This is the first book solely dedicated to the history, development, and present-day flowering of Chicana and Chicano visual arts. It offers readers an opportunity to understand and appreciate Chicana/o art from its beginnings in the 1960s, its relationship to the Chicana/o Movement and its leading artists, themes, current directions, and cultural impacts.

Although the word “Chicano” once held negative connotations, students—along with civil rights activists and artists—adopted it in the late 1960s in order to reimagine and redefine what it meant to be Mexican American in the United States. Chicanismo is the ideology and spirit behind the Chicano Movement and Chicanismo unites the artists whose work is revealed and celebrated in this book.

Jackson’s scope is wide. He includes paintings, prints, murals, altars, sculptures, and photographs—and, of course, the artists who created them. Beginning with key influences, he describes the importance of poster and mural art, focusing on the work of the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada and the significance of Mexican and Cuban talleres (print workshops). He examines the importance of art collectives in the United States, as well as Chicano talleres and community art centers, for the growth of the Chicano art movement. In conclusion, he considers how Chicano art has been presented to the general American public.

As Jackson shows, the visual arts have both reflected and created Chicano culture in the United States. For college students—and for all readers who want to learn more about this fascinating subject—his book is an ideal introduction to an art movement with a social conscience.

In lowriding culture, the ride is many things—both physical and intellectual. Embraced by both Xicano and other Indigenous youth, lowriding takes something very ordinary—a car or bike—and transforms it and claims it.

Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being in the world, artist and historian Dylan A. T. Miner discusses the multiple roles that Aztlán has played at various moments in time, from the pre-Cuauhtemoc codices through both Spanish and American colonial regimes, past the Chicano Movement and into the present day. Across this “migration story,” Miner challenges notions of mestizaje and asserts Aztlán, as visualized by Xicano artists, as a form of Indigenous sovereignty.

Throughout this book, Miner employs Indigenous and Native American methodologies to show that Chicano art needs to be understood in the context of Indigenous history, anticolonial struggle, and Native American studies. Miner pays particular attention to art outside the U.S. Southwest and includes discussions of work by Nora Chapa Mendoza, Gilbert "Magú" Luján, Santa Barraza, Malaquías Montoya, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Favianna Rodríguez, and Dignidad Rebelde, which includes Melanie Cervantes and Jesús Barraza.

With sixteen pages of color images, this book will be crucial to those interested in art history, anthropology, philosophy, and Chicano and Native American studies. Creating Aztlán interrogates the historic and important role that Aztlán plays in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture.