Writing on Desert Walls: A History of Muralism and Graffiti in the El Paso Borderlands

This dissertation examines the socio-political and cultural nexus between murals, graffiti, and government responses to these forms of public art and artistic practices in the El Paso borderlands. The study begins in with the establishment of El Paso as a capitalist landscape during the 1880s, and continues through the 1930s, when Emilio García Cahero, one of the only Mexicans to get a Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural commission during the New Deal era, painted his fresco series “Mining and Metallurgy” at Texas College of Mines (now known as UTEP) and ends the 2000s, when the city of El Paso revamped and consolidated its public arts program under a single institution, the Museum and Cultural Affairs Department (MCAD). This dissertation aims to demonstrate how, from rock paintings through urban landscapes, the writing on the wall allows the voiceless to be heard and seen. A history of graffiti and murals in the El Paso borderlands reveals the limits and parameters of what is considered legal and commodifiable, thereby opening a critical dialogue among artists, the state, and the citizenry. This dissertation breaks from the historiographical obsession with New York City and Los Angeles as the core venues of graffiti and muralism (and art in general), but instead argues that peripheral cities, such as El Paso, are not peripheral at all, but central to nation-building projects, contributing to a greater understanding of graffiti and muralism in contested landscapes. This history of graffiti and muralism in the El Paso borderlands reveals how writing on the walls helped transform the natural landscape into a landscape of profit.