Invaders: Vallejo, Food and the Making of California

_Invaders_ is an exhibition pairing _Interrupted Passage_, an ongoing food-based project by Julio César Morales and Max Rivière-Hedrick, with significant works from the di Rosa permanent collection. Together, these works use food as a way of investigating alternative histories and the relationships between migration, labor, memory and power, transforming food from something we consume into a medium through which histories are transmitted, contested, and remembered. _Interrupted Passage_ is a project that considers the meal as a site of political negotiation and cultural exchange. The project takes inspiration from a feast hosted in 1846 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a Mexican general and rancher who played a complicated role during California's transition from Mexican to American rule. After being taken prisoner by American soldiers, Vallejo invited his captors into his home and chose to negotiate through hospitality rather than armed resistance. The resulting meal placed Vallejo in an extraordinary position: both host and hostage, negotiating the future of California from his own dining room. Céser Morales and Rivière-Hedrick reimagined this historical encounter through a series of eight-hour meals performed for audiences in locations across California and Mexico. By recreating the feast as a contemporary social and sensory experience, _Interrupted Passage_ asks how food can become a form of diplomacy, resistance, accommodation, and survival—and how seemingly intimate acts of hospitality can participate in much larger political transformations. This exhibition presents the most expansive view to-date of this two-decade project, bringing together video, sculpture, photography, ephemera, and live food activations, alongside a new series of photographs and a new video and sound installation. In preparation for the exhibition, Morales also undertook sustained engagement with di Rosa's permanent collection, selecting works to enter into a visual and conceptual call- and-response with his own practice. In conversation with _Interrupted Passage,_ works by Joan Brown, Carlos Villa and Enrique Chagoya, among others, open a broader conversation around Vallejo's story and the enduring questions it raises about migration, belonging, hospitality, power, and cultural exchange. _Invaders_ considers California not as a fixed place or singular history, but as a place continually remade through movement, encounter, negotiation, and exchange. Through food and the rituals surrounding it, the exhibition asks how histories of invasion and migration settle into the body—how they linger—in taste and memory, in the hands that prepare a meal, in the stories passed from one generation to another, and in the strangers who become guests at our table. Here, the table becomes both archive and stage: a place where the past is served, contested, remembered, and imagined anew.