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A drive through a Mexican American1 community may reveal a 1960 Chevrolet low rider with blue metal-flake paint and chain link steering wheel; an elaborate altar containing saints, plastic flowers, and candles; a mural depicting pre-Columbian deities, die Mexican flag, and farm worker activist César Chavez. These three artifacts seem unrelated. Low riders are popular cultural artifacts; altars are religious cultural artifacts, and murals are "fine art" artifacts. Yet, these art forms relate to each other both aestiietically and functionally. Low riders, murals, and altars all depend on a Mexican aesdietic of montage and excess known in Spanish as rasquachismo (YbarraFrausto 1991:passim); additionally, they function as cultural, artistic expressions of ethnic identity, and in die case of low riders and murals, they function as expressions of resistance against the dominant Euro-American culture. But while low riders and murals are well established and commonly recognized Mexican American/Chicano art forms, another more contemporary art form serving these very same functions is now popular: barrio art T-shirts.
While I was teaching high school in a district about ten miles southeast of El Paso, Texas,2 1 noticed diat many of my Chicano/a students wore T-shirts displaying multiple iconographie images from Chicano history and culture (see illustrations) .3 1 knew that there was a story behind diese shirts, especially after observing young people wearing these shirts in Los Angeles, California; Lubbock, Texas; various towns and cities in south-central Texas, as well as in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona. But since being a folklorist at the same time I was teaching English proved to be difficult, it was not until later that I was able to discover the story behind these T-shirt images.
I would suggest that like die murals of the 1960s, diese shirts are artistic expressions designed to enable or facilitate Chicano self-determination. My fieldwork experiences in Arizona and Texas4 seem to bear this out. The young people who did agree to talk with me were quite eager to tell me what they had to say; if my interpretation of a particular image - or one of their comments - was wrong, they let me know. I was also often surprised by die vigor with which diese young adults responded to my questions. However, their insistence about what they were...