Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles
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Cholo Writing - François Chastanet
www.dokument.org
foreword
Stroke As Identity
Chaz Bojórquez
Los Angeles may have the longest history of street writing in the world. Some say that an earlier style of LA graffiti goes back to the 1930s when the Latino shoeshine boys marked their names on the walls with daubers to stake out their spot on the sidewalk.
Before the invention of the spray cans, most LA graffiti was painted with paint and a brush, and the young men who lived by the Los Angeles River would use sticks and paint with the tar seeping from the ground. Those tar tags still exist today and trace our graffiti history back to the 1940s.
East LA graffiti has its own unique format called placas or «plaques», symbols of territorial street boundaries. Placas are graffiti painted walls with the names of a gang and its members, mostly painted on the limits or edges of their communities. They are pledges of allegiance to their neighborhood. Placas encourage gang strength, create an aura of exclusivity, and are always painted in black letters. The typical writer would be a young boy; I have never heard of a girl writing Cholo. The squarish, prestigious font used was called «Old English», a typeface meant to present a formal document to the public. All the names from a gang were written in lines that were flushed left and right, or names were stacked line over line and centered. Great care was taken to make them straight and clean. This layout or format is based on an ancient formula that demanded a headline, body copy, and a logo. These three major building blocks of corporate and public advertising can also describe the type layout from ancient Sumerian clay tablets to The Constitution of the United States and the modern layout of The Los Angeles Times. The headline states the gang or street name, the body copy is your roll call list of everyone’s gang name, and the logo refers to the person who wrote it by adding his tag to the end of the placa [pages 19, 22, 25, 27, 35]. This tradition of type, names and language has rarely deviated drastically and has been handed down from generation to generation. This style of writing, we now call «Cholo Graffiti». Cholo is much more than just graffiti. It’s a lifestyle. It exists only in the Southwest United States, but the best graffiti comes from East Los Angeles. This style of graffiti is written «by the neighborhood for the neighborhood». To quote Joseph Rodríguez (East Side Stories: Gang Life in East LA, PowerHouse Books, 1998), «la vida loca, or the crazy life, is what they call the barrio gang experience». This is a major difference between Cholo and New York wild style graffiti. In Los Angeles the graffiti is based on culture and race. In Cholo writing only one person writes for the whole gang and you tag only within your own territory. In New York graffiti, the emphasis is on being more of an individual and not about ethnic identity, where «getting up» all-city or all-state with your tag is more important than the group.
«Racism and poverty created the gangs, we had to protect ourselves», said old time Zoot