Conjuring the Archaeology of Aztlan - Through the Looking Glass and Material Lens of the Chicana/o Counterculture, 1976-2018

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With a pedigree firmly rooted in the evolution of the American automobile, lowriders trace their origins to the low-slung custom cruisers and social clubs of the 1930s and 40s. In effect, Mexican immigrants of that time were drawn to mutual aid societies in their quest for identity, kinship, camaraderie, and support. This thereby fueled the rise of lowriders and lowrider automobiles and the pop-cultural milieu of the time. Such youth-oriented social formations proved timely manifestations of the changing Chicana/o countercultural landscape of the 1950s through 1990s. The Hispanic towns and barrios of the American Southwest set the stage for the resurgence of the legendary Aztlan, deemed an ancestral crucible for the Chicano/a social movements of the 1960s. Drawing on a 40-year corpus of visual and documentary materials collected via participant observations and urban archaeological surveys undertaken in El Paso, Texas, Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, Delano, and Bakersfield, California; this illustrated presentation reviews findings from a decades-long program of urban archaeology, modern material cultures, and ethnohistory undertaken to monitor and evaluate the material cultural correlates identified with the proliferation of Chicana/o countercultural identities spanning lowriders, pintos, spooks, sprayheads, tecatos, clikas, homeboys and girls.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Chicanx Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24992