Seeing the wall of Perry Vasquez’s “Keep On Crossin’” prints, part of Vasquez and Victor Payan’s Keep On Crossin’ Project, in TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art at the High Museum of Art recently, I was struck by the way Vasquez brought together two of the biggest names in graphic art of the 1960s: Andy Warhol and R. Crumb. This is a provocative blend: Warhol, the graphic artist turned art world operative, and Crumb, one of the creators of the genre of underground comix, represent two very different and, in some ways, mutually antagonistic cultural contexts. Vasquez’s seemingly infinite replication of the image in different color schemes is Warholesque, but the more compelling aspect of the piece is his appropriation of the phrase “Keep On Truckin’” and the happy figure strutting his way through life from Crumb. Vasquez and Payan translate “Keep on Truckin’” into “Keep on Crossin’” and Crumb’s anonymous suited men into a generic Mexican truckin’ his way across the border. Crumb first used the expression, and those figures, in the mid-1960s; they were taken up by the hippie subculture as an expression of combined determination and insouciance. Vasquez and Payan have repurposed them to address the issues surrounding illegal immigration. 

At one level, then, “Keep On Crossin’” is a pair of Chicano artists’ appropriation of an older white artist’s work, and a 21st century reworking of an image and idea associated with a mid-20th century subculture through the eyes of a currently embattled community. But as I looked at the wall of images, I thought about the dense web of cultural allusions and appropriations that lies behind it, a web that entangles, in one way or another, the East and West coasts of the United States, and cultural expression associated with African-American, Mexican-American, and white American subcultures.

Crumb did not coin the phrase “Keep on Truckin’” (indeed, a court of law eventually found that the phrase is in the public domain and that Crumb had improperly earned royalties from it, which he was compelled to pay back). It originates in a 1936 blues recording by Blind Boy Fuller and appears in a number of blues and novelty records of the era, where it is used as sexual innuendo. In the early 1970s, the San Francisco rock bands The Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna had hits built around the phrase (respectively “Truckin’” and “Keep on Truckin’” a pastiche of Fuller’s song and others related to it). These bands’ use of the phrase was undoubtedly inspired by Crumb but it also represents another means by which it found its way into the hippie lexicon.

Truckin’ was also a dance step popular in the Harlem dance halls of the 1930s and 1940s (it was a shuffle step that was incorporated into the Big Apple and served as the basis for the Suzi-Q). In 1936, Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears, an all-female big band, recorded a song called “Truckin’” that referred explicitly to the way the “uptown” (read: Harlem) dance had become popular “downtown” (read: among white people). Crumb, an avid collector of vintage 78 rpm discs from the 1920s and 30s--and a sometime musician whose band, R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders, performed such music--was undoubtedly aware of these sources and the way both expression and dance had passed from black culture into cultural contexts dominated by whites. In short, the R. Crumb image is not the point of origin of the verbal and visual iconography Vasquez and Payan appropriated; Crumb’s use of it was also an act of appropriation that furthered the cultural miscegenation around Truckin’ that began in the 1930s.