Creating Aztlan : Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island

About the book

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.

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Quotes

"Creating Aztlán will make a lasting and important contribution to Chicana and Chicano art, discourse, and visual studies." --Arturo J. Aldama, author of Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State

Dylan A. T. Miner Biography

Dylan Miner is an American artist and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

Art

As an artist, Miner has exhibited widely, including the Institute of American Indian Arts, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, National Museum of Mexican Art, Native American Rights Fund, La Galería de la Raza, Nokomis Center and countless alternative and university galleries, community centers, union halls, and anarchist bookstores. His working-class comics are included in Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation (New Press, 2009) and Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 2005, as part of the centennial celebrations of the founding of the IWW, Miner’s two-person exhibition with Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl traveled throughout North America and the world. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian. From this award, he created the exhibition Anishinaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes). In 2010 and 2011, Miner had nine solo exhibitions, Urban Shaman Gallery, in Winnipeg, Manitoba and various university galleries. In 2015 he exhibited at the Martha Street Studio, in Winnipeg. In 2016 he did a residency in Regina, Saskatchewan in collaboration with the MacKenzie Art Gallery, and the Dunlop Art Gallery.Miner is a member of Justseeds Radical Artist Collective. He co-founded the Campesina/o Collective.

Controversies

Dr. Chris Andersen (Métis), professor and director of the Rupertsland Centre for Métis Research at the University of Alberta, critiques Miner's use of Metis identity and iconography in his book "Métis": Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood. Dr. Andersen criticized Miner's racialization of Métis identity to support arguments for a Metis presence in locales with little Red River–based iconography.Miner is a former member of the Woodland Métis Tribe of Ontario, which is not affiliated with the Métis National Council. He is now registered with the Métis Nation of Ontario.

Selected articles

"Dylan Miner: An Anti-Authoritarian Artist on Bikes Beyond Borders," by David P. Ball, Indian Country Today Media Network Métis Artist and Indigenous Activist: Dylan Miner", interview by America Meredith, First American Art Magazine, N° 1, Fall 2013

Notes

References

Buhle, Paul and Nicole Schulman. Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Verso, 2005. ISBN 978-1-84467-525-8. McPhee, Josh and Erik Reuland. Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. Oakland: AK Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-904859-32-1. ... Read full biography