The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) is a Sacramento, California-based art collective, founded in 1970 by Ricardo Favela, José Montoya and Esteban Villa. It was one of the "most important collective artist groups" in the Chicano art movement in California during the 1970s and the 1980s and continues to be influential into the 21st century.
Harry Gamboa Jr. is an American Chicano essayist, photographer, director, and performance artist. He was a founding member of the influential Chicano performance art collective ASCO.
Helena Maria Viramontes is an American fiction writer and professor of English. She is known for her two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them, and is considered one of the most significant figures in the early canon of Chicano literature. Viramontes is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University.
The Centro Cultural de la Raza is a non-profit organization with the specific mission to create, preserve, promote and educate about Chicano, Mexicano, Native American and Latino art and culture. It is located in Balboa Park in San Diego, California.The cultural center supports and encourages the creative expression “of the indigenous cultures of the Americas.” It is currently a member of the American Alliance of Museums.
Daniel Anthony Olivas is an American author and attorney.
Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia, better known by his nom de plume Alurista, is an American poet and activist. His work was influential in the Chicano Movement and is important to the field of Chicano poetry.
California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) is an archival institution that houses collections of primary source documents from the history of minority ethnic groups in California. The documents, which include manuscripts, slide photographs, newspaper clippings, works of art, journals, film, sound recordings, and other ephemera, are housed in the special collections department of the UCSB Libraries at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where they are made accessible to researchers upon request. An effort is currently underway to make certain documents available online through the Online Archive of California.
Luis Javier Rodriguez is an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist. He was the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, identifying himself as a native Xicanx writer. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and has been controversial on school reading lists for its depictions of gang life.
Chicano poetry is a subgenre of Chicano literature that stems from the cultural consciousness developed in the Chicano Movement. Chicano poetry has its roots in the reclamation of Chicana/o as an identity of empowerment rather than denigration. As a literary field, Chicano poetry emerged in the 1960s and formed its own independent literary current and voice.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
Diane Rodriguez was an American theatre artist who directed, wrote and performed. An OBIE Award winning actress, she was known for using comedy to confront various forms of oppression, often with special attention to issues of gender and sexuality.
Their Dogs Came With Them is a 2007 novel by Helena Maria Viramontes. Viramontes was born in East Los Angeles, California, into a Mexican American family. She attended Garfield High School and later Immaculate Heart College where she earned her BA in English Literature. During her time in school, Viramontes became deeply influenced by the Chicano Movement. Their Dogs Came With Them is Viramontes most recent work. Seventeen years in production, Their Dogs is acclaimed for its complex characters and personal, gritty writing style. The novel is largely based on Viramontes's childhood in East Los Angeles. The book focuses on the freeway construction and difficult conditions for the Mexican Americans living in this area at the time. It also explores the formation of Chicano youth gangs and their impact on Chicano communities.
Judithe Hernández is an American artist and educator, she is known as a muralist, pastel artist, and painter. She a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a former member of the art collective Los Four. She is based in Los Angeles, California and previously lived in Chicago.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
Yosimar Reyes is a Mexican-born poet and activist. He is a queer undocumented immigrant who was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in East San Jose, California. Reyes has been described as "a voice that shines light on the issues affecting queer immigrants in the U.S. and throughout the world."
Marisela Norte is an American writer, poet and artist living in Los Angeles. She is known for her poetry that explores the unseen city. Her book Peeping Peeping Tom Tom Girl was published by City Works Press in 2008, and her work can be found in numerous anthologies including Microphone Fiends, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, Bear Flag Republic, American Studies in a Time of Danger, Rara Avis, American Quarterly, and Rolling Stone's Women of Rock. She has also written for ChismeArte, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metro Transit Authority.
Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation was a traveling exhibit of Chicano/a artists which toured the United States from 1990 through 1993. CARA visited ten major cities and featured over 128 individual works by about 180 different Chicano/a artists. The show was also intended to visit Madrid and Mexico City. CARA was the first time a Chicano exhibit received major attention from the press and it was the first exhibit that collaborated between Chicanos and major museums in the U.S. The show was considered a "notable event in the development of Chicano art." Another unique feature of CARA was the "extensive planning" that attempted to be as inclusive as possible and which took place more than five years prior to the opening at Wight Art Gallery.
Peter Rodríguez was an American artist, curator, and museum director. He was the founder, director and curator of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and a co-founder of the Galería de la Raza.
Ralph Maradiaga (1934–1985) was an American artist, curator, photographer, printmaker, teacher, and filmmaker. He was Chicano, one of the co-founders of Galería de la Raza and part of the San Francisco Bay Area Chicano Art Movement.
