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    Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles
    Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles
    Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles
    Ebook119 pages31 minutes

    Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles

    By François Chastanet

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    Cholo writing originally constitues the handstyle created by the Latino gangs in Los Angeles. It is probably the oldest form of the graffiti of names in the 20th century, with its own aesthetic, evident long before the East Coast appearance and the explosion in the early 1970s in Philadelphia and New York. The term cholo means lowlife , appropriated by Chicano youth to describe the style and people associated with local gangs; cholo became a popular expression to define the Mexican American culture. Latino gangs are a parallel reality of the local urban life, with their own traditions and codes from oral language, way of dressing, tattoos and hand signs to letterforms. These wall-writings, sometimes called the newspaper of the streets , are territorial signs which main function is to define clearly and constantly the limits of a gang s influence area and encouraging gang strength, a graffiti made by the neighborhood for the neighborhood. Cholo inscriptions has a speficic written aesthetic based on a strong sense of the place and on a monolinear adaptation of historic blackletters for street bombing. Howard Gribble, an amateur photographer from the city of Torrance in the South of Los Angeles County, documented Latino gang graffiti from 1970 to 1975. These photographs of various Cholo handletterings, constituted an unique opportunity to try to push forward the calligraphic analysis of Cholo writing, its origins and formal evolution. A second series of photographs made by Francois Chastanet in 2008 from East LA to South Central, are an attempt to produce a visual comparison of letterforms by finding the same barrios (neighborhoods) and gangs group names more than thirty five years after Gribble s work. Without ignoring the violence and self-destruction inherent to la vida loca (or the crazy life , referring to the barrio gang experience), this present book documents the visual strategies of a given sub-culture to survive as a visible entity in an environement made of a never ending sprawl of warehouses, freeways, wood framed houses, fences and back alleys: welcome to LA suburbia, where block after block, one can observe more of the same. The two exceptionnal photographical series and essays are a tentative for the recognization of Cholo writing as a major influence on the whole Californian underground cultures. Foreword by Chaz Bojorquez.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDokument Press
    Release dateOct 30, 2015
    ISBN9789185639854
    Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles

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      Book preview

      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

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