Asco’s Stations of the Cross

Stations of the Cross was a walking ​“ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the ​“useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/​death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trioblocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their
Mexican American neighborhood. One year earlier, Whittier Boulevard had been the site of the National Chicano Moratorium March – the largest war protest organized by a minority group, and one that called out the disproportionate burden borne by Americans of color on the front lines.