Going After Graffiti : Youth / OPINION : ‘I Did It Out of Boredom’

I was in a gang. When you’re in a gang, you usually tag on walls--your name and your gang. When I joined the gang I was 13. When I got out, I was 15.

The reason I joined a gang was because I felt left out in my dad’s home. My dad had a wife and two other kids (with his second wife), and I would be by myself all the time. So I would be with my friends and have lots of fun. They showed me more affection than my family.

I would always see my friends with a marker or something in their hands, tagging, so I would do it, too. People would come up to me and tell me that they’d seen it, and I’d be proud. I did it out of boredom, I think. What else is there to do?

Taggers usually have their own tagging crew. They don’t do things that gang members do. They just like to write on the walls. You know how rich people have their names on their houses or something? Well, tagging is like that. People see your name and your gang there, and they know that belongs to you. It makes people feel good. We never thought about the damage, or the money people spend to clean it up. We thought it was good for the neighborhood.

Taggers compete with each other to see who writes the best, who draws the best, who can get their name in a high place.Whoever gets up real high gets known by a lot of people.

Taggers have scribbly writing, or a different kind of writing from gang members. For gang members, they’re just letters. For taggers, they’re drawings.

I think it was just maturity that changed my attitude. I moved away from my family that was non-affectionate, and I came back to East L.A., where I was born and raised, to live with my Mom. She shows me love all the time. I decided not to get into any trouble for my Mom. Now I come to school for me. I do it for my Mom, too, but before it was really just for my Mom, because I wanted to impress her.

I regret what I’ve done a lot, but there’s nothing I can do to erase it. There’s no chance I would ever start doing that again. It’s not something that can help me achieve my goals, so why should I waste my time doing that? And I do have goals. First of all, I want to graduate on stage at a high school. And then I would like to study to be a lawyer.

Now what I do is tag my name on a paper I have in front of me. But it’s just my name, you know, it’s just handwriting.