Freeway Revolt Summary

The reading this week brought to my attention that historic events have a way of repeating themselves. In Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Avila explains that during the “Freeway Revolt” there were different ways that communities organized and the types of issues they were fighting against. These issues and organization structures mirror current day protests. Likewise, the connections between how women were treated with respect to protests during the “Freeway Revolt” and the recent Women's match are astounding. In the context of these two events, white women are seen as saints for fighting a fight that doesn’t affect them, while women of color as ridiculed for making a big deal out of nothing. Avila makes a point to contrasts the experiences of

The sub-section “Women of the Freeway Revolt” focuses on women who made political and media coverage for their participation in the “Freeway Revolt”. Unsurprisingly all of the women in this part of the chapter are white upper and middle-class women from influential families. All of them started out as housewives and had the time and resources to participate in the freeway revolt. These women were seen as “mothers [that] kept insisting and wouldn’t give up” they were an actual force to be reckoned with. In contrast, the next section “Feminism under the Freeway” the role of women of color is finally explained. Unlike the white women in the previous section, these women don’t make any political gains or receive media coverage. Their work is not able to stop the Freeways from intersecting their communities. Instead, they allowed to create murals on the sides of the Freeway and under bridges. They try to repurpose these spaces and make them into a form of resistance against the oppressive nature of these new roads. These women use their culture and voices to “bring life, even to the deadening spaces created by men.” Though they were not able to prevent the creation of highways like their white counterparts-due to race, socioeconomic status, first language, etc.-they were able to facilitate cultural