Jose Montoya (1932-2013) was born in New Mexico, and came to California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1940s with his family for field work, living in farm labor camps in towns across the Valley, including Delano, Hanford, Laton, Parlier, and Fowler. He was the first in his family to graduate high school, and joined the US Navy in 1951 during the Korean War. Using his GI Bill to attend art school, he graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1962 and later received his MFA from Sacramento State University in 1970. His earliest influences were from his mother using stencils to paint on walls in their home and setting out rolls of craft paper for her children to print with potato stamps. While in art school he was drawn to German Expressionism and artists that created scenes of everyday life such as Norman Rockwell and the poet Walt Whitman. He experimented with new mediums such watercolor and ink, developing his technical abilities but staying true to his own artistic sensibilities rooted in barrio life. In 1969 Montoya started his Pachuco Art Series and in 1977 his well known exhibition Pachuco Art: A Historical Update opened in Sacramento, reframing the pachuco from the media sensationalized delinquent to “the first freedom fighters of the Chicano Movement.”
Montoya was a founding member of the Rebel Chicano Art Front (RCAF, later named Royal Chicano Air Force), a collective of multidisciplinary artists entrenched in the work of the Chicano civil rights movement. Along with the RCAF Montoya joined the fight for labor rights with the United Farm Workers in the fields where he grew up, supporting the movement through artistic interventions, screen printing in the fields, feeding school children, and joining boycotts as a satirical militant force. Montoya was the embodiment of the urgent, resourceful, and multifaceted art of the Chicano Movement era and beyond. Known for his sense of humor and unfailing wit, Montoya inspired and educated many generations of artists in the same rebellious/activist/avant garde Chicano tradition.
Early Life: Montoya ‘s early life was shaped by his family’s constant migration from state to state, city to city. His parents were migrant workers, often moving for different types of work. In between New Mexico and California for much of his adolescence, Montoya settled in the central valley and attended high school in Hanford, Parlier, and completed his secondary education in Fowler.
Enlistment in the Navy: Montoya joined the Navy after graduating from high school in 1951. He was stationed in San Francisco and Hawaii where he encountered unique racial diversity and cultural differences. In the second half of his service, he was stationed in Korea and then Japan towards the end of the Korean War. He explored his time in Japan in The Bully (2001), a short story that included line drawings of sailors, political undertones about a war that was largely ignored and overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. He describes this story as taking place during “a lull in the police action they refused to call a real war”. The Bully is rife with interactions between regionally and racially different US servicemen to enhance readers’ impressions of characters and to signal the complexities of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences among US soldiers. The Bully showcases Montoya’s storytelling while simultaneously taking an autobiographical approach.
Post War: After the war, Montoya earns his AA and wins an art scholarship to the CCAC. In combination with his GI bill monies, he returns to San Francisco to work on his BA. His time in the Bay Area exposes him to the political and cultural left prior to the Chicano movement. As a result, his political consciousness evolved as did his attitude towards military service. After graduation from the CCAC in 1962, Montoya moved to Sacramento to teach art 8at Wheatland High School where he became active in the farmworkers movement while frequently returning to the Bay Area to participate in the early Chicana/o art dialogues.