THE LAND HOLDS YOUR NAME
flyer for the Opening and Performance
homeLA‘s Redrawing the Rancho
Performance & Opening November 8 & 9
1-4pm
Tickets Here
John Rowland Mansion and Dibble Roundhouse Museum
16021 Gale Avenue
City of Industry, CA 91745
ABOUT THE WORK:
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.
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.