Kristian E. Vasquez

This dissertation is an investigation of the literary, musical, and visual aesthetic forms and practices of Xicana/o/x cultural producers, or La Xicanada, of a post-1990s California. The Xicanada were inspired by the Indigenous social movements and culture of resistance of their time. This study is compounded by three interwoven parts: the first being a phenomenological and semiotic investigation undergirded by decolonial feminist methods to understand how ideology, consciousness, perception, aesthetics, and performance—as laborious processes— facilitate “heresy” in the material and spiritual dimension of Xicana/o/x cultural production. Secondly, the term, “coloniality of the wor(l)d,” a fusion of colonial-capitalist experience, postmodern narrative, and social reality, is to think how Xicana/o/x cultural producers conjure a lifeworld in opposition to it, namely by what the project terms “the decolonial spirit.” Lastly, this study facilitates a zine and digital mapping project of the audiovisual archive, pláticas, and theory collected.