Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 21

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
From October 9 to 12, 2015, Cristóbal Martínez, Raven Chacon, and Kade L. Twist
(a.k.a. Postcommodity) displayed an installation called Repellent Fence that was made of
26, 10 feet in diameter balloons tethered to the ground floating 100 feet in the air across
the U.S.– Mexico border from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Arizona, in
the United States. The balloons mimicked bird repellent that did not work and used
traditional indigenous colours to critique the oppressive divisions caused by the U.S.–
Mexico border, especially how indigenous people (Postcommodity N.D.). According to
Twist, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, this was partially a critique
of how when the media, artists, and “thinkers” discusses the U.S.–Mexico borderlands,
they do not understand that border crossers are indigenous people (a point that is important
because indigenous people lived in the area long before the U.S.–Mexico border
existed) (Argesta 2017).
The Calle 16 project mural was created by Latina/os in Phoenix, Arizona, in response to
the anti-immigrant bill SB1070 and had similar aims. Mural artist Gennaro Garcia’s objective
is to paint Aztec imagery to express what he loves about Mexico, the country he
was born in and the United States where he immigrated (Kondo 2011). An organization,
Calle Diez y Seis, has evolved to direct murals and revitalizations of the 16 th Street area in
Phoenix (Arizona PBS 2011). Silvana Salcido Esparza, a female Latina chef, started the
project to counter many American’s negative images of Phoenix caused by the SB 1040
law (ibid). The project is in a Mexican-American neighbourhood, though it eschews
connection to Latina/o or Chicana/o movements and politics in general but�like other
murals mentioned�seeks to build community by involving local residents in artistic
creation (ibid).
A recent mural project affirms the interlinkage of Mexico and the United States all the
while prioritizing culture over commodified urban land use. On October 22, 2019,
four muralists, Marisa Latigo and Santos Villareal from Matamoros, Tamaulipus, and
Marcilina Gonzalez a University of Texas at Brownsville alumni, and Robert Ruiz from
Brownsville Texas, were chosen by the Brownsville Beautification Committee’s Murals
Without Borders committee to paint murals about a borderless world near The Casa
Nylon building, a municipal building in Brownsville, Texas. Discussion of the project,
while not intentionally Marxist, implies working to the side, if not beyond, the system of
capitalism. 1 Brownsville, Texas Director of Government and Community affairs director,
Ramiro Gonzalez, said:
It was the idea between two cities in trying to work together… a lot
of the times, we always focus on working together on economic development
or business and that kind of stuff.…The culture kind of goes
by the way side, and we are starting to work on some of these smaller
1 This approach echoes Félix Guattari’s idea of socialism operating within spaces of a still intact capitalist
economy (Guattari 2009:117).
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