LACMA

1992 Hollywood, California Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez, parlaying the success of his hit movie La Bamba, begins preparations for his next studio-financed film, a biopic on the life of famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. When word leaks that Valdez is considering casting a non-Latina in the title role, angry Chicano activists organize in opposition. The project stalls. The film will be made ten years later—not in Spanish, directed by an Anglo, with Diego Rivera played by an Englishman. Nobody raises an objection. 1992 Los Angeles, California, and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico Filmmaker Sandra Peña-Sarmiento publishes her "Pocha Manifesto #1," reclaiming the once-derogatory term pocha and providing a theoretical framework for creating art. Also this year, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez releases El Mariachi, putting theory into practice and proving you can make a Hollywood movie on a rasquache budget of $7,000. 1991 California Teenager Daniel Ramos becomes the most widely known artist in Southern California. Under the name Chaka, the graffiti artist is credited with more than ten thousand tags from San Diego to San Francisco. On the day of his release from a five-month stretch in prison for vandalism, Ramos tags his name on the inside of the court elevator. 227 ApRIL 23, 1993 Southern California United Farm Workers founder César Chávez dies in his sleep near Yuma, Arizona, at the age of 66. The breaking news is announced immediately on Spanish-language radio across Southern California, prompting distraught listeners to call in lamenting their hero's death. Their worst fears are allayed, however, when they realize the person who had just died was César Chávez, the Mexican American civil rights leader, and not Julio César Chávez, the Mexican lightweight boxer.

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