Janina López

Since its founding in the early 1970s, the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) has cultivated a Chicano identity through murals, prints, and education in California’s capital city of Sacramento. This dissertation analyzes RCAF members' roles as artists and educators in a rapidly transforming political, social, and economic landscape in Northern California amid the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Murals, both as collaborative processes and as material objects, are at the heart of the RCAF’s artistic-pedagogical practice. Printed materials—posters, flyers, and calendars—are another primary component of the RCAF’s work and serve as tools for activism and education. I examine these artistic mediums as methods for developing a critical pedagogy for Chicano art education, and I trace how public art and education intertwine in the work of RCAF artists over six decades.  

This dissertation begins with early Chicano manifestos and journals to understand the art, education, and teachings of founding RCAF members in relation to the core platforms of El Movimiento: agricultural labor organizing, education reform, and self-determination. My analysis of RCAF silkscreen posters charts the collective’s community and institutional education models and their Barrio Art Program, which began in the 1970s and is still active today. I then turn to RCAF murals as assertions of Chicano presence in/on civic space, disruptions to the built environment, and activist affirmations of history and legacy.  I address collaborative mural processes, community education, and public art programs to understand ongoing community-city relations in Sacramento. The dissertation brings together visual art, performance, and activism to understand the RCAF’s multifaceted approach to education and creating Chicano community.