The road trip is a central pillar in the architecture of American mythology. The iconography of the open road—the highway disappearing into the horizon, the illusion of unrestricted mobility—has supplanted earlier frontier imagery as the dominant symbol of American freedom. Where once covered wagons, cowboys, and expansive mountain ranges symbolized the ideology of westward expansion and the American promise of reinvention, the modern road trip has become their post-industrial analogue. While the visual language has shifted, the underlying mythos remains the same: the suggestion of boundless opportunity, movement as liberation, and geography as a canvas for self-discovery and economic prosperity.

Yet, at its foundation, this mythology remains precisely that, a myth; it's composed of partial truths and systemic exclusions. The notion of the "open road" is not open to everyone. Structural inequalities render mobility itself a privilege. The poor, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised are not only excluded from this narrative; they are often subjected to the economic violence and erasure that dot and punctuate these very routes and their histories.

It is for this reason that the road trip serves as an ideal site of interrogation. Positioned at the core of national identity and symbolic projection, the American road trip provides an ideal subject through which to interrogate the very cultural fabric of the United States. To deconstruct the road trip is, in many ways, to deconstruct the myth of America itself.

This project will undertake artistic interrogation of several iconic American road trips, each with its own historical, political, and cultural significance. From the colonial history of the Pacific Coast Highway, to the economic violence underpinning the mythology of Route 66; from the narcopolitical landscape of Interstate 10—designated as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area—to the structural inequities mapped along the I-95, infamously known as the "Corridor of Shame," each chapter will explore a distinct critical focus. The structure of each chapter will emerge in response to my experience with—and relationship to—the specific route in question.