"California is a garden of eden,
A paradise for you and for me,
But believe it or not,
You won't find it so hot,
If you ain't got the do re mi."
Unknown Author
Gangs, Graffiti, Race, and Space:
Communication from the Subaltern
Presented at the Rethinking Marxism 2000 Conference
This paper is a consideration of the development of Latino gangs and the communicative acts that have evolved in that subcultural context, such as graffiti and lowriding. The importance of placing such acts in the arena of urban spatial and racial divides is seen as key in working towards an understanding of how hegemonic and coercive forms are subverted in a subaltern community. This paper is an attempt to situate gangs and graffiti and lowriding in a theoretical structure that takes into account how these forms serve to resist the unequal terms offered minority and immigrant communities in the urban context. While much of the literature approaches gangs from a criminological standpoint and elides the resistent nature of such groups, a critical studies or ethnographic approach to understanding gang culture can develop a more strategic positioning of how and what gangs communicate.One of the things we all share in common as humans is the act of communicating, of voicing ourselves. This act is legally situated in the U.S. in the right to freedom of expression, and this has been seen as one of the cornerstones of a democracy. But by definition a legal situation has borders and limits, so inevitably a legal situation creates insiders and outsiders. The communication act of someone on the outside of the legal situation then becomes a contested act, an act performed under penalty, against authority. When a community systematically finds itself on the outside of a society's legally defined rights and boundaries, even the existence of the community comes into question. As a result, the cotidian acts of such a community become acts of infidelity to the state, of agitation, and of resistance. For a subaltern community, one under duress for its difference and subjected to a dominant ideology and a state apparatus that it has no control over, walking and talking can become criminal acts. Economic inequality and systematic exclusion have pushed race-, class-, and gender-defined communities in the United States into this position, and this paper is an attempt to examine how one community has developed a system of resistance under this type of duress.
The scope here is limited to a minority subculture within Latino and urban culture, since of course not all Latinos spray graffiti, paint murals, drive lowriders, or have gang tattoos. Certain cultural expressions have become emblematic of a visible part of the Latino culture, and a style has developed that exhibits itself through distinct clothing and music and cars and a way of life that a growing body of literature has documented. This paper is an exploration of the roles graffiti and car culture have played as confiscations of space in the racialized and marginalized community that is the barrio. My argument is that these appropriations of the private and public arena make an act of resistance out of lifeways and communication acts that are defined as criminal and as other by the state and by the dominant culture.
Latinos have been ranching in what is now the southwestern U.S. since the California missions were established in the 1500's, but the population is now a minority. Demand for labor in the north and the social conditions in Mexico led to increased immigration, so that by the early 1900's, Mexican-American communities were established in many U.S. industrial and agricultural areas, especially in Texas and the Southwest, in Chicago, and in California. Immigration was for economic reasons and so flowed into areas of economic development like the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles. As economically marginalized labor, Latinos were forced into lowpaying jobs and into the racialized space of the barrio. The poverty of this community and its surveillance by the state led to the incarceration of many Latinos. Class and race have always been an indicator of the percentage of a community that will spend time in confinement, and U.S. prisons have high percentages of minorities and the poor. Latino communities in U.S. prisons probably did more to further the development of gangs than any other single factor, and by the 1920's and 1930's, there were gangs in the barrio. These gangs arose out of the marginalized labor force residing in the Chicano communities exisiting on the fringes of many cities. Phillips (1999:108) writes "Los Angeles's barrios developed on the outskirts of towns or in highly industrialized areaswhere migrants constituted the majority of the labor force." Similar to a Mexican tradition of La Palomilla, the cohort of young men in a community who formed a clique, gangs became an urban phenomenon that found fertile ground in the Chicano communities from El Paso to Chicago to Los Angeles. The Bracero program and continued immigration from Mexico brought lots of young men into the cities, and there they found existing gangs that assimilated them into a subculture with its own speech and dress. Out of El Paso came the Pachuco, which Lipsitz (1994:84) traces to a gang of marijuana traffickers in the city in the 1930's. Some of the gangs of today, such as , such as White Fence, 18th Street and Tortilla Flats in Los Angeles can trace their evolution back to the original Pachucos.
The Great Depression brought a mass migration of poor from across the U.S. to Los Angeles., and it was probably in this period that an African-American style, the zoot suit, appeared. This became the Pachuco dress in a subculture that included the first low-riders and the multi-racial dance clubs on streets like Central Avenue and Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles. Lipsitz writes of "'slick chicks' who associated with male street gangs and whose long coats, draped slacks, huarache sandals, and pompadour hairdos constituted the female version of the zoot-suit style." (1984:84). The 1943 Zoot Suit riots saw this style attacked by anglos, as white servicemen entered the barrios of Los Angeles and assaulted Chicano youth. The city officials were accomplices in this racially motivated violence, and Lipsitz found that "The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution making it a criminal offense to wear a zoot suit, and Los Angeles police officers did their part by slashing the clothing of the zoot-suiters they arrested." (1984:83).. Marginalized economically and subjected to such antagonisms from the white majority and under constant police surveillance and the threat of arrest, Latino youth entered a lifestyle that took them in and out of the gangs and prisons, into chronic unemployment, and institutionalized the gang lifestyle in the Chicano community.
This community continues to fight for space and place in a world owned and operated by the industrial and economic concerns of the white majority. Since the poor often don't own the land or home they inhabit, an appropriation of livable space must occur, and the rest of this essay considers how Chicanos have seized walls and streets and sidewalks as their own.
The Spacialization of Race and The Automobile
The economic violence, the race hate, and the fear directed at the minority peoples on the part of the white majority can be seen in the development of Los Angeles as a city. Originally a Mexican community divided among several vast ranches, Los Angeles has in this century become a flourishing industrial and moviemaking center, and economic pressure began to push the Chicano and Black community out of the prosperous center. As race-based restrictive covenants and redlining by banks denied Chicanos and Blacks access to housing, minorities were pushed into segregated areas, especially central Los Angeles and the area east of the L.A. river, which would become the vast Chicano neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. Raul Villa (1999) found a systematic expansion by white communities and industry that pushed Chicanos and other minority communities out of central areas like Pio Pico and Olvera Street in the 1910's and 20's, and led to the destruction of a Chicano neighborhood where Dodger Stadium now stands. The public trolley system was dismantled to make way for private automobile culture and the demands for more and more asphalt put even more pressure on the barrios, eventually destroying and vivisecting Chicano communities with the freeway system that continues to darken the skies of the city. Villa notes that Chicano communities had to fight to even have freeway onramps put into their communities.
Car culture transformed L.A., and the separation of work and home predicated a need for the labor force to drive. As economically distressed workers, Chicanos by necessity became automobile mechanics, since paying for repairs was beyond their means. As used car owners, a unique set of skills developed around the second hand auto. A style developed that marked the car as identifiably Chicano and a statement was sent out to the viewing public of the freeway and avenue. The lowrider aesthetic employed techniques of chopping and lowering cars, fancy paint and chromed metal in order to capture attention for what for many was the most expensive piece of personal property they owned. In lieu of home ownership, car culture came to be a personal expression of style that allowed the Chicano lowrider to create a web of spatial and visual dominance that linked streets and barrios from San Francisco and the Central Valley to Tijuana. The lowrider outshined all but the newest cars, and so functioned as a way to be seen in a manner that placed the lowrider at the center of attention and competed for social prestige in the newly mobile car culture. Bright (1995:91) found that "The presence of such a cultural alternative [the lowrider] allows for the reworking of the limitations of mobility placed on racialized cultures in the United States, especially in a city such as Los Angeles with a legacy of surveillance and conflicts between racial minorities and the police." The walls of the barrio were created by the freeway, but the freeways also let Chicano style flourish and cross-pollinate across a much less isolated spatial dimension. Police and government responded accordingly, and laws soon prohibited practices of cruising, of driving too slow, of having a car too low, of tinting windows too dark. Skills learned in the factories of the military-industrial complex were applied to the Chicano auto, and hydraulics were installed that allowed the height of the car to be controlled as a means of complying with California State Vehicle Code requirements while allowing the car to drop once the watchful eye was turned. (Bright, 1995:105-6). Skills of metal plating and machining learned in wartime factories were applied to the auto, and the Chicano lowrider has developed as a premier site of the construction of Chicano expression. The lowrider functioned as a key form in L.A. that integrated a multi-ethnic car culture across the region. Bright (1995:104) found that "Important sites included integrated performance venues, clubs in working-class parts of town, and the cruising strips and diners found in all parts of Los Angeles. In this milieu, cars became integral to youth culture activities."
Graffiti and Property
Ancient rocks in the southwestern U.S. bear the scars of centuries of graffiti by indigenous taggers carrying flint points instead of Krylon, and graffiti is another universal human expression that crosses cultures and continents. Graffiti has been received as an artform unparalleled in the urban U.S. context, and it now hangs in the galleries of New York and L.A. Part of the HipHop skillset, along with the turntable, rapping, and breakdancing, graffiti in New York City in the 1970's brought it into the public eye as art. Phillips (1999) has documented the extensive history of the form in L.A., with a variety of styles dating back to the 1930's. Only in the last few decades has it received recognition as an intricate and highly skilled use of a medium, but for decades it has been prosecuted as a criminal offense. Kids with spray paint have been chased and killed, harassed and legislated against, beaten and imprisoned. The war against graffiti continues in most U.S. urban areas, and as HipHop culture prospers, the rural and suburban U.S. is receiving its share of tagger crews. This crime against property is interesting because the objective is not theft. The profits of graffiti writing come from recognition and an appropriation of private property and visually public space, property that the tagger will never have a chance to own. When the Chicano neighborhoods of Los Angeles were vivisected by freeways, the view out of the barrio was blocked by grey concrete. By painting the walls with messages of place and name, Chicano youth are able to "own" the wall until the graffiti removal crew arrives. By placing tags on freeways, suddenly the gang and their barrio can name itself into the consciousness of commuter L.A., competing with billboards for space in the hyper-commercial urban landscape. Phillips (1999) traces stylistic developments since the 1960's, and notes different forms among the two main sources: HipHop taggers and gangs. The gang graffiti predates the tagger style by decades. Phillips writes that "Through graffiti and tattoos, Chicano gang members represent themselves and their position within a larger Chicano gang political system that spans California and the Southwest." By placing their name across the urban landscape the prolific tagger gains recognition not just around a neighborhood but across the city. Private property in the barrio is a scarce product, especially for poor youth who own little worth more than their walkman and sneakers. By tagging in the private and public domain, graffiti can invert property relations for a time, imposing new ownership on the visual space of the city. Whether tagger or gang graffiti, the illegalized act situates the author on the outside of the law, and posits a resistance to forces that control so much of the life of the poor: social services, police, landlords, banks and bill collectors, school principals and parole officers. Graffiti is a message to all of these economic and social disruptions that mar the life of those without the resources or racial characteristics to be a part of the status quo.
Conclusion
The so-called Latin Boom is a recognition of the economic and political successes the Latino community, as generations of Latinos have finally gathered sufficient critical mass to make a dent on Madison Avenue accounts. Millions of Latinos have achieved middle-class lifestyles and liveable wages in the last fifty years, and the hyperbole about a Latin Boom finally recognizes that. Chicanos have fought for political power and economic freedom at least since 1910, but even the Brown Power movement of the 1960's was never hailed as a Latin boom, and neither was the United Farm Workers. Only when Wall Street accountants noticed the buying power of the affluent Chicano upper and middle class did the press proclaim a Latin boom. But 27% of Latinos were living below the poverty level in 1997 (Heinz, Folbre, 2000:77) and Latino men earned just 63 cents on the dollar of the white full-time wage. (Ib. cit.) Fusco, (1993:67) calls it "superficial assimilation through consumerism and tokenism [that] can be lauded as a sign of the mainstream's acquiesence while the fundamental changes needed to bring out a more profound form of equity are still thwarted at every turn." For a population that will be 25% of the of the U.S. population by 2050, the current economic situation of Latinos remains such that the social conflict with the state will continue, as unemployed youths continue to follow a pattern of gangs and prisons. Eradicating gangs is attacking the symptom of larger societal problems like income inequality and distribution of private property, and is no more feasible than burning and bombing Vietnamese villages was for destroying the Viet Cong. By nature gangs operate around the reaches of law enforcement, and concerted attacks on the Chicano community to smash gangs have only cemented the system and validated and mythologized the gang as the viable alternative for marginalized youth. Part of the reason that Chicanos and other groups have developed their own cultural forms is that unlike white immigrant groups that assimilated in a few generations, people of color have been systematically excluded from the cultural forms of a society designed around the needs and desires of the white majority. Graffiti and lowriders play important roles in the Chicano community, and can be seen as acts of resistance in a community under seige.
Bibliography
Bright, B.J. 1995. 'Remappings: Los Angeles Lowriders' in Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity, ed. Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Bakewell. Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press.
Cabezas, O. y Téllez, D.M. 1984. La Insurrección de Las Paredes: Pintas y Graffiti de
Nicaragua. Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua/Ediciones Monimbó.
Fusco, C. 1993. 'Passionate Irreverence: The Cultural Politics of Identity'. In
The Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Sussman et. Al. Eds. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Harris, M.G. 1988. Cholas: Latino Girls and Gangs. New York: AMS Press.
Heinz, J. & Folbre, N. 2000. The Ultimate Field Guide to the U.S. Economy.
New York: The New Press.
Huff, C.R. 1990. Gangs in America. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
LeClerc, G., Villa, R., and Dear, M.J., eds. 1999. La Vida Latina en L.A.: Urban Latino
Cultures. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Lipsitz, G. 1994. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940's.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Moore, J.W. 1991. Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Paredes, A. 1958. With His Pistol in His Hand: a Border Ballad and Its Hero.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Phillips, S.A. 1999. Wallbangin': Graffiti and Gangs in Los Angeles.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rodriguez, J. 1998. Eastside Stories: Ganglife in East L.A.
New York, NY: powerHouse Books.
Sheldon, R.G., Tracy, S.K., and Brown, W.B. 1997. Youth Gangs in American Society.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Thrasher, (1927)
Venegas, D. 1984. Las Aventuras de Don Chipote o Cuando Los Pericos Mamen. Mexico, D.F.: SEP/CEFNOMEX.
Vigil, J.D. 1988. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press.
