Cultural icon Cheech Marin shares life experiences, laughter with CWU community

Cheech Marin has lived a full life and made a lasting mark on the international cultural landscape, building a successful career in cinema, comedy, art, and other entertainment genres for more than five decades.

On Thursday, October 3, he joined Central Washington University’s Associate Dean of Graduate Studies Rodrigo Renteria-Valencia for a conversation in front of a packed McIntyre Hall auditorium.

Sponsored by the Diversity and Equity Center, An Evening with Cheech Marin: A Life of Art, Culture, and Entertainment was held in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. The conversation focused primarily on Marin’s activism in promoting Chicano voices within the arts.

He has been amassing one of the world’s foremost collections of Chicano art since the mid-1980s, which is currently on display at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California. “The Cheech,” as it is affectionately known, opened as a collaboration between the Riverside Art Museum, the City of Riverside, and Marin in 2022.

In an interview conducted by Brandon Mattesich for CWU’s student-run newspaper The Observer, Marin said he has found his own life experience echoed in the works of the Chicano artists represented in his collection, which drove him to put his work on public display for others to connect with.

“These artists were using their knowledge of world history and world art and melding it with their Chicano background,” Marin said. “It was an interesting combination that I saw emerging, and while not everybody understood it at first, I did.”

Born in east Los Angeles to a Mexican-American family, Marin found out early on that he couldn’t quite identify with that label, feeling that he was neither fully Mexican nor completely American. Once he discovered the Chicano culture, he knew he’d found a word that accurately described his identity and lived experience.

Over the course of his career — which includes his storied tenure as part of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, as well as over 25 roles in movies from a broad variety of genres — Marin noticed that a growing number of Chicano voices were finding their way into the public consciousness, a process he told The Observer that he was overjoyed to be witnessing.

“It’s like when the tide comes in and leaves things on the shore, and then the next one comes along and leaves even more things behind,” Marin said. “That’s the process we’re involved in right now. More and more Chicano art is being left on the shore. It’s amazing to see that what was once a little corner of the art world is starting to come into the mainstream. It’ll recede and come back again, and with every generation, the picture gets a bit clearer.”

Having facilitated the conversation at CWU and one in Yakima the day before, Renteria-Valencia sees Marin’s story as an inspiration to people from all walks of life.

“Cheech's journey inspires us to believe in a different version of ourselves—and to make it a reality,” Renteria-Valencia said. “His career speaks of a constant journey of reinvention, and the capacity to escape pre-established or even self-created boxes. He is known as a comedian, but he is also a musician, an art collector, a film director, a producer, an actor, and a community advocate—just to name a few.

“In this sense,” he added, “he inspires us both as an institution and as individuals to reinvent ourselves when needed. For CWU that means to become a Hispanic Serving Institution. For CWU students, it means to believe everything is possible if you have the support and put in the work.”

Marin expressed those views with wit and empathy to the crowd gathered in McIntyre Hall earlier this month.