In the early 1970s, the Central Valley artists’ collective The Royal Chicano Air Force was formed and began to produce art and graphics in support of the UFW and the Chicano civil rights movement. Many members of the RCAF had been farm workers or were the children of farm workers, and the group’s use of airplane imagery is partly a response to attacks by crop dusters on workers. As RCAF member Juanita P. Ontiveros recalled in the TV documentary Pilots of Aztlán: Flights of the Royal Chicano Air Force, “It was the local grower’s sons that flew the crop dusters....They would dust and they dared each other on who would fly down the lowest until they ended up getting people to throw themselves on the cotton sacks. And of course you would feel all, it was like dew falling on your skin, you would feel all the pesticides.” 

In this context the RCAF deployed images of retro biplanes and their pilots but decorated them with UFW colors and icons, especially the union’s stylized black thunderbird. The world of the RCAF was thus built on earlier efforts by the UFW to produce spectacles like the massive march on Sacramento that were visible to aerial news media and to thereby commandeer or hijack a vantage point from above that was often monopolized by agribusiness. On that basis the RCAF elaborated an alternative reality where they formed an imaginary aerial counter force to the historical agribusiness domination of the visual field in California.

In dialectical answer to agribusiness futurism, the RCAF produced futuristic images of Chicano technologies of flight, as in Esteban Villa’s watercolor of a woman astronaut, "Third World Astro Pilot of Aztlán" (ca. 1971—72) and Ricardo Favela’s colored pencil drawing "UFW Cooperative Space Station #Uno" (ca. 1983—84).

Similarly, like the UFW, which formed its own clinic and cooperative gas station, the RCAF converted a space-age gas station in Sacramento into the "Aeronaves de Aztlan Automotive Co-op" (ca. 1978—79). The collective context of such representations and institutions further mark them as utopian alternatives to agribusiness futurism and its idealization of technology in the service of labor exploitation and private property.

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