Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 25

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
bolism of United Farm Workers’ stepped eagle (painted in red in the upper left-hand corner)
and Reyes Lopez Tijerna’s 1960s movement to reassert Mexican-American rights
to land grants. The loss of land grants was an aspect of primitive accumulation following
the U.S.-Mexico war (see Dunbar-Ortiz 2007). Similarly, the placement in Las Vegas,
New Mexico, is significant, since according to Gunn (2016), this was a site of the loss of
communal land, i.e. commons and, therefore, is accurately portrayed by the term primitive
accumulation. Similarly, the murals in Lincoln Park in El Paso, Texas, in an incident
that almost happened in Chicano Park San Diego, were slated for demolition. As Smith
(2007) notes the destruction of land for highways, and other forms of eminent domain,
is a contemporary form of primitive accumulation. The Women’s Building (created in
1979) in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, has murals of Central American
and Mexican women’s themes painted on it and provides community services. It
is thus a form of commoning that fights urban primitive accumulation. The mural, “La
Cultura Contiene la Sevilla de Resistancia que Resplendor de la Flor del Liberacion/
Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance, Which Blossons into the Flower of Liberation”
by Miranda Bergman and O'Brien Thielein, painted in 1984 and 2014 in Balmey Alley in
the Mission District, speaks to the expulsion from land created by the U.S. involvement
in Latin America. Outside of the U.S. Southwest, Casa Aztlan in Chicago, Illinois, used
both murals with Mexican-American themes painted on the building and an online list
of demands for the community to create a communal space (Pilsen Alliance 2017). (See
Lulay (2017) about the creation of murals, there to affirm Mexican-American cultural
identity in the 1970s and its recent destruction.)
In Texas, visual interventions have challenged land loss caused by U.S. anti-immigration
policy and emphasized environmental temporal rhythms. For example, Carlos Parra’s
“Nomadic Border/La Frontera Nomada” includes photographic and written mixtures
of ecological and immigrant issues about the United States. This echoes changes
in environmentalism to reflect the ecological viewpoints and needs of Latina/os and
other non-white people. Mexico borderlands on the northern side of Tamaulipus, Mexico.
According to Parra: “Although the Río Grande has its human-caused dangers, its
cultural and natural history is much, much deeper than what is often presented in the
news. Currently much of this quiet riverine forest is in danger of being destroyed by the
U.S.’s border wall project” (Parra 2019). Another critique of border enforcement-led
ecological destruction that uses art to occupy a physical space is the “Welcome Wall” at
the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas (across the border from Tamaulipus),
which will lose wildlife habitat land if U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s planned border
wall is built. On April 26, 2019, the “Welcome Wall” was begun by a multiethnic group
of street artists. “The colorfully irreverent wall is designed to be a conceptual message
board for an ongoing discussion about the border, wall, wildlife and immigration issues”
(Moyer 2019).
Four installations situate immigration experience in international (Indigenous, Mexican,
and Central American), not United States, time and space. The Cross Project planted
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