![]() ![]() By the early 2000s, politically neutral street art images replaced depictions of social struggle, Chicano/a history, and community life.īy 2011, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles hosted the first-ever museum survey of street art and graffiti. While physical displacement was being experienced firsthand by long-standing residents, the transformation of the walls in these communities symbolized a broader cultural change. ![]() But such murals, often done by local graffiti artists who were themselves deeply rooted in the Chicano community, were forced to make room for "street art" in the context of neighborhood change and urban redevelopment.Īs real estate prices went up, the Guadalupe murals came down, symbolizing local displacement by gentrification. The Guadalupe, or La Virgen, was used to signal the Chicano community's faith in God's protection, delivering them from the violence of the streets at the hands of gangs and police alike. ![]() Local governments turned to gang injunctions, a restraining order targeting alleged gang members, to help rid neighborhoods of the remaining taggers and wall writers who were labeled gang members and were painting political wall murals. declined and gentrification increased, new residents felt they could safely move into lower cost, "up-and-coming" neighborhoods. Rather, police and district attorneys, backed by a morally panicked public, were making an example of graffiti writers, charging them with felonies, giving them six-figure fines and sending them to prison for illicitly marking walls.īy the end of the 1990s, as the violent crime rate in cities across the U.S. It was not enough, it seemed, to rightfully charge graffiti writers with vandalism. Vandals were targeted with well-funded anti-graffiti task forces and police crackdowns on taggers like me. Graffiti was interpreted as gang-related and, therefore, territorial and violent. Many residents couldn't read or understand it either. Law enforcement didn't seem to understand what the writing on walls meant or who was behind those cryptic images and personal monikers. I started tagging, or illegally writing my name-Cisco CBS-on surfaces across Los Angeles in the early 1990s.Īt the time, local governments were cracking down on wall writers with anti-gang legislation, such as California's 1988 Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, and a variety of " broken windows theory" policing initiatives. But it hasn't always been this way.īefore becoming an academic who teaches and writes about graffiti, I was a graffiti writer. The vibrantly colored walls in such places attract travelers to parts of town once deemed "sketchy." These same neighborhoods are home to bookstores that carry graffiti coffee table books and universities that offer courses on graffiti art. Some up-and-coming neighborhoods in cities like Dakar, Senegal Mexico City Brisbane, Australia and Seoul, South Korea offer street art tours and host graffiti festivals. Today, many cities, from Pittsburgh to Pretoria, invite street artists to help brand neighborhoods that are being revitalized and gentrified as legitimately hip destinations for business owners, home buyers and influencers. In cities around the world, graffiti is now associated with " street artists" rather than violent street gangs. ![]()
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