Chicano

Ricardo Favela, a founder of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group of Mexican American artists who used poster art to support Chicano civil rights causes, has died. He was 62. Favela, who was on the faculty of the art department at Sacramento State, died of a heart attack July 15 in Visalia, Calif., his daughter Florentina said. A resident of Sacramento, he had attended a family party in Visalia and died in his sleep later that night.

When we think of art patrons, prestigious names normally come to mind. Medici, Getty, Rockefeller. But Cheech? That's a name we associate more with lowbrow humor than fine art. Yet Cheech Marin, half of the '70s comedy duo Cheech and Chong, arguably has emerged as the nation's leading advocate for Chicano art. For a time, Marin, 60, was sounding like the Rodney Dangerfield of the art world, always complaining that he can't get no respect from the arts establishment. Nobody's laughing nowadays.

On a recent Monday afternoon, two UCLA students stand before their class, performing a skit they've written about a pair of high school friends on graduation day in East Los Angeles. "I want to get out of the ghetto," one young woman excitedly tells her friend. "I think East Los will bring me down. It won't take me anywhere. I just see something bigger for myself." The other student is dismayed. Success doesn't mean forgetting your roots.

Officially, it's called the Sixth Annual Mexico City Book Fair, but some participants in the upcoming bibliophiles blowout are toying with a more tongue-in-cheek sobriquet: "Chicanos vs. Chilangos." And don't forget the Cubanos. On Friday, this kinetic metropolis will inaugurate its yearly celebration of the written word, from poetry to graffiti.

Back in the '70s we took sides, young Chicanos, waving the Mexican flag every chance we got, but it wasn't so easy, either. We got flak from our parents. They had grown up in the '30s, in the '40s, right here in L.A., and some of them couldn't even pronounce the word "Mexican" in mixed company without cringing, as if they had swallowed a sour ball in front of a crowd judging them for poise and elan. And they told their kids the same sad story. "We are Mexican, we are not.

The Man Who Could Fly And Other Stories Rudolfo Anaya University of Oklahoma Press: 200 pp., $19.95 * RUDOLFO ANAYA, whose first novel, "Bless Me, Ultima," is considered a cornerstone of Chicano literature, has been writing and publishing stories for more than 30 years. His new book, "The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories," is actually a career-spanning selection of his short fiction.

MOVIE producers don't show up every day on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Boyle Heights. So it's surprising how little fuss the locals make when actor-director Edward James Olmos and his production team arrive one recent morning to scout locations for the upcoming HBO film "Walkout," a dramatization of the seminal 1968 Chicano student protests at high schools on L.A.'s Eastside.

IN 1970, when Richard Vasquez's "Chicano" was first published, the Mexican American civil rights movement -- a struggle for the visions and values embraced by the term "Chicanismo" -- was in full flower. His novel can be seen as a courageous effort to define and interpret that term. Now, on the 35th anniversary of its publication, "Chicano" has been reissued in English and Spanish editions and sheds a new and different light on the same phenomenon.