Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 23

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
to affirm this on a micro-political level; however, enclosure may not quite be what was
occurring. Brown’s use of “early modern” theory creates a dependence for her on the erasure,
e.g. enclosure freed people when it actually was based on forcing them into industrial
work and slavery and genocide for African Americans and Native Americans, and
increasing land loss and racism against Mexican-Americans. Analysing Chicano Park
and other mural sites through Marxist histories and theories, which Brown (2010) did
not consider, illuminates how walls of freeways enclosed and took away neighbourhood
commons. Yet, how does race play into this?
Racially, different imagery was likely necessary for Chicano Park. White people displaced
from their land because of the construction of Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah Valley
National Park in Virginia wrote letters to government officials in accepted discourses
to legitimate their community (Powell 2007). This response to primitive accumulation
may have been more effective for whites in the 1930s, who could potentially situate
themselves in middle-class whiteness by obtaining a good job. Mexican-Americans
tried to mainstream by self-identifying as Spanish, i.e. European not Mexican, and conforming
to expected stereotypes of a culture that hated Mexicans but ironically enjoyed
Spanish Mission culture (Forbes 1973:119) and by using the term Mexican-American,
thus evading overt identification with Mexico. By the 1960s, still oppressed young Mexican-Americans
instead legitimated themselves through Mexican imagery, which, if it
appealed to whiteness at all, appealed to white-hippy’s infatuation with the exotic and
psychedelic. Just substitute India or Japan for Mexican culture. In some ways then, Chicano
Park could be seen as a competition to be similar to Other culture’s exalted by the
Beat Generation and counter culture, but one appropriated not by people from outside
of this cultural group, but by people more or less from the inside. 2 Yet, how might a reaction
to primitive accumulation look like that neither accepted mainstream discourses
nor mainstream land ownership dispute tactics?
Spatially Opposing the Material Aspects of Land Loss Due to
Primitive Accumulation Which Is the Cause of Immigration
Chicano Park was created in an area where families were driven off their land because
of the construction of a highway. “According to Victor Ochoa, a Chicano Park mural coordinator
from 1974 through 1979, ‘They threw Interstate 5 in the barrio, taking something
like 5000 families out of the barrio’" (Anguiano N.D.). Since these families were
2 This, however, is somewhat problematic because Chicano Park and other Chicana/o imagery not
only celebrated Mexican culture, but also indigenous culture to explore dispossession from land
which may have been too backwards looking and thus contradictory to “revolutionary” ideals of the
Chicano movement (Berelowitz 2005:330). Using Native American culture for revolution seems to
me similar to the Beat Generations and 1960s countercultures appropriation of Asian and Native
American cultures. However, Berelowitz’s critique seems steeped in a teleological Marxist viewpoint,
which cannot account for the importance of traditional practices in commoning, though the critique
of cultural misappropriation still holds.
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