How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? In The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force, world-famous archaeologist La Stef and the clandestine Con Sapos Archaeological Collective track down the “facts” about the elusive RCAF, the Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force.

La Stef and her fellow archaeologists document the plight and locura que cura of the RCAF, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, ongoing subversive performance stance, and key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. As the Con Sapos team uncovers tensions between fact and fiction in historical consciousness and public memory, they abandon didactic instruction and strive instead to offer a historiography in which various cultural paradigms already intersect seamlessly and on equal ground. That they often fail to navigate the blurred lines between “objective” Western archival sciences and Indigenous/Chicana/o cosmologies reflects the very human predicament of documenting the histories of complicated New Worlds everywhere. Uniquely blending art history, oral history, cultural studies, and anthropology, The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force suspends historical realities and leaps through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

Winner, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, 2019

The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective’s work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.

Blending RCAF members’ biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective’s output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF’s verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.