Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 14

THE AESTHETICS OF A MOVEABLE BORDER
expansion through colonialism. Colonialism has involved not just the conquest of foreign
lands and peoples but a conquest of agricultural and subsistence producers and
the accompanying appropriation of their lands, resources and labour” (Dunbar-Ortiz
2007:103–104). Yet, this colonialism does not seem to get better with the passage of
time and modernization. Instead, the loss of land created a persistent wish to regain land
for Mexicans-Americans whose ancestors were in the United States before 1848 and
dashed hopes for Mexicans that immigrated seeking a better life, thus “[t]he modern
Mexican and Mexican-American experience of the Southwest was one of repeated loss
and dispossession” (Berelowitz 2005:326).
Historical Context
The U.S. Southwest was part of Mexico before the end of the U.S.–Mexico War in 1848.
There was a variety of property arrangements ranging from hereditary to common lands
that differed from U.S. concepts of private property that could be bought and sold. This
property contained obligations for ecologically sound land use. Land was supposed to
be usable for multiple generations. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was supposed to
honour these, as happened with Florida and the Louisiana territories. California dealt
with the issue more efficiently than New Mexico. Many people who lived on land grants
in New Mexico lost their ability to live in or farm land and became migratory labourers
in the U.S. Southwest. These issues became prominent in a regional context with the
Chicano movement in the mid-1960s, an aggressive Latina/o movement based on the
idea that the U.S. Southwest was Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, which
belonged to Mexican descent peoples, not the United States. This vision later changed
to a psychological vision of a homeland and the movement partially collapsed under its
inability to properly include women, LGBTQ, and others in Chicana/o identity (Dernersesian
1993 paraphrased in Berelowitz 2005:330).
Despite the official territorial surrender of land to the United States in 1848, Mexico
impacted Chicano Park (a highly influential U.S. Southwest Chicana/o mural site) in
three distinct ways. First of all, after the Mexican Revolution, many Mexican immigrants
settled in California, thus altering the demographics of San Diego; secondly, the Mexican
revolution used murals to communicate ideology, especially afterwards. The Mexican
muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Riviera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, a.k.a. the
Three Giants, directly influenced Mexican-American muralism in Chicano Park. Thirdly,
murals in Chicano Park include images Mexican history, broadly speaking from pre-Columbian
mythology to the Mexican Revolution, to Twentieth Century emigration to the
United States.
Murals in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico have often been politically motivated rather
than to resize canvas-sized painting to fit on walls. Mexican murals aimed to sustain revolutionary
spirit and solidify the Mexican nation-state after the Mexican revolution and
in the 1920s (the ideal period of Mexican muralism, not the authoritarian governance af-
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