Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 13

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Introduction
This paper asks how muralism and other forms of visual art act as micro-political
interventions against macro-political violence against immigrants. In particular,
this paper examines how content in murals and artistic sites in the U.S. Southwest
not only help people remember persistent violent land loss in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico,
and Central America but also create “time-images” (Deleuze 1989) which diminish
the distance between safe times and dangerous times. Since these murals are about land
loss for an oppressed ethnic group, this imagery lies at the intersection between ethnic
identity and political economy. To avoid prioritizing memory over political protest,
this paper explores if imagery can create material spaces of resistance rather than just
imagined ones. This paper argues that protest art in the form of murals can comment on
racist bordering practices and partially reverse land loss that accompanies such practices.
Evidence comes from sites which are somewhat removed from the U.S.–Mexico border,
physically speaking, but nonetheless oppose it.
This paper does not attempt an exhaustive representative account of border art in the
U.S. Southwest since it is too large and has too long a history for this. Moreover, border
art is ever-evolving and a representative account could nostalgically privilege border art
that fits canonical ideals rather than newer art that responds to contemporary problems.
This paper analyses land loss not as loss of individual property, but of commons. Commons
are defined broadly here to include traditional ways of land use, plus what Davis
(2001) refers to as the urban commons of Latina/os that includes public space and
extended family networks as well as a variety of practices such as ecology, knowledge,
etc. (see Linebaugh 2011:16–23). Primitive accumulation refers to violent land loss processes
like: (1) the expulsion of Mexican-Americans from hereditary and common land
in New Mexico after 1848, (2) expulsion of (often indigenous) Mexicans (often indigenous)
from common lands in Mexico after N.A.F.T.A. in the 1990s and arguably led to
much of the immigration from Mexico to the United States, (3) the violent expulsion
of Central Americans in the 1980s due to U.S. support of right-wing governments; and
(4) the expulsion of Mexican-Americans, and others, for highway construction, or other
urban renewal projects. Land loss during primitive accumulation is significant beyond
property ownership because it stops traditional, often ecological knowledge (Toohey
2017:63–64). Primitive accumulation occurred outside of Europe. It is not a past-only
event. The European primitive accumulation that Marx focused on succeeded through
extreme violence against the European working class, the rise of slavery and colonialism
(where it was repeated) (Linebaugh 2008) and terrorizing women in Europe and European
colonies (Federici 2004).
When situating the abovementioned concepts of land loss in the singularities of land
loss in the U.S. Southwest, it is wrong to assume that internal migration or immigration
to U.S. cities remedied primitive accumulation. “[T]he conquest of the northern half
of México must be framed within the historical context of nineteenth-century capital
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