Califas: The Ancestral Journey / El Viaje Ancestral

Califas: The Ancestral Journey / El Viaje Ancestral grows out of the Califas Legacy Project led by Museo Eduardo Carrillo which documents four decades of work by five Chicano/a/x artists from the Central Coast region of California: Yermo Aranda, Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997), Ralph D’Oliveira, Carmen León, and Amalia Mesa-Bains. The project is multifaceted and includes an online resource, a documentary film, a traveling exhibition, and community programming.

Under the direction of Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press, together with Museo, it also reunites these five artists in a collaborative and unique artists’ book, linking art and social movements of the 1960s rooted “en Califas” to the next generation of Latinx and other artists. The word “Califas” refers to the Chicano name for the state of California, and draws on the title of the conference Eduardo Carrillo co-organized in 1982, “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California.”

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic. Her artworks, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, resonate both in contemporary formal terms and in their ties to her Chicano community and history. She has pioneered the documentation and interpretation of Chicano traditions in Mexican-American art and is a leader in the field of community arts. Among her many awards is the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship. She is professor emerita in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University at Monterey Bay.

Ralph D’Oliveira has painted more than one hundred murals in California and abroad during his career of over forty years as a muralist. He has led dozens of projects with schools, working collaboratively with neighbors and students. In 2013, he traveled to Norway to paint a mural project in Trondheim. He views all these mural projects as a way to build community. Ralph draws on his multicultural background incorporating native Chumash and Mexican roots.

Carmen León is a painter and teacher of art. In 1975- 76, she was involved with a grassroots arts center, the Academia del Arte Chicano de Aztlán, painting some of the first murals in Watsonville, CA. In 1985, she began teaching art in the schools, focusing on her involvement with the Latino/a/x community and drawing on her Peruvian and Mexican heritage. León was one of the co-founders of Galeria Tonantzin in San Juan Bautista, CA, a venue for women’s art.

Yermo Aranda is an elder and wisdom keeper of the history and ancestral teachings for Chicano/Native/ Mexica-identified peoples. He was the co-founder of El Centro Cultural de La Raza in San Diego, CA, a cultural art center focused on Latino and Indigenous art forms. As the Centro’s first administrative director, Aranda initiated the Chicano Park Murals in 1973. Chicano Park is now recognized by the City of San Diego and the State of California as a historical site.

Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997), painter and muralist, was influenced in the 1960s by the Chicano Movement. His monumental works include “Las Tropicanas” (Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento), “El Grito” (Los Angeles), and the destroyed Santa Cruz mural, “Birth, Death and Regeneration.” In 1982, while professor of art at UC Santa Cruz, Carrillo and Philip Brookman hosted Chicano artists, intellectuals, and visionaries at the conference, “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California.” His work and life inspire all of Museo’s activities.

The journey of the making of this book began in 1989 when Felicia Rice, book artist and printer, collaborated with artist Eduardo Carrillo and poet Francisco X. Alarcón on the broadside, “Dedicatoria Chicana.” This initiated a series of projects with Chicano artists that has been the editorial focus of Moving Parts Press for over thirty years. The book, a one-of-a-kind collaborative “mural,” was designed and letterpress printed by Felicia at Moving Parts Press.

This unique artists’ book now resides in the Stanford University Library. A facsimile of the original was reproduced in an edition of just seven copies for the artists. Finally, Felicia adapted the original book into a small-scale trade edition which was distributed widely to schools, libraries, arts organizations, and youth-serving agencies throughout the California Central Coast region of Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz Counties.