Cultural Activities
The RCAF organized cultural activities such as a yearly poetry readings called "Flor y Canto", and revived indigenous Mexican practices such as celebrations of harvest ("Fiesta de Maíz") and the rainy season ("Fiesta de Tlaloc"). Tere Romo, who worked with the RCAF to re-establish the Día de los Muertos celebration in Sacramento in 1975, said that they had "an Indigenous ceremony with dance offerings, along with a Catholic mass, because there were a lot of older, traditional people there, and it's a holy day of obligation for Catholics." They soon established the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, a workshop for the production of posters for community events. There, thousands of posters were created over the years. Out of all this activity came the music of the Royal Chicano Air Force Band established by Freddie Rodriguez and featured the vocals of Gloria Rangel and Irma Rangel. Eventually, Esteban and Jose established the Trio Casindio under the strong mentorship of Rudy Carrillo. Their first recording, All Day Music, was released in 1985.
In 1995, Steve LaRosa and KVIE-TV, a public television station in Sacramento produced a film on the RCAF. Entitled, "Pilots of Aztlán", the film has been shown annually throughout the region. In 2008, KVIE produced a follow up DVD entitled, "The RCAF Flies Again".
Read more about this topic: Royal Chicano Air Force
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or activities:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)