In "building: a simulacrum of power," completed in 2014, rafa esparza turns the handmade adobe brick into a vehicle for examining labor, inheritance, and the contested histories embedded in material culture. The work draws directly from the artist's collaborative process of making adobe bricks alongside his father, Ramon Esparza, at the Bowtie Project in Los Angeles, a gesture that fuses familial knowledge with a pointed critique of how structures of power are literally built and reproduced across generations. The adobe itself carries enormous symbolic weight, rooted in Indigenous and Mesoamerican building traditions that predate and persist beneath dominant architectural and political histories in the American Southwest. Esparza's practice consistently blurs the boundaries between performance, sculpture, and social engagement, and this work is no exception. By centering the body and its labor as both medium and message, he locates resistance within the act of making, proposing that the humblest materials can simultaneously uphold and subvert the power structures the title invokes. The word "simulacrum" is telling here, pointing to the ways dominant institutions reproduce themselves through spectacle and symbol, while the artist quietly inserts his own lineage into that conversation. Signed by the artist and currently held in the collection of the Hammer Museum, this work represents a significant moment in Esparza's evolving practice and stands as a compelling acquisition for collectors interested in politically engaged, process-driven art that speaks to questions of identity, place, and the construction of history.