Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 28

THE AESTHETICS OF A MOVEABLE BORDER
on websites. Images in Chicano Park, for example, juxtapose different times�Twentieth
Century America and pre-Columbian Mexico�and different places and ways of
using space�ecology and freeways. Maybe this is more apparent while walking around
the park, where one might encounter homeless people, community activists giving food
to homeless people, skateboarders, students researching the park, rather than viewing
mediated visions of the mural on the Internet. Park users also may choose to walk by
or use the park’s sports facilities rather than considering the murals. Suffice to say, there
is something both within and without the images that can elicit meaning and reaction.
Thus, these murals disorder time and space as much as they explain, albeit in a way that
aims to direct the viewer towards Aztlán, a semi-historical plane of existence but also
present and future possibility given the park’s incomplete project. This is cinematic in
a Deleuzian (1989) sense, because these murals not only tell, but also seek to make the
viewer think.
Yet, Deleuze’s thought, which responded to World War II’s urban destruction, better explains
primitive accumulation when combined with contemporary theories of borders.
Borders do not cleanly divide people or nation-states as in theories of “extensive division,”
but rather are intensive division: “adds a new path to the existing one like a fork
or a bifurcation producing a qualitative change of the whole continuous system. The
bifurcation diverges from itself while still being the ‘same’ pathway” (Nail 2016:3). Different
people will experience the border differently (Nail 2016:3). Imagery in Chicano
Park, and elsewhere, accordingly illuminates how freeway construction partially failed to
create clear urban borders. The imagery moreover amplifies how people experience borders
differently on ethnic, racial, and class registers�the border of the freeway is at once
liberating freedom for many San Diego residents allowing automotive motion at the expense
of Chicana/o residents, but also a possibility to affirm Chicana/o identity in the
moonscape ruins of primitive accumulation. This affirmation suggests not just showing
dangerous times to elicit fear or protest, but also the simultaneous use of pre-Columbian
art to affirm both Chicana/o identity and a positive identity.
Other artists, while not speaking so politically, have claimed that their art should be
open to interpretation based on the viewer’s own thoughts:
According to Gaytan, the murals are stories, ideas and carry many symbols
that viewers need to consider to understand the work. “That’s what
I try to teach people, see the whole picture, then make your own decision,”
he says. One of his murals depicts a heart with its arteries extending
all throughout the mural and below the heart it says: “Lincoln Park/
El Corazon de El Paso/Chicano Park.” Gaytan says that the extended
arteries represent the lanes on the freeway and highway and how they
all lead to the center.
(Montes 2014)
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