Historic house museums are the most common museums in the United States; estimates vary, but the most credible is around 13,000.11Andrea Burns, “Resource or Burden? Historic House Museums Confront the 21st Century,” National Council on Public History, January 13, 2015, citing National Trust for Historic Preservation president Stephanie Meeks’s estimate that there were approximately 13,000 historic house museums in the United States as of 2013, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/resource-or-burden/. Many such houses, if you’ve chanced upon one, are preserved and presented similarly. Visiting might involve moving through a dollhouse preserved in amber, accompanied by “history” that sounds more like propaganda about those who used to live there. As museums they are incredibly costly and difficult to maintain, due to local ambivalence, an aging audience, no funding structures, and costly upkeep, among other things.22Franklin D. Vagnone and Deborah E. Ryan, Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums (Routledge, 2016).

In that context, what happened at the Rowland Mansion, a historic house museum in the City of Industry, California, was something quite special. homeLA, in partnership with the La Puente Valley Historical Society, presented Redrawing the Rancho, a suite of new site-specific performances by Nao Bustamante, Eva Aguila, Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, and Victoria Marks. The Rowland Mansion is hailed as the oldest surviving brick structure in Southern California, now gridlocked by municipal buildings, corporate business parks, and commercial warehouses. A stately residence in its time, the house was built in 1855 by Mexican American ranchero John Rowland and now stands as the only clear vestige of the immediate area’s life prior to modern development. For Redrawing the Rancho, Executive Director and Curator of homeLA Chloë Flores asked each artist to respond to the site.

Predictably, each artist stepped outside of “official” historical accounts of the Rowland Mansion, which remember it primarily through its men, its connection to the cattle industry, manifest destiny, and self-reliance.33Donald E. Rowland, John Rowland and William Workman: Southern California Pioneers of 1841, Western Frontiersmen Series (Arthur H. Clark Company, 1999). Through deep research and sustained engagement (that will, in some cases, continue well into 2026), the artists make new stories about those who have called this small green island home in the midst of a now vast built environment.

The audience was welcomed with food upon arrival, Northern Mexican–Rowland Family fusion in the form of buñuelos and champurrado orchestrated by Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier for her participatory work, Recetas de La Casa Rowland. The next performance, Rodriguez-Frazier’s Peregrinaje for Maria (2025), began shortly after—as a trickle, and then a flood. Seventeen performers dressed in beige and white blouses, each holding a small bouquet of autumnal flowers, emerged from within and around the crowd to stand in a concentrated group before us. Over the next fifteen minutes, they migrated toward the mansion, beckoning though not explicitly demanding us to follow along. The performers, with their backs periodically to the audience, broke in and out of working in groups, at times marching in synchronized procession, or working in alternating pairs, or circling around one another, flowing in and out almost as if their roles were interchangeable. The pairs broke apart, rejoined, and then took turns circling the whole group before rejoining again. Arms akimbo, hands pressed in prayer, wrists thrown into the air, jubilant lifts, and elaborate footwork grounded the music (a mix of what I now know was Native American drums and cumbia rebajada).44Redrawing the Rancho performance program pamphlet, presented by homeLA in partnership with the La Puente Valley Historical Society, Rowland Mansion, City of Industry, CA, November 8–9, 2025. To follow the pilgrimage made you constantly aware of your own spatial relationship to the (moving) performance, meaning that you did not see every element of choreography, rendering your account slightly different than even your companion’s. As we passed through the gate, the performance slowed down, ending at the front steps of the mansion as the performers—now in a circle—placed their bouquets at an altar dedicated to Maria Encarnacion Martinez, John Rowland’s first wife who is largely absent from the historical record. As far as the La Puente Valley Historical Society knows, there is not a single remaining photograph of her in existence.55Amy Rowland, on-site discussion at Rowland Mansion, City of Industry, CA, January 18, 2026.

Nao Bustamante’s Attracting Bluebirds (2025) began next, not far from where Rodriguez-Frazier’s group had ended. Donning a wicker hat embellished with blue feathers, Bustamante emerged from behind the house making jarringly realistic bird calls by way of an out-of-sight instrument in her mouth (or at least it sounded like there was one there). She first wandered through the crowd, carrying a water dish successfully—though with great difficulty, spilling most of the water—before placing it near a small replica of the mansion that doubled as a functioning birdhouse that she had placed there before the performance started. From a table, Bustamante then proceeded to toss bird food at the audience, who, registering the absurdity, laughed and applauded. She periodically paused in listful gaze at the sky as if she were waiting for something, before an almost involuntary jerk drew her back in and she continued chirping at attendees. Beyond the performance, Bustamante added feeders, fountains, and native plants around the property, turning it into an unlikely oasis for local and migratory birds.

The audience was allowed into the mansion itself throughout the event, and after Bustamante’s performance I browsed the items on display, taking in the stories of the home and related displays. The collection is quite expansive, including many photographs, books, original furniture (from various occupants of the house over the years), everyday objects, and a ton of maps (John Rowland was a surveyor).

Victoria Marks then presented two “choreo-portraits” on the first floor of the house, part of a larger body of work in which she works closely with an individual who is not a dancer and creates a choreographed “portrait” comprised of movements that embody that person and their histories, which the two then perform. Titled Las Cosiendas, Marks worked with Martha Rodriguez and Millette Rowland McDonald, direct descendants of participants in the La Cosienda Club, a historic sewing circle in La Puente that existed from 1914 to 1964.

As the evening drew to a close, in the backyard Eva Aguila set up a microphone, some carpets, and chairs for seating, and a shallow bucket of copper bells in front of a 150-year-old grapevine original to the rancho. Aguila, as part of her long-term engagement with the site, built a pergola to support the grapevine and will return later this year to prune it, transforming the plant into an embodied metaphor for the exchange of human labor and agricultural products. The artist began the performance by delivering a spoken-word text that, among other things, called us to remember those who were kicked off their own land and forced into a type of indentured servitude that kept them impoverished and separated from their children. The text itself was animated by found sounds that Aguila sourced from the site—the whistling and whispering of the wind, something like a heartbeat, and low basal tones. After reading the text, she instructed us to take the small copper bells she had placed there, and standing under the pergola we rang the bell each time the artist read the name of an Indigenous person and their age, sourced from the 1870 census. Famously, only Indigenous people who renounced all tribal relations were counted in the early census, making their reading both a record of and a memorial to Indigeneity.

For the closing performance, Rodríguez-Frazier’s Casita (2025) took place on the front porch of the house just as the sun was beginning to set. Four women in relatively austere dresses, skirts, and blouses, eyes darting, danced together before separating, and rejoining again, in an embrace or contact, frequently facing each other before separating again. Their closeness, their garb, the title, all exude themes of home and domesticity—and above all nostalgia—but it’s really the chemistry between the dancers that exudes “home” the most: the home they find in each other, in what I imagined to be their indefatigable sisterhood, or at least that was the story I created as I watched. After the performance was over, some folks gave remarks, and then we all went our separate ways.

This nod to nostalgia set in context just how fiercely Redrawing the Rancho’s artists insisted on cutting through nostalgia to force the audience to grapple with the many realities of the house without any sugar coating. By placing their bodies within the site itself and the micro-sites therein, each performance dissolved the traditional division between the audience and performer, breaking the notion that these events and their repercussions are simply in “the past,” instead of always already here and now. History is not necessarily a place you go, but something that must be conjured and evoked. Redrawing the Rancho uses performance to draw new lifeblood from the Rowland Mansion. The problems in the historical record—problems of erasure, the erasure of bodies and lives—are best ameliorated, in kind, with the body.