| Many teachers of Latino adolescents observe students who devote time and effort to producing drawings featuring distinctive iconography from the Mexican American/Latino community. This dissertation uses ethnographic methods to explore these drawings, commonly called lowrider art, and the social practices of taking meaning from the environment and communicating meaning visually. This study explores how lowrider art functions as a system of visual literacy: How culturally distinctive icons are used to create drawings that function as visual texts with analyzable cultural meanings, and how these drawings are at the center of socially constructed interactions that communicate cultural information.; This study finds that Latino visual literacy encodes and transmits cultural knowledge that challenges the ideology of assimilation, negative stereotypes of Latino youth, and asserts a positive Latino cultural identity that reclaims Latino youth's indigenous heritage. This cultural knowledge is subaltern because it exists outside of mainstream cultural institutions like schools, churches, and museums. It is a border knowledge because it is a hybrid epistemology that draws on Spanish/Latin American and Amerindian ways of perceiving, thinking, and knowing. For many Latino youth, this system of visual literacy is part of their process of constructing a Latino cultural identity.; This study makes significant theoretical contributions to the New Literacy Studies and to the New Visual Literacy by exploring culturally distinctive visual literacy events situated in Latino adolescent social worlds. This study has important implications for literacy teachers and researchers by revealing social practices of literacy that often go overlooked because of eurocentric conceptions of literacy. |
