Redrawing the Rancho

homeLA, in partnership with the La Puente Valley Historical Society, presents Redrawing the Rancho, an interdisciplinary performance event activating the Rowland Mansion in La Puente, California. The program features new performance, dance, and installation work by Nao Bustamante, Eva Aguila, Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, and Victoria Marks that confront and reinterpret the narratives surrounding the Rowland Mansion—Southern California’s oldest surviving brick structure—and the intertwined histories of colonization, agriculture, and industrialization that shaped it.

Once part of a nearly 50,000-acre land grant awarded in 1842 to John Rowland and William Workman, settlers who led a mule train from New Mexico to Alta California, the site bears the layered legacies of the Kizh nation, Spanish missions, Mexican land tenure, and American expansion. Today, the partly restored mansion sits in an industrial corridor of the City of Industry. Stewarded by the volunteer-run La Puente Valley Historical Society, whose evolving perspective offers both intimacy and complexity in narrating the site’s past.

Building on these multiple histories, Redrawing the Rancho introduces counter-narratives that reclaim overlooked identities, voices, and contributions tied to the mansion’s past. The performances and installations engage themes of displacement and dwelling, Indigenous land stewardship, Mexican-American identity, labor, and environmental change. Each artist works with specific spatial, material, and historical elements of the site, inviting audiences to encounter the home and its histories through a critical lens that foregrounds both care and accountability. In doing so, the project asks how history is preserved, whose stories are told, and how artistic intervention can transform our relationship to place.

ABOUT THE WORK

Eva Aguila’s The Land Holds Your Name is a ceremonial performance installation that examines the impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples through wine production, the Spanish encomienda system, and a remaining grapevine on the Rowland Mansion property. Through research and conservation efforts, Aguila tends to the vine, constructing a support system for its future growth: a pergola symbolizing the entanglement of labor and enterprise. Beneath it, she’ll perform a fertility ritual rooted in her Purépecha ancestry, incorporating traditional copper bells, spoken word, and infrasounds recorded on the land to honor Indigenous ancestors whose names were erased from colonial narratives. By inviting the audience into this collective ritual, Aguila transforms the site into a sacred space of witnessing, remembrance, and healing—where the land itself becomes a threshold of testimony, affirming Indigenous presence across past, present, and future.

Nao Bustamante’s project expands this dialogue between ecology and history, creating an environment that welcomes birds back to the Rowland Mansion, countering the ecological losses brought by industrialization. Drawing from her research into local bird species and historic aviary migratory patterns she has installed bird feeders, fountains, and plantings that attract and sustain local species. At the center of this habitat stands a replica of the Rowland Mansion itself, Attracting Bluebirds, reimagined as a dwelling for birds–a gesture that mirrors the estate’s former prominence while redirecting its symbolism toward care and regeneration. Equipped with wildlife cameras, these structures document avian activity and migration, generating a living archive of images and sounds that will inspire Bustamante’s outdoor performance. Through this work, she explores the environmental effects of progress, the intertwined histories of displacement and migration, and the possibility of return and renewal in both nature and memory. Her project extends into spring 2026, when the return of nesting birds mark both a literal and metaphorical homecoming.

Victoria Marks’ Las Cosiendas is a research-driven movement work that animates and unsettles the Rowland Mansion’s histories. Named for La Cosienda Club, where women gathered to sew and socialize between 1914 and 1964 in La Puente, the performance draws from archival photographs and the oral histories of members of the La Puente Women’s Club whose matrilineal lineages weave together Kizh, Spanish, Mexican, and Californian histories. Working closely with several club members, Marks creates “choreo-portraits” that unfold throughout the mansion’s first floor, challenging traditional portraiture and complicating settler legacies. In her choreography, sewing becomes a metaphor for mending, repairing, and connecting across generations, while music functions as both a score and a vessel for remembrance, carrying ancestral names into the present. The performers replace the lyrics of the traditional song La Bruja with a litany of their mothers’, grandmothers’, and great-grandmothers’ names, accompanied by a live adaptation performed by musician and performing artist San Cha. This act of vocal testimony transforms the performance into a living archive, foregrounding the Indigenous and women’s labor that are often left out of official narratives, and acknowledging their essential role in sustaining the mansion and its histories.

Also considering the mujeres of the mansion, choreographer Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier presents a three-part narrative performance that explores the impact of Western Expansion on contemporary Mexican-American identity through the stories and memories of the Rowland Mansion. Blending choreography, personal narrative, archival texts, and live music, Rodríguez-Frazier evokes themes of settlement, faith, safety, and belonging—tying cultural memory to the home and land. Performed on the mansion porch, surrounding grounds, and a repurposed water tank, the work brings to life the voices of women whose presence has shaped Rancho La Puente across generations. Recetas de La Casa Rowland opens the event with Maria De Los Angeles Rodríguez sharing buñuelos and champurrado, a gesture of hospitality that blends northern Mexican flavors with recipes from the historic Rowland home. Peregrinaje for María unfolds as an ensemble dance pilgrimage from the Dibble Museum to the Rowland Mansion, honoring Rowland’s first wife María Encarnación Martínez through dance and soundscapes that braid together histories of migration, faith, and resilience. In Casita, a dance quartet interprets the diary of Alice Karstens Rowland on the mansion’s porch, tracing the gestures of daily life and centering the quiet strength of women in shaping spaces of belonging.

Early next year, Redrawing the Rancho will be included in a Getty Research Institute webinar focusing on the Getty Scholar Program’s theme of “Repair.”

Redrawing the Rancho is curated by Chloë Flores and generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the California Art Council, a state agency. homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts. For additional information, please visit our website and join our mailing list.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND PRESENTERS

About Eva Aguila
Eva Aguila is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and organizer. A first-generation born in Los Angeles, her work centers on oral histories of the Mexican diaspora and immigrant experiences, with a focus on her ancestral roots in rural Michoacán. Through video, sound, and installation, Aguila examines personal histories and the in-betweenness of the Latine experience. Drawing from both research and personal archives, her current work reflects on the materiality of memory. Influenced by ephemerality and Indigenous Futurism, she uses time-based media to depict alternative narratives and reinterpret cultural portrayals of the diaspora. Her work has been exhibited and performed locally at the Vincent Price Art Museum (2025), SUR:biennial (2023), CURRENT:LA FOOD (2019), and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013), and internationally across Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Aguila holds an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design and a BFA from the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts.

About Nao Bustamante
Nao Bustamante is from the Central Valley of California, and is now a proud Angeleno. Her precarious artwork encompasses performance, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, writing and often includes community collaboration. She recently opened a project space, called Grave Gallery, on the site of her burial plot in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Bustamante has presented in institutions and underground sites around the world. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Performance Biennial Deformes, (Chile), the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, and the International Sundance Film Festival, where she received the Chase Legacy Award in Film, co-sponsored by Kodak and HBO. Bustamante received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a Lambent Fellow, and was awarded The Mike Kelley Foundation Artist Project Grant and the California Community Foundation Fellowship. For her work looking at the history of the pelvic examination, she has also received a Creative and Research Grant from University of Southern California. Nao is a 2024 recipient of the Rome Prize and a 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant awardee.

About Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier
Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier (she/her/ella) is an educator, dance-maker, and performing artist based in Riverside, California. As a first-generation Mexican American woman artist, she values “movement” as a means to wrestle with and rejoice in her Mexicanidad. Her movement aesthetic and choreographic interests are rooted in a mix of soulful Contemporary and Latin social dance forms approached by “experimental” dance-making processes and Post-Modern frameworks. Frazier holds a BA in Dance and an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside and is a full-time Associate Professor of Dance at Riverside City College. Over the past twenty years, she has created and performed work throughout the U.S. and Mexico. She has collaborated extensively with her long-time dance partner, Joey Navarrete-Medina, and is a founding member of Primera Generación Dance Collective (PGDC), which was named one of Dance Magazine’s 2025 "25 to Watch" this past January. Alongside PGDC, Frazier currently serves as a board member for Show Box L.A., a Los Angeles-based non-profit, and for Latina Dance Project, a cultural non-profit organization and the originators of the BlakTinx Dance Festival. For more information, visit larosadance.com

About Victoria (Vic) Marks
Vic Marks is an Alpert Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, who has been making dances for stage and film for the past 44 years. Her work migrates between choreo-portraits and action conversations for people who don’t identify as dancers (veterans, dads, moms, sorority and fraternity students) -- and dances for dancers that fuel Marks’ inquiries into movement. Recent projects include the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, a gathering of disabled dance artists who work together to challenge “ability paradigms,” and The Disability and Ecology Performance Exchange (also at UCLA), a group of artists, poets and scholars who gathered to consider the way unique corporealities shift our understanding and connection to the natural world. Marks has been selected to serve as Culver City’s Artist Laureate for the next two years, building Action Conversations and creating performances in public spaces. Her work in progress, “A Deer Walks into a Dance,” will be premiered in 2026-27 in Los Angeles. Marks is a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Chair of UCLA’s Disability Studies new major.

About Chloë Flores
Chloë Flores (she/her) is a Latinx Yaqui Native curator, writer, organizer, educator, and art leader with over twenty years of experience working in the arts in Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of performance, place, and advocacy—foregrounding movement-based and transdisciplinary practices that interrogate power, history, and belonging. She is the director and curator of homeLA, a dance-centered organization that promotes intersectionality through site-specific programming—bridging art, architecture, and the layered histories of Los Angeles. Her work spans exhibitions, performances, programs, publications, residencies, and coalition-driven initiatives that seek to redistribute resources and generate new models for care, equity, and critical exchange. She holds a dual B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from California State University Long Beach and an M.A. in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from The USC Roski School of Art and Design.

About homeLA
homeLA is a performance platform that critically engages with the sites, histories, and narratives of Los Angeles to reveal the complexity of the city—past, present, and future—through varied contextual imaginings of “home.” We support experimental performance makers within the fields of dance and art through programs, dialogue, and advocacy. www.homela.org / @home_la

About La Puente Valley Historical Society
Founded in 1960, the La Puente Valley Historical Society is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Rowland Mansion and surrounding regional history. With a mission rooted in stewardship, education, and community, the Society is committed to sharing stories of the past in ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of Southern California’s history.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

homeLA events require proximity and are intimate events that include live video recording and photo for documentation and accessibility purposes.

COVID: In fostering a community of care, we ask that you keep the following in mind: This event will be held outdoors and indoors. Please mask at your own discretion. We will have masks on site for folx who want to mask. If you are feeling sick at all, we ask that you please stay home.

Accessibility: The first floor of the Rowland Mansion and grounds are ADA accessible with accessible parking and bathroom nearby. The grounds and exterior pavement is uneven and consists of gravel, lawn, and concrete.

Tickets: 50% of ticket proceeds will be donated to the La Puente Valley Historic Society. The rest will support future homeLA programming, such as artist and participant fees.