♪♪ In Spanish: De colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera.

Narrator: They emerged from poverty-stricken labor camps throughout California's Central Valley.

Sons and daughters of migrant farmworker families, they became Chicano poets, painters, and muralists.

Political activists devoted to social justice.

A self-described rebel band infusing their artistic efforts with humor and satire, their role in the Farm Worker Union Movement brought an entirely new and enduring perspective to both art and politics.

This is the story of Sacramento's own Royal Chicano Air Force, and its legacy of art and activism.

Rebel Chicano Art Front arose in the '60s when a group of students led by Jose Montoya and Esteban Villa, professors of Chicano Studies at CSU Sacramento, formed a cultural affairs committee to organize cultural activities and art classes on campus as well as outreach classes in the barrio.

Esteban Villa: You Know, when I, I started, got a job at State, me and Jose, there was only two of us.

It only takes two people to change the world.

Sometimes just one person to change.

And so, we knew that, and we started to do painting in the, in the community.

Jose Montoya: Which made the art department glad to see us out of their hair.

We're, we're out, we're not on campus.

But on campus is where we got the students to go into these programs.

Armando Cid: Meeting Jose and Esteban was like "are these guys really teachers?

I mean what, how did they get into the university?"

First of all, it was like going into a party atmosphere, and we started to run together, and I found out that, that we were all basically learning art together.

Rudy Cuellar: Jose and Esteban were my professors, and they were also my mentors, and they supported our struggle there at Sac State to be whoever we were.

We didn't think of ourselves as an art movement, but people sure brought it up, people sure let us know that we were somebody more than just a bunch of crazy artists.

Ricardo Favela: We originally started out as the Rebel Chicano Art Front.

Jose Montoya: And we began to sign all of our artwork with the initials of the Rebel Chicano Art Front, RCAF.

Ricardo Favela: But they kept on getting it confused with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Jose Montoya: And we just got tired of explaining our, we just at some point said, "It's really the Royal Chicano Air Force."

Ricardo Favela: And then, I don't know, somebody says, "Yeah, and we fly adobe airplanes, man.

You know, we make them out of earth."

Producer [Off Camera]: When I hear you talk about adobe airplanes, I never know what's myth and what's fact.

Esteban Villa: [Laughs] Okay.

So our planes, our planes, made out of adobe tile and, or not.

You think of big, bulky adobes, you know, that they build houses with.

Jose Montoya: Our sense of humor, which we call our "Locura", our "Insanity", was precisely what allowed us to move on and, and to, to accomplish the things that we accomplished.

Uniforms and flying helmets, bandoleers, leather jackets, Jeeps.

The regalia that was provided for us became a natural thing for us to use in our Locura.

Stan Padilla: "Locura Cura."

That said a lot, you know.

That's almost like a mantra among the group, "The craziness cures," is sometimes that in a world that's out of balance, if you put beauty and harmony, it, it doesn't cure as much as more craziness.

And so that's a part of the sacred fools.

You know, the one who pushes the dimension, pushes the envelope of creativity is not only serious, you know, but, but is profoundly humorous and plays with the irony of life, plays with the hurts, the tragedies, the tears of life.

Turns tears into laughter, and I think that's one of the greatest strengths of the RCAF that would echo to society, you know, to look at itself, to laugh at itself, because through laughter there was healing.

Narrator: The word "Chicano" had emerged as RCAF's self-identity, and the group of academics and artists made it their mission to promote Chicano culture and influence people's ideas of what it meant to be Chicano.

Jose Montoya: The fact that we have proclaimed ourselves Chicanos is a political act.

It, it was like what happened after World War II when we were allowed to be Mexican "hyphen" American.

We knew the history of the Americans, the Americans never allowed us to be Americans, they would always remind us that we weren't Americans, but now because too many heroes were coming back from the wars, let's put a hyphen and make them Mexican-Americans.

Those of us who rejected it were accused of being anti-American, of being un-American, and we knew the record, they never kept a treaty promise, they sent 400,000 of my people back to Mexico whether they were Mexicans or not, we knew of the oppression that the Americans imposed on us, and now they said "okay, well you can be an American".

F#*#*#* you!

I want to be a Chicano man.

Joe Serna: You're going to get what we consider to be a new American, an American and brown, and here's what we're about, here's our art, here's our literature, here's our politics, what do you think?

Is it okay?

If it's not okay, what's not okay about it?

We redefined what assimilation meant, that assimilation really wasn't what we were about, participation was what we were about.

Narrator: By the mid-1960s, the United Farm Workers of America, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had grown to become one of the largest farmworkers' unions.

The UFW sought legislative and regulatory reforms to help farmworkers achieve better pay and working conditions.

It was a cause familiar to members of the RCAF.

Juanishi Orosco: We were farmworkers; Our parents were farmworkers; and we knew what the conditions were.

So, when the movement was, the United Farm Workers movement was alive we jumped in because that was our life experience.

I had worked in the fields helping my, my mother, my father, Jesus and Carmen Orosco.

You know, they worked hard in the fields all their lives and they raised nine kids, and on a hundred dollars a month.

Juanita P. Ontiveros: It was the local growers' sons that flew the, the crop dusters.

We, we would be picking cotton.

They dared each other on who would fly down the lowest and of course, you would feel all, it was like dew falling on your, on your skin.

You would feel all the pesticide.

At that time, it was DDT.

Juanishi Orosco: In the summer, in the heat, 110 degrees out there, and you're working from 4 in the morning to way past 6 in the afternoon, you know, and you worked your ass off, and you had to run, literally, and I remember all of us, all of us that were working the fields, you, you carried your 16-foot ladder that weighed maybe 30, 40 pounds on top of your 75-pound bags of pears and you're running from tree to tree, and as you're getting close to the tree, you'll throw your, your ladder into the tree and by the time it hits the tree you're halfway up picking, because time is money.

Armando Cid: I remember the Bracero program, going out there trying to find my, my uncle.

You know, he was on a visa from Mexico to work out here in the Woodland area.

And they used to have, like, chicken coops with all these men stacked in there like cattle.

And this was their living quarters.

Yeah.

Reporter: What your view is of the strike or boycott of the grape industry?

Governor Ronald Reagan: Oh, the grape boycott.

Well, I've classified that in the past on number of public occasions as, as immoral, and I think it is.

And I don't think that the same rules of industrial unionizing could apply in the farm because that would not be legitimate collective bargaining, that would simply be blackmailing.

Joe Serna: My father died not knowing what it meant to earn over a buck and a quarter an hour.

No, no, no pension.

No medical benefits.

No housing benefits, no unemployment insurance.

None of that.

And so, for a lot of us, work in the UFW was a way of getting even.

Juanishi Orosco: You know, we saw something that was happening, we could sense and feel the, the bigness of what the whole movement was all about, and we could internalize that and create the icons, the images, the murals, the posters, the individual artworks that reflected that.

Jose Montoya: The idea of using art as resistance or using art to organize, that was still very much something that, that we could do as, as, as an Air Force.

Jose Montoya: We're not protesting!

We're just taking it back.

[Laughter] RCAF Artist: Taking it back.

Jose Montoya: Well, just transform it.

Make it, make it livable, make it, humanize it.

Farmer: People are raising some hell!

♪Singing in Spanish♪ Protester: Can we help you solve the problem, Mike?

You sign the contract, and we solve the problem.

♪Singing in Spanish♪ Speaker: All those that are sacrificing themselves so that farmworkers may live and work in justice and dignity.

Across the Californian border, the richest of the rich America, stand the slums of Mexicali, from these cardboard houses in the dust, many of the farmworkers of California are recruited.

♪Singing in Spanish♪ Jose Montoya: [Laughter] Stan Padilla: There was a real foundation and a longing to bring all of this Chicano awareness into some kind of context, there was the movement, but the movement, the farmworker movement had grown, people were struggling with what do we do with all of this, the small part I feel I played was to say we have an ancient culture, we have an ancient stream, let's begin to put this all together, words, poems, lines, activism, you know, it all sort of goes together, and the model that we can use was, is the indigenous native model, who we are, we are a native people, we didn't come from somewhere else.

Jose Montoya: (That is where you will find me.)

Hector Gonzalez: Most of the people in the RCAF, they come from agriculture families, so there's a tie there.

They knew what Cesar Chavez was doing.

I think they saw that brotherhood.

It was a duty to help Cesar Chavez.

Narrator: Just as Cesar Chavez had envisioned, United Farm Workers was becoming both a union and a civil rights movement gaining strong support from members and supporters alike.

Cesar Chavez: Let this rally be the beginning of a boycott against those growers who want to destroy the union, perpetuate starvation wages and those employers who want to maintain the slave working conditions of the work that they've done so, for so long.

[Applause] Juanishi Orosco: Cesar recognized early on the importance of the artists' community and how to best utilize them for the United Farm Workers' Movement.

We don't need to go back into the fields and help pick but, you know, now we've moved beyond that.

We're artists and we can say things that relate on a large scale and address specific issues with our talents.

Joe Serna: You could do it in a way that was honorable, that was in keeping with America, the American tradition of protest, and at the same time being tuned in with the rest of the country, with Martin Luther King, Civil Rights Movement, but this time it was focused on us.

It had to be satirical, it had to be real, it had to be spoof, and it had to be dramatic, it had to be outrageous, and at the same time try to accomplish fairly establishment kinds of results like making sure that United Farm Workers succeeded in the Grape Boycott, which the RCAF ran.

Phil Isenberg: They became in some sense the, the graphic arts arm of the union in the Sacramento valley.

They would do the arts; they would do the posters.

Juanishi Orosco: 52 weeks out of the year, seven days out of the, you know, out of the week over the span of 10 years nonstop.

We would get the call, "We need, you know, X number of, 500, a thousand posters by tomorrow morning with the union logo on it and these words on it."

Louie Gonzalez: And so, it was up to us to get them done, whatever it took, if it meant staying up all night, that's what we did.

Armando Cid: In a 8-by-8 room with all these lacquer fumes overcoming us drinking a few beers and, and just cranking out work and, you know, starting out around 7 with no food in our system, you know, working until the wee hours of the morning, 4 o'clock to, to run out the poster that was very much needed the next morning.

Juanishi Orosco: Villa would say, "Stay up with me.

Stay up with me."

And we're going, "Okay."

And Villa just went - Chi-Koom, Chi-Koom, Chi-Koom - this fast, hand pull, not machine, hand pull screens.

And the squeegeer would have to squeegee the ink, pull up the print and that fast, somebody would have to pull it off, the other guy would have to put it down, and just as fast as you can do this, that's how fast we were going.

And we would do this all night long.

Stan Padilla: A poster is important because it's like the ancient Chinese saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words", and I think that's what we see throughout all of the posters, there's an attitude that comes out stronger, it's just not what's said on, on the poster, you know, those are just particulars.

Ricardo Favela: The poster that I, and I did this poster, it was a poster when we went to Woodland to boycott Safeway.

Hector Gonzalez: And the RCAF was on a Jeep, Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa, and a couple of other pilots, and some young kids goes "Mom those are the Chicano pilots, where are their planes, no they're, they're in a Jeep now".

They loved it, you know, people actually thought that these guys were, were pilots, they wanted to know where were their planes, where were they, and who was their commander, that's, that's the fun you know.

Invent something like Don Quixote did, have fun and at the same time help somebody.

That's how I see it, they, they were having fun and at the same time you're helping people.

Paul Chavez: What the RCAF did was they, they got art and they took it out of the galleries and put it into the barrios, and we'll always be thankful for that.

Narrator: Juan Carrillo, Deputy Director at the California Arts Council from 1978 to 2005, considers RCAF posters as significant contributions to the visual arts world.

Juan Carrillo: And so, the RCAF posters became posters to publicize health issues, fundraising dances, education issues, marches, I mean it was a way for the posters to, to inform the public and it was a way for new symbols to be presented to the public.

Everyone that I've met in the Chicano art world has acknowledged that the RCAF posters were a significant contribution of this century to, to art history.

Joe Serna: We didn't get caught up in the internal political affairs of the union.

We were kind of independent in a way, which meant that Cesar would give us impossible tasks.

Dolores Huerta: No request was ever too, too big or too small.

If we needed food for people that were marching, if we were going to a demonstration and they had to have signs, or we were having a convention and we needed their help.

Juanita P. Ontiveros: It could have been 2 o'clock in the morning, or, or in midnight, whatever, and I would receive a call.

Joe Serna: When he would say: "We have a major lobbying effort going on at the Capitol, I'm bringing 2,000 farmworkers to Sacramento.

I want you guys to house them and feed them for 3 or 4 days."

And we would always fulfill them.

Paul Chavez: And it's true, you know, I mean my father and, and guys like Jose Montoya and Esteban Villa, you know, they were from a, they were from a different time, right?

And so, they lived a lot of the same experiences, and their interests were the same.

So, yeah, I mean he felt completely at home, I mean, they were basically his home boys.

Juan Carrillo: And so, the Royal Chicano Air Force began to involve itself in community affairs and community activities, and to help bring a vision about that I think was absent, and it was a vision of a world where we're, we're, where we were educated, where we participated politically, where, where we were active agents in life.

Jose Montoya: Where did the, where did he get the idea that they're going to paint the freeway?

RCAF Artist: Did you do that?

RCAF Artist: No.

Jose Montoya: It's a good idea.

RCAF Artist: Claim it quick!

Jose Montoya: No, no, but you know, just the band across there to compliment this, you know, make it like la avenida de los.

¿Verdad?

You know, like the pyramid in Tehuantepec.

Narrator: RCAF's contributions to public art around the Sacramento community has enriched our understanding and appreciation of their legacy and societal impact, and so far, it's stood the test of time.

Stan Padilla: The Metamorphosis mural.

It was very controversial at the time.

Not only, uh, from the arts people but from our own people saying, "Well, where are all the power fists?

Where are the Huelga birds?

You know, we're not used to this new kind of art.

You know, this doesn't seem like a Chicano mural."

And we were saying, "Well, we believe this is a human mural."

I remember the day that when we finished the mural, when we finished the big butterfly, that there was an actual tiger swallowtail butterfly that flew from the top of Macy's building and it came and flew right to the center of the, the butterfly, the painted butterfly.

It almost genuflected, it pulsed there and then it flew away and we all watched it and we knew we had completed and that it was confirmed what we had done.

Narrator: In 2016, the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission unanimously invited RCAF members Esteban Villa, Juanishi Orosco, and Stan Padilla to work on restoring the 1977 "Metamorphosis" mural as well as a new mural for the Golden 1 Center.

The Royal Chicano Air Force's "Flight" mural was unveiled inside the Golden 1 Center prior to a Sacramento Kings game in 2018.

Phil Isenberg: The name Sacramento is a Spanish name, this is a community that's had a legacy of Latin and Spanish culture for, for longer than any of us can ever, can ever imagine.

We forget it from generation to generation, but we keep coming back to it and what these guys did is they reminded us of our roots in this community and a number of us, myself included, took enormous pride and pleasure in trying to in what little way we could help them express what is fundamentally important to them and to Sacramento.

Stan Padilla: I look back at those times, the really exciting times with the height of the RCAF very warmly, very fondly, you know, these were all my compadres, you know, we, we went through so many experiences together, we became family, so I miss those times, I, I've been in Nicaragua right after the revolution, I've been in times where you, there's something in the air that's happening, you can't explain in words, and that's one of those times for me.

Juanishi Orosco: I feel so fortunate that what I had to offer was at the right time for the right thing at the right place.

I don't think each one of us can kind of like say why we came together, than that we knew when we saw each other, yeah, there's something we've got to do together, you know, we understood it.

It's a duty and a privilege to be able to serve my community and my culture.

The whole RCAF experience was, was a magical carpet ride through the renaissance of the Chicano cultural arts movement.

Dolores Huerta: Well, the Royal Chicano Air Force are a group of young men and women that had an incredible vision about what they wanted the society to look like.

They did what they started out to do, and I just wish that, that model existed in every city, I think, our, our whole country would be a lot different if we had a RCAF in every community.

Juan Carrillo: The mission of the Royal Chicano Air Force was to change the world.

In terms of education the number of times that we've had to confront administrations of different campuses, jobs assisting the United Farm Workers Union in, in better working conditions for farmworkers, so I mean our mission was to change the world in those sorts of ways, get involved, lend a hand, lend a body.

Phil Isenberg: Well, a movement in the making is trouble, once they've made it, they're an institution to be revered and respected.

Art has to express what's going on in a community every day, every month, every year of that community's life, and these guys represented an enormously powerful potential in this community and as you tell the story of arts in Sacramento, you're going to tell among others the powerful story of the RCAF and it will be a fascinating story for generations to come.

Louie Gonzalez: I still, I still have a lot of hope for, for the group, you know, even, there's a lot of positive things going on individually, lot of good things happening, and you know, that's how, that's how it all started, a lot of good stuff going on, and we, we'll keep doing that in our own way.

People say the movement is in pieces, but the way we look at it is the pieces have movement, and that's who we are.

In Spanish: De colores, de colores son los pajarillos que vienen de afuera De colores, de colores es el arco iris que vemos lucir Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mi Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mi ♪♪