Chapter 4 of Folklore of the Freeway was my favorite, as it talked about how identity politics may affect the ways an artists captures a structure or landscape as the freeway. Avila focuses on the White/Chicano dichotomy of the art, which is important, but I was also interested in thinking about how the highway can serve as a gendered space. In Avila's book, there is no mention of gender as it plays it out through mobility within the structure of the freeway. On the contrary, women are depicted as antagonists to the freeway, which was the case for the most part. It is important to consider how Chicana women used art, for example, to record the memory of displacement brought upon by the construction of freeways. It's important that Avila discusses the ways that Chicana women were proactive, creative storytellers and critics through art. But I think I would have liked to hear some discussion about how Chicana women and mobility on the freeway - were women driving? If so, was it a liberatory experience? How can we think of the highway as a non-oppressive space that offers possibility for women, as a sphere of its own?

I therefore want to push back a little against Avila's positing of white and/or white female artists like Opie as depicting the freeway in a non-gendered way. Vija Clemin's painting Freeway actually depicts the experience of driving/riding on the freeway as being in a private space looking out into the private realm. In this way, I think we can think about freeway art as not only being about the external and mere infrastructure, but also being affective in the way that Chicano artists were creating their art. I just wanted to bring up this example to nuance Avila's claim about white artists and their abstract interpretations of the highway. For more on Celmin's painting: http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/worksofart/freeway/

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