Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 22

THE AESTHETICS OF A MOVEABLE BORDER
projects, smaller initiatives to bring both communities together and get
them excited around a certain topic. Both communities got together,
and you can see the results now. It is just generally trying to use the art
as a convener.
(Martinez, Laura October 25, 2019)
Gonzalez thus frames the murals not as a boost as creating cultural and community
unity. This wording potentially pushes urban governance away from arts-based property
development. The types of reasons given for this murals project are similar to the
non-commodified use of art in mural sites such as Chicano Park in San Diego, albeit
emanating from official government sources such as the City of Matamoros, the City of
Brownsville, Texas, the Mexican Consulate in Brownsville, Texas, and the U.S. Consulate
General in Matamoros, Texas.
U.S. Southwest muralism effaces the power of both the U.S.–Mexico border and bordering
within the United States. Price (2000) conceptualizes Chicana/o tattoos and muralism
as a simultaneous resistance to borders and bordering. Likewise, Sheren (2016:10)
sees Chicana/o murals as a reverse bordering�I have paraphrased this into I.R. terminology�of
Chicana/os against the rest of San Diego to establish community in Chicano
Park. This is somewhat problematic in a more long-term view, given the survival
of the park as a functioning community space. In both the sense of the U.S.–Mexico
border as well as the appropriation and resistance to bordering is by painting murals
on walls and pylons in Chicano Park. Brown (2010) explains that border walls lack any
hope of being complete, since they are more fictitious (or theological) because they cannot
solve the problem they create. Likewise, urban bordering could not be complete
because Chicana/os spatially resisted it. Yet, the anti-bordering latent in these murals
remains incomplete in a few dimensions. The first is the amount of land it could occupy.
The second is that it was never meant to be art only, but to: (1) retake all of Aztlán, (2)
create Aztlán as a nation-state in Logan Heights connected to international countries
(Berelowitz 2005:331–332), and (3) to also extend to the San Diego Bay and include a
ball park, a university, a no-charge hospital, a market, and a port to welcome immigrants
from Central and Latin America (from the Community Master Plan of Barrio Logan
(Berlowitz 2003:150 paraphrased in Berelowitz 2005:332).
Western modernist philosophy sometimes lends a theological aspect to enclosure. For
Carl Schmidt and John Locke, enclosing property was the genesis of sovereignty and
state (Brown 2010) for Schmidt, there cannot be a people without enclosure (Brown
2010). Similarly, the United States creates itself by creating borders. Similarly, to a certain
extent, the Chicana/o community recreated itself by enclosing white property in
Chicano Park. Enclosure in the Western tradition has been literally and metaphorically a
theological process, e.g. it first starts around shrines but enclosure through border walls
in the United States has become a method of self-protection of people (at least their goal
in perceiving the border wall this way) (Brown 2010). Chicano Park ironically seems
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