2025 Infinite Expansion Grants awardee homeLA presents Redrawing the Rancho

October 29, 2025

[October 7, 2025 - Los Angeles] 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. Redrawing the Rancho is curated by Chloë Flores and will be presented on Saturday, November 8 and Sunday, November 9, 2025, from 1:00pm-4:00pm with art activations unfolding across the mansion’s grounds and interior spaces.

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.

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. Eva’s project extends into February 2026, when she prunes the wine for future prosperity.

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 adapted performance. 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 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 with live percussion by Daniel Hill.

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 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 homeLA's website.

DETAILS:

What: Redrawing the Rancho, curated by Chloë Flores for homeLA Who: homeLA and La Puente Valley Historical Society

When: Saturday, November 8 and Sunday, November 9, 2025 Press Event: Dress Rehearsal on Sunday, November 2, 2025 Time: 1:00-4:00p (event and dress rehearsal)

Where: Rowland Mansion, 16021 Gale Ave, City of Industry, CA 91745

Tickets: Sliding scale, from $15-$35 RSVP: https://bit.ly/redrawing-the-rancho