Meanwhile, Illescas says street art is more likely to be recognized as such within arts districts, where officially sanctioned “beautification” projects use public art to attract more business and new residents, which can contribute to gentrification issues. In Los Angeles, a city which many researchers consider to be highly racially segregated, Black and Latinx communities, like South Central Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, are the places where graffiti is most likely to be severely criminalized and lumped together with gang activity, Illescas says. And he’s particularly interested in shedding light on how race may affect public perceptions of graffiti.ĭepending on the context, graffiti can either be publicly admired as “street art”-and valued up to millions of dollars-or it can be criminalized at levels ranging up to felony charges and years of jail time. He’s also critically examining the subculture’s hypermasculinity and how that may limit its transformative potential. Graffiti is a multiracial and multi-ethnic subculture, and Illescas says his research aims to recognize the specific contributions of Black and Latinx communities. “Although outsiders might not necessarily notice it, you can easily see the Mexican-American artistic influence in the aesthetics, and that has become associated with Latinx urban identities.”
“The result is that Los Angeles has a really unique graffiti style,” Illescas said. In the 1980s, those traditions then incorporated colorful, whimsical East Coast influences. Rich graffiti writing traditions emerged, including “placas,” or tags that list a writer’s stylized signature, and “barrio calligraphy,” which blends rolling scripts with Old English lettering. Graffiti styles in East Los Angeles, for example, reflect Mexican-American artistic influence that began with Pachuco counterculture in the 1940s. Graffiti also offers what Illescas calls an “illicit cartography,” meaning that it can be read like a cultural map of the city. “They feel that the system is against them, and upward social mobility is limited for them, so putting their names up around the city is a way for them to achieve respect from their peers and assert their dignity, and that doesn’t come easily from other places and institutions in society.” The artists of a legal mural in Los Angeles list their names in a style inspired by traditional "placas." Photo courtesy of Ismael Illescas. “In a city where these youth are marginalised, ostracized, and invisibilized, graffiti is a way for them to become visible,” Illescas said. But graffiti allows Black and Latino young men to transform these areas into spaces of congregation and empowerment. Some of the most popular graffiti yards in Los Angeles are abandoned spaces in communities of color that neither the economy nor the city has been willing to invest in, he says. In fact, now, as a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies, his dissertation research has taken him back to Los Angeles, where he gathered insights from current and former graffiti writers about how their work connects with concepts of art, identity, culture, and space.įor those who create it, graffiti is an expression of identity and an outlet for creativity, social connection, and achievement, according to Illescas’s research. He has since given it up, but he never lost his initial sense of curiosity and admiration.
Illescas became a graffiti writer himself, for a time. And, eventually, he started writing back. Little by little, he began to understand the meanings behind some of these messages. They were written on walls and scrawled daringly across billboards. In his urban environment, he found himself surrounded by beautiful, cryptic messages. He had migrated to the city with his mother and brother from Ecuador in the 1990s as part of a large Latin American diaspora. Ismael Illescas grew up admiring the graffiti around his neighborhood in Los Angeles.
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