Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 24

THE AESTHETICS OF A MOVEABLE BORDER
Chicana/o, i.e. Mexican-American, rather than white families, the California Transit Authority
and San Diego carried out primitive accumulation in a racialized way, because
power was exercised over an oppressed group in a way that this oppressed group thought
was because of their race.
Chicano Park was also spatial response to primitive accumulation. An orthodox reading
of Marx’s (1976) primitive accumulation may make it seem as if its victims migrated to
cities and became proletariat, or in Nail’s reading, was only about losing land (2016).
However, Federici (2004) and Linebaugh (2008) expose a long-term process of land
dispossession. Chicano Park thus can be situated in a history of non-passive reactions to
primitive accumulation. As Marco Anguiano puts it:
Unlike other parks, Brown Berets fired raised shotguns in militant salute
while a Mexican flag was raised and waved defiantly during Chicano
Park Day ceremonies. And unlike other parks, Chicano Park was taken
by militant force by a community angered by decades of neglect, ignorance
and racism.
(Anguiano N.D.)
Thus, Chicano Park fits into anti-land seizure struggle and does so in a way that, irrespective
of its visual images, elicits a Mexican political stance and was physically taken, not
bought or regained through litigation. Not using litigation differs from land grant heirs
in New Mexico who unsuccessfully used land occupation techniques and later turned to
litigation (see Correia 2012). Chicano Park became a legally recognized national park
47 years after it was physically, and illegally, occupied. Yet, how might this be visually
depicted?
If we return to the theological aspect of walls and sovereignty mentioned in the previous
section, and see Chicano Park as unfinished, then a combination of redressing primitive
accumulation’s spatial division and imposing pre-Columbian imagery in U.S. space,
seems more effective to analysing murals that uses such imagery to imagine how to heal
the freeway’s destruction of Longan Heights. On a pylon under the highway towards the
Coronado Bridge, there is a mural with a protestor amidst a blood-red (e.g. dangerous)
San Diego Bay, and an Aztec man in a reclaimed San Diego Bay. “All the Way to the Bay”
is written in large, legible letters on this mural. The significance of this is described as
“The ‘All the Way to the Bay’ (1970–88) campaign spearheaded by Ronnie Trujillo of
the CPSC asserted the right of Barrio Logan residents to have the only access to the bay
and to extend Chicano Park all the way to the waterfront. Activists challenged the San
Diego Port District and other agencies from San Diego to Sacramento. Ground was broken
for the bay park in 1987 and the park completed in 1990” (Anguiano N.D).
Other U.S. Southwest murals explore primitive accumulation. The People’s History of El
Norte in Las Vegas, New Mexico, uses the Mexican-immigrant labour movement sym-
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