The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City by Eric Avila (review)

In 1999 I moved into a semiconverted warehouse in Oakland, California. It was filled with a shifting array of artists, activists, and punks, including the Milwaukee-born Puerto Rican artist Brian Barreto. Barreto’s creations were idiosyncratic, ranging from glass jewelry to furry hats and gorgeous, elaborate shadow-puppet shows. As a venue for events, the ware-house hosted frequent performances and occasionally morphed into a gallery for visual art. For one show, Barreto crafted a huge cardboard sculpture of interlocking freeway over-passes and underpasses. While it captured well the impersonal and forbidding maze that dominates the contemporary urban environment, the cardboard contrasted sharply with the unyielding concrete of real-life freeways. Cardboard is pliable and temporary, whereas concrete is of course hard, heavy, and far more permanent. In addition, the sculpture, while covering as much ground as a small room, rose only about waist high, offering viewers the sensation of towering over what would normally be an imposing landscape. The size and medium of the piece symbolically brought freeways down to a human scale, putting them in their place, so to speak, as subordinate to the human communities they purportedly serve. At the same time, it acknowledged the abstract sinuous beauty of the highway that has long fascinated artists.

I was reminded of Barreto’s sculpture while reading Eric Avila’s The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, in which he explores the criticism and creative appropriation of freeways by urban communities of color across the nation. Avila argues that these responses constitute an “invisible freeway revolt” in the highly political realm of cultural production (4). In the postwar era the creation of the interstate highway system dramatically transformed urban landscapes across the United States, as neighborhoods were demolished or divided up by the labyrinthine construction of freeways. Deeply interwoven with broader schemes for “slum clearance” and urban redevelopment, the path of the highway was not random; “blighted” neighborhoods—often neighborhoods of color, given the racialized use of blighted—were often specifically targeted to be razed in the name of interstate progress. The plans of the technocrats did not go uncontested, however. In cities across the country, beginning in San Francisco in the late 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, communities organized to block freeway construction in their neighborhoods. This movement has been mythologized as the “freeway revolt,” a groundswell of grassroots activism against powerful state and corporate interests.

Avila notes, however, that the most prominent victories of the freeway revolt were not truly won by the “little guy” (or the “little old woman” portrayed in the 1961 children’s book Make Way for the Highway). Rather, they were most often won by communities that could transform race and class privilege into political leverage, as with the successful battle that Jane Jacobs and her allies waged against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s. Avila explains that “the path that urban freeways took in the course of their construction followed … the subjective axes of racial and class power,” but he emphasizes that “the path that freeways did not take followed those coordinates as well. That is why there is no Beverly Hills Freeway” (51, 52). The “visible freeway revolt,” Avila argues, thus actually served to reaffirm racialized patterns of neighborhood isolation and disinvestment by further relegating freeway construction to the communities with the least political power to resist. While Beverly Hills defended itself against the intrusion of highway construction, no fewer than six major freeways carved up East Los Angeles in the 1960s. Avila acknowledges that urban communities of color sometimes organized directly in opposition to highway construction (as has been prominently documented by Raymond Mohl), but he insists that we must look beyond formal protest in order to fully understand the...