François Chastanet - Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles

foreword
Stroke As Identity
Chaz Bojrquez

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 everyones 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. Its 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 Rodrguez (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 Suiter El Chava from hoyo maravilla gang in the 1940s. In those times, Latino Zoot Suiters were defining their Americanism. Zooters were not accepted by the Anglo-Americans as true citizens, where language (Spanish) and skin color segregated you to the bottom of society. In the 1920s there were illegal mass deportations to Mexico of Mexican-American citizens who were trying to unionize their labor. In Downtown Los Angeles, my mother witnessed the public beatings of Latino Zooters by white US servicemen during World War II. The sailors would follow the Latinos into their neighborhoods to attack them. To protect themselves, the Latinos formed gangs based on which neighborhood they lived in. Gang names like 18 th street, white fence, alpine street, clover street and avenues referred to actual locations and streets that still exist today. Latino Zooters were swinging to their own styles, their hair done in big Pompadours and their bodies draped in tailor-made suits with the pants starting under the armpits. They spoke cal, their own language, a cool jive of half-English half-Spanish rhythms. The term applied loosely to the spoken slang of gypsies and bullfighters in Mexico and Spain used at that time. Out of this 1940s Zoot Suiter experience came lowriders (a parallel car culture to the Anglo Hot Rod scene of the 1950s), gangster culture (Zoot Suiters from the 1940s, Pachucos in the 1950s, Cholos and Vatos of the 1960 70s, all these names are the same people, today we call them Home Boys). The Zooter experience also gave us tag names, and finally a unique style of East Los Angeles graffiti, called Cholo. The Mexican-American gangs were the first and Original Gangsters, hence the moniker OG. In the 1980s the Black gangsters adapted the dress code of the Home Boys, even copying the style of lowrider cars. The only difference would be their choice of Western serif typeface for their own graffiti. The renowned Black gangs, the Bloods and Crips, were mere copies of Cholo culture. Even today the Mexican gang members largely outnumber the different Blacks gangs in LA county.

We must give credit to the gangs for their steadfastness in keeping with the graffiti traditions. Cholo type is stronger today than ever before, and it has grown into an international influence. In the graffiti world, painting battles have taken place between Japanese calligraphers and East LA writers. This unique typeface has taken a very long journey from a European prototype to its use as a symbol of pride for an American gangster culture. To have remained intact is formidable, and its future usage is in the hands of the next generation.