Is There a Chicanx Style of Architecture?

"Chicano art is American art," Cheech Marin told me over the phone last winter. It’s something the actor and comedian has said to a lot of people over the past 30-plus years. Chicanx art is close to his heart, but if you haven’t been following his career (and even if you have), you might be surprised to learn that the Up in Smoke star has been one of the preeminent patrons of the field since the 1980s. This June, his decades of collecting culminated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new art space in Riverside, California, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, under the umbrella of the Riverside Art Museum—The Cheech for short.

The center will have a permanent collection building on the works Marin has donated, space for traveling shows, fellowships for graduate students, and community galleries where amateur artists will be able to show their work. It will be a hub for Chicanx culture locally and nationally, a place for people to come together and celebrate a heritage rarely given the spotlight.

"Chicano culture is really a phantom culture," Marin said. "So we’re bringing it out of the shadows and into the mainstream of America so everybody will get the message." 

Marin’s life has already been groundbreaking. He was born in a United States where there were regularly signs outside of establishments reading, "No dogs, no negros, no Mexicans"—and now he’s opened a museum of Mexican American art in the middle of one of California’s bigger cities. 

"This is a really wonderful opportunity to spread this message of art and love to the rest of the world," he told me, his excitement infectious.

The secondhand high only faded when I hung up the phone and glanced at renderings of the building. It looked more like a suburban bank outlet than a major cultural hub, the sort of thing you’d pass on the highway driving by some has-been suburban corporate campus—glad I don’t work there, you think to yourself, before driving on and forgetting it exists.

Said building was formerly home to the landmarked Riverside Main Library. Designed in 1964 by local architecture firm Moise, Harbach, and Hewlett, it’s a mostly windowless brown brick box set on a plinth behind a paved-and-planted plaza and flanked by parking lots. (A local preservation blog referred to it as Riverside’s "most under-appreciated" midcentury building.) The renderings were pretty indistinguishable from old photos of the library; the only thing that announced the new inhabitant was a sign over the front entrance. I tried to reconcile the idea that The Cheech is possibly the most visible home for Chicanx culture to open in decades, a flower of almost 60 years of a cultural movement, with this uninspiring reality. I closed the renderings and wondered: What should a Chicanx building look like? 

"The museum is the backdrop to the artwork." This is the explanation that Elisa Hernández Skaggs, the project’s manager at Page & Turnbull, one of the firms behind the design, gives me about the building’s subdued aesthetics. The existing building "is very quiet, and it has certain features that we felt were important to respect," she says. "The punch is delivered by the artwork itself."

Chicanx art often does pack a punch. It’s got a penchant for comic mash-ups of high and low references rendered in riotous colors and textures drawn from a mix of finely crafted and found objects—La Belle Epoch, a sculpture in the De La Torre brothers’ opening show at The Cheech, features a massive Aztec timepiece/ferris wheel adorned with blown glass, cutlery, and bike tires. Rasquache, a rehabilitated form of a Mexican-Spanish slur that means something like tacky or tasteless, is how academics often describe the punchy aesthetic.