Community Conversations Interview with Chicano Forever Featured Artist, Ray Olais

September 12, 2025
Christina Loya

Community Conversations documents the experiences of artists, activists, and community members in Kansas City throughout their lives. It will highlight their work, lives, and connection to the arts in Kansas City and here at Mattie Rhodes. It will also explore topics of identity, history, and culture. The goal of this project is to record the histories and experiences of underrepresented communities within the arts in Kansas City.

This project has been undertaken by Christina Loya- that’s me. I am a Public Historian and Community Engagement Coordinator at the Mattie Rhodes Cultural Center. Just a little bit of background about myself and why I wanted to start this project:

I am a 3rd generation Chicana with deep roots in the Kansas City area. My parents grew up in two historic Mexican American working-class neighborhoods of Kansas. My mom, Mary, is from the Oakland neighborhood of Topeka, Kansas and my dad, Steve, is from the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas. Both neighborhoods have proudly been home to Mexican American communities for over 100 years.

My parents decided to raise myself and my younger brother in Olathe, Kansas- a burgeoning suburb in the early ’90s. At this time, Johnson County’s Latino population was unfortunately just under 2%. While my brother and I were fortunate to have more opportunities available to us than my parents did, we were forced to reckon with reality of feeling “different” from our peers.

As a result of my surroundings, I did not learn my own history growing up. My work in my personal and professional life is steadfastly dedicated to reversing that. As a graduate student at UMKC and in the years since, I have researched and recorded the stories of Mexican Americans in the Kansas City area, with a particular focus on telling women’s stories and exploring how our identities shapes our experiences. I wanted to provide some background information about myself to set up my conversation with Ray and to set a tone for this project.

About my first interview for Community Conversations: In July, I sat down with our featured artist for this summer’s Chicano Forever exhibit, Ray Olais. Ray hails from East Orosi, a barrio in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. This area was known as the hotbed of the Cesar Chavez Farmworkers Movement in the 1960’s and ‘70s which subsequently instilled an immense sense of pride and inspiration for Raymond as a young Chicano artist.

Olais’ artwork contains Mesoamerican imagery and showcases icons of the Chicano art movement, as he was heavily influenced by leading Chicano art professors Jose Montoya and Esteban Villa, of Sacramento State College.

Raymond enjoys creating Sci-Fi artwork and sculptures, as he grew up during the space-race era of moon landings and classic Sci-Fi movies of the 1950s and ‘60s. He meshes the two styles of artwork together as a homage to both his Chicano roots and his affinity for Science Fiction. Raymond also wears the title of local historian, documenting the history of Newton’s Mexican American community since the arrival of Mexican railroad workers in 1905.

Raymond feels his work conveys his traditions and identity as a Chicano artist, telling stories about his life and culture. It is not only through his influential work as an artist and historian, but Raymond himself is a shining example of what it means to be Chicano Forever.

(I am also working on a separate landing page so viewers may be able to watch the entire hour long interview with our guests. More to come!)

ENJOY!

In the following clip, Ray discusses his “Chicano awakening.”