial cannibalism, which they reasoned would complicate the already controversial use of public space with too much illegality. Others, including Privates Stan Padilla, Gina Montoya, and Juanishi Orosco, prepared a sweat lodge on Stan’s property in the Sierra Nevada Foothills—a place believed Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/118/381399/boom_2012_2_4_118.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Miss Ella and La Stef at Zapata Park in the search for the sacred scrolls. to house potent spiritual energy, as well as being the site of (PHOTO COURTESY OF JANELL LACAYO). historical atrocities associated with the European discovery

Día de los Muertos sacred scroll of the Royal Chicano Air Force. Excavated by the Con Sapos team at Southside Park cenote.

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Día de los Muertos scroll.

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Fiesta de Maiz scroll.

Boom0204_13.indd 124 12/21/12 7:40 PM of gold and other minerals. The group gathered green 5. Chuy’s danzantes lead procession down 64th / to the willow branches, pine resin, and stones in preparation for cemetery, the cleansing. 6. carrying the (almost) interred Elvia Nava. The following narratives describing the first ceremonies 7. The neighbors complain. held in Sacramento were recently excavated from the Southside Park cenote by La Stef and local historian Miss 8. Finally, they arrive at the cemetery. Ella. A major find in the field of RCAF scholarship, three of 9. They offer blessing at the four directions. / In reverse. the four sacred scrolls were found encased in wooden boxes 10. Las Mujeres perform an interpretive ‘Birth Dance.’ with cut out holes for viewing. Read from top to bottom by turning the handles, it is not unlike watching film in a prehistoric television set. Indeed, it has been confirmed that [Translation of First Scroll: Fiesta De Maiz/ these Ancient RCAF Documentaries are the missing link Corn Festival] Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/118/381399/boom_2012_2_4_118.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 between the ancient scroll book form and contemporary As read from left column to right, up and down: film media, proving that they are indeed the precursor to movies and television. Thus, it can be concluded that these 1. The First Fiesta de Maiz dominant forms of art and entertainment have originated 2. Held on the summer solstice / with the sun at its entirely in the Americas. zenith There was no physical record found of the Fiesta de 3. in Southside Park Jaguares, a ceremony said to have been developed by danza 4. where / a few / months / prior / . . . azteca leader Chuy Ortiz to honor and establish a rite of 5. a visiting Tibetan monk / discovered a crystal bed passage for young men. While a fourth box was found in pieces, the scroll 6. beneath the pond / that was really a cenote pertaining to Fiesta de Tonantzín was missing. 7. that had a vein that ran / from SacrAztlán all the way to Hopi. [Translation of First Scroll: Dia De Los Muertos/ 8. When the elders arrived / they burned copal. Day Of The Dead] 9. They blessed the dancers / who began to dance.

As read from left column to right, up and down: 10. They / danced / . . . 11. and / they / danced 1. The First Dia de los Muertos. 12. until some out-of-town performers / passed out. 2. Pilot’s hold council in Stan [Padilla]’s sweat lodge. 13. Maria de Maíz appeared / atop a pyramid. 3. Las Guadalupanas receive visions from Mictlán / and begin to organize. 14. Xilonens – dressed in white – / enter the sacred circle. 4. Senior Airman Rudy Cuellar pilots a special / mission 15. They receive the blessings and the palabra. to retrieve pyramid and coffin. 16. They had prepared all year for this. b

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