Famous Chicano poet woos Cal Poly

Jose Montoya, the famous poet, artist and musician, is like the cool grandfather who speaks in a deep, soothing voice and tells you stories about the exciting days when he was younger.

And indeed, Montoya has had some exciting days. The grandfather of Chicano poetry, as he is often called, was on the forefront of Chicano art and activism during the Chicano Renaissance and the Cesar Chavez marches of the late 1960s and ’70s.

Montoya, who came to speak at Cal Poly Friday night, began the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) at Cal State Sacramento as a way for Chicano students to have an artists’ collective similar to other revolutionary Chicano art collectives like the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALAF).

“I think that the movement was beginning when I got out of college and I started teaching,” Montoya said about his art. “By 1964, the farmer workers were already on the move and I was already doing art and writing. It wasn’t connected to the movement at the time but connected to my culture, which was on the move at the time.”

At the lecture, Montoya spoke about the RCAF and its significance. The presentation, which started with an Native-American prayer to the four directions, also included a showing of “Pilots of Aztlan,” which detailed the RCAF’s history and the posters which made the collective famous.

The presentation was coordinated by modern languages and literatures professor and honorary RCAF member Gloria Velasquez,through the College of Liberal Arts, the Chicana/Latino Faculty Staff Association and the Movimiento Estudiantil Xicana/ o de Aztlan (MEXA). Velasquez, one of the first Chicano professors at Cal Poly, introduced Montoya as her mentor and long-time friend.

“Esteban Villas and I both wound up teaching at Sacramento State in the early ’70s and the students wanted to have a collective like MALAF, and I told them we were going to emulate the Toltec artists and not sign our names to any of our works because it’s a collective,” Montoya said.

First called the Rebel Chicano Art Front, the RCAF was often confused with the Royal Canadian Air Force. As the story goes, an unknown RCAF member said, “No man, we’re the Royal Chicano Air Force! We fly adobe airplanes!”

The joke stuck as people began to donate World War II jackets, helmets, spare jet parts and even a jeep to the RCAF. From then on, RCAF members often came to rallies, picket lines and marches looking like revolutionary soldiers.

As an art collective, the RCAF began to make posters for rallies held by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. The posters, which are now considered to be fine art, become more artistic and Chicano-influenced over the years.

The collective, which still exists today, often picketed grocery stores that sold “scab” crops, picked by farm workers who had gone against UFW strikes. They marched along Cesar Chavez, until his death in 1993, to fight against poor working conditions, wages and child labor.

Today the movement has shifted from farm workers to illegal immigrants. In a way, “things are going to get worse” for Chicanos, Montoya said as he encouraged students from MEXA to continue to fight after the lecture.