El Muertorider

Created by artists John Jota Leaños and Artemio Rodríguez, El Muertorider is a customized 1968 Chevy Impala transformed into a “dead lowrider”—a mobile monument and media installation that traverses aesthetics, memory, and resistance.

El Muertorider is both homage and indictment. Rooted in the visual lexicon of Chicanx lowrider culture and the iconography of Día de los Muertos, this Impala is not simply a showpiece—it is a critical intervention into histories of cultural erasure, racialized policing, militarism, and environmental violence. Conceived as part of the larger new media opera Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta, the car functions as Act III of the four-part series and embodies a history of dissent, mourning, and insurgent creativity.

Contextual Origins

El Muertorider emerged following a pivotal moment of censorship: artist John Jota Leaños was targeted with death threats and university investigations for a Days of the Dead poster memorializing Pat Tillman—an ex-NFL player turned soldier whose death in Afghanistan was surrounded by controversy. This silencing, taking place at Arizona State University, became the conceptual engine for Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta—a multi-platform, critical media project that confronts the suppression of political speech during wartime and interrogates the machinery of empire through humor, music, and visual spectacle.

Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta – The Four Acts

• Act I: Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos!
  A primer animation that reframes history through a Day of the Dead lens, screened at Sundance Film Festival and numerous international venues.

• Act II: Deadtime Stories with Mariachi Goose and Friends
  A satirical animated series with an accompanying 11-song album co-created with mariachis and musicians.

• Act III: ¡Radio Muerto!
  A transmedia experience composed of over 13 hours of independently produced radio stories from artists, students, scholars, and activists. To spatialize this experience, Leaños and Rodríguez reimagined the lowrider as a media altar—one that audience members could enter, sit in, and listen to while watching animations. This became El Muertorider.

• Act IV: DNN: Dead News Network
  A satirical news program from the perspective of the dead, this act reclaims narrative authority from corporate media and state propaganda.

Building the Dead Lowrider

Leaños spent months searching for a car across California before purchasing a 1968 Chevy Impala from a Chicano owner named Fidel in Napa. At a Creative Capital Foundation event, Leaños met printmaker Artemio Rodríguez, who had wanted to adapt his woodcut imagery to the surface of a vehicle. Their collaboration marked a fusion of traditions—autonomous media art and master printmaking—layered onto a car that itself bears historical weight: manufactured in Los Angeles at the height of civil rights movements and urban racial unrest.

The vehicle was extensively prepped and sanded by hand. Rodríguez’s woodcuts were scanned, digitally modified in Photoshop, and cut onto a masking tape-like adhesive material in sheets. These adhesive stencils were meticulously applied to the car after it was painted white. Once the entire body was masked with Rodríguez’s designs, the Impala was painted black. The adhesive was then carefully removed, revealing the imagery as white silhouettes against the black paint—producing an effect akin to reverse relief printing or a large-scale serigraph on steel. A final clear coat sealed the surface, transforming the car into a mobile monochrome print, a ritual object, and a contested archive of cultural memory.

Inside, the Impala was retrofitted with new upholstery, carpet, a high-end stereo system, a DVD player, and a digital archive of ¡Radio Muerto! programming—transforming the car into a living mausoleum of cultural memory.

Symbolism and Design Motifs

The Hood
The hood features “La Katrina”—a reinterpretation of Posada’s iconic Catrina figure—now spelling her name with a “K” in reference to Hurricane Katrina. Surrounded by hurricane satellite imagery rendered as flowers, this image critiques environmental racism and class-based abandonment in the wake of the New Orleans disaster.

The Trunk
The trunk maps four colonial trajectories across California:

1. El Camino Real (now Highway 101), tracing the colonial mission system.

2. Gold Rush Wagon Trails of Manifest Destiny.

3. The “Iron Snake” railroad built by Chinese laborers.

4. Route 66, ushering in modern car culture and Westward migration.

On either side, a Mexican campesino and an Indigenous figure bear witness to land theft and the onset of privatization. A “Burning Wagon”—the emblem of Burning Wagon Productions—punctuates this visual historiography.

The Roof
Atop the Impala sits the “Muertuvian Man,” a satirical Chicanx parody of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Framed by four directions, he represents hubris, colonial rationalism, and is rendered in skeletal form—mocking Enlightenment ideals through the critical humor of Día de los Muertos.

The Sides
One flank of the car portrays the global war machine—a militarized leviathan driven by greed and imperial aggression. The opposing side mirrors this critique with Rodríguez’s signature three-headed beast, a visual metaphor for consumption, conquest, and unchecked power.

Hubcaps and Rear Fender
These surfaces honor the original architects of lowrider culture: working-class Chicano/as who repurposed postwar auto technologies into an aesthetic and political practice of slow cruising, public spectacle, and community gathering. These tributes are rendered not in chrome perfection, but with intentional imperfection—rejecting the over-sanitized aesthetics of car shows in favor of lived history.

The Politics of Imperfection

El Muertorider is not a pristine show car. Unlike the hyper-polished aesthetics of competitive lowrider exhibitions, this “dead lowrider” embraces imperfection as part of its story. It stands as a living artwork—a vehicle for memory, critique, and cultural expression. Rooted in the Chicanx tradition of cruising, it evokes a California driving experience shaped by a rasquache aesthetic, resistance to policing culture, creativity in the face of oppression, and community gathering.

From the 1970s onward, lowrider cruising was systematically targeted through anti-cruising ordinances, discriminatory policing, and urban redesign that sought to remove lowriders from public view. Yet despite decades of marginalization, cruising culture has not only endured—it has resurged in recent years, reclaiming visibility in urban centers and gaining wider cultural recognition as a legitimate and vital expression of Chicanx life, artistry, and self-determination.

Designed as an interactive installation, El Muertorider invites visitors to enter the vehicle, sit inside, and engage directly with its built-in media system—listening to independently produced radio, watching animations, and inhabiting a space shaped by both mourning and resistance. In doing so, the work transforms the lowrider into a site of embodied remembrance, political reflection, and cultural continuity.