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The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) at UC Santa Barbara has successfully completed Proyecto Aeronaves, a project that has made available to scholars and students the historically important archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF).  The Guide to the Royal Chicano Air Force Archives is available at CEMA's website.  The RCAF is an artistic collective based in Sacramento that was founded in 1969 to express the goals of the Chicano civil rights and labor organizing movement of the United Farm Workers. The word "Aeronaves," is the Spanish equivalent of "airships." The RCAF art group, originally named the Rebel Chicano Art Front, known for mixing humor with serious intent, has long used aviation as a visual metaphor in its work.

Proyecto Aeronaves was made possible through the award of a grant from the University of California Institute on Mexico and the United States (UC-MEXUS). The grant award supported the cataloging of primary source materials that comprise the archives of this influential Chicano cultural arts organization. The project produced online guides that give researchers access to the materials that are in a rich variety of media formats. Electronic access to these records is now available.

The RCAF archives document the development of Chicana/o artists and activists as well as Chicano cultural, political and social history from the 1960s to the present. The archives include sketches, drawings and slides of the murals, silkscreen posters, material from art and cultural exhibits and hundreds of photographs, as well as organizational records. This material is now available for use by the public and researchers in a variety of disciplines, including art, labor and cultural history, political science, sociology, as well as theater and cultural arts.

The RCAF is best known for its mural paintings, poster art production, and individual artistic contributions. It also fostered a number of cultural activities including book publications and sales, dance, music and theater. RCAF's founding artists include Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa, Juan Orosco, Ricardo Favela and Rudy Cuellar, who have produced murals and exhibitions from San Diego to Seattle. RCAF is significant as a collective that has maintained a twenty-five year history of engaging communities to express their Chicano culture, history and struggle for equal rights.

Proyecto Aeronaves complements the work of CEMA's Proyecto CARIDAD (Chicano Art Resources Information Development and Dissemination), the archival cataloging of Chicano visual arts slide images. Together these projects document the visual art production and social history of important Chicano art collectives in California.

The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives seeks to preserve and document the cultural and political experiences of California's major ethnic groups-Asian American, African American, Chicano, Latino and Native American.

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