Border Lines : Southern California’s Blight of Tagging Is Exported to Tijuana, Where Outraged Residents Have Little Sympathy for Rebellious Youths

Los Taggers have left their mark on Tijuana.

Defiant slogans are smeared across the slums lining the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the gated mansions of hilltop colonias , the downtown malls and boulevards. “PK” means police killer (as it does in Los Angeles). “HEM” stands for Hecho en Mexico (Made in Mexico). “HAP” alludes to a group of taggers known as Homeless Altamira Punks and/or Haciendo Artes Prohibidas (Making Prohibited Art).

The walls tell the story of how the graffiti culture of Southern California has surged over the border in the last two years.

“All of the fashions of the United States arrive sooner or later,” said Federico Benitez Lopez, director of a municipal police force that has deployed a full-scale anti-graffiti campaign, along with city social workers. “The movement of people back and forth is large. It brings these influences.”

An unprecedented rampage by at least 25 newly formed tagging “crews” with hundreds of members has become the hot topic of radio talk shows, academic forums and angry neighborhood meetings. It is an ironic twist on the perennial complaint by some Californians that social ills ooze north from Mexico. The ringleaders of the tagging crews tend to be English-speaking teen-agers who go to San Diego schools or former immigrants from a number of Mexican families that have abandoned Southern California recently. Some youths have brought U.S.-style urban marauding back with them.

The reverse migration is because of “the economy, the riots, the earthquake, the fires, you name it,” said Angel, the barrel-chested manager of Madness, a paint-splattered store that opened on Boulevard Agua Caliente last year. The business caters to the craze that has united immigrants from dusty shantytowns, “juniors” from elite families and even university students with artistic pretensions.

“We are not trying to destroy Mexico,” said owner Leo Alva, 23. “If anything, we are trying to help Mexico by educating the young about hip-hop culture.”

The clothing entrepreneur divides his time between his Eastside garment factory and weekends in Tijuana, where his family runs several stores. Alva insisted that he does not sell spray paint or encourage lawbreaking, but simply responds to the demands of fashion.

“During the last two years I was going to Tijuana and seeing there were a lot of (taggers),” he said during a telephone interview. “A lot of crews that were here in Los Angeles, somebody from here would move there. People from California were down there recruiting or teaching.”

Madness sells baggy jeans for up to $70, T-shirts for $18, caps and backpacks for toting spray-paint cans during “bombing” runs. Ski masks--head wear made fashionable in Mexico by Subcommandante Marcos, the charismatic masked leader of this year’s armed uprising in the state of Chiapas--are $18.

The rebellious vandals of this border city have encountered little of the sympathy won by the indigenous guerrillas of the south. During a recent appearance by a delegation of taggers on a popular radio forum, irate callers denounced them. Mothers alternately scolded and appealed for reason: “Mijo (my son), why are you doing this?” one asked.

The residents of Tijuana are still dazed, said Chance, a husky 17-year-old who speaks fluent English and wears his hair shaved close with a braid in back. “They don’t know what to do. It’s not a trend, it’s a culture. Or a subculture, anyway.”

Chance, who travels to San Diego each weekday to attend high school, said Tijuana tagging crews have appeared on local television and in Alarma, a Mexican crime tabloid known for gory photos of murder victims. He clearly relishes his newfound celebrity. He and his cronies do their clandestine handiwork near the international line, “where the tourists and the taggers from the other side can see it.”

The taggers have defaced the traffic signs above the steel sea of vehicles at the freeway border crossing at San Ysidro. They have “bombed” Tijuana buses and the San Diego trolley that serves the border area. Avenida Revolucion provides prime targets, including the headquarters of the Tijuana municipal police; the most daring culprits add the numbers 1036, the radio code for “fleeing suspect,” to their scrawls as a taunt to the black-garbed Tactical Group, a SWAT-like unit trying to fight rising youth crime.

Like many U.S. counterparts, Tijuana taggers claim to be peaceful, misunderstood artists, complaining that the public confuses them with violent street gangs. They accuse the police of meting out curbside justice, and say that officers have sprayed captured taggers head to foot with confiscated aerosol cans.

“The police over (in San Diego) are tough,” Chance said. “The police over here are mean.”

As police crack down, graffiti-related arrests have gone from about a dozen a month in early 1993 to 83 arrests in January. Curiously, many suspects are 18 and older.

“We have arrested people who were 34 years old,” said Benitez, the police director. “They are what in other times would have been called hippies.”

Hippies, the zoot-suited pachucos of the 1940s and modern-day cholos and taggers all flowed into Tijuana as part of an incessant cross-border current of styles and subcultures, according to sociologist Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce of Tijuana, an expert on Mexican popular culture.

Graffiti weave together historical influences of Mexico’s socially committed mural art, territorial declarations by youth gangs and political sloganeering. Since the days of the Mexican revolution, Valenzuela said, “the wall becomes a clandestine newspaper of the people.”

It becomes a kind of cultural history text as well: along the facade of a building next to Lazaro Cardenas Preparatory School, the fading declaration “El Salvador will triumph”--popular in the 1980s--has been nearly obscured by a bilingual riot of fresh tribal symbols and drawings.

The city has never experienced such a widespread, organized wave of graffiti, Valenzuela said. “The taggers have expanded graffiti from the confines of the (working-class) neighborhood and spread it through society.”

Unlike cholo gangs, the illicit fad crosses Mexico’s highly demarcated socioeconomic lines. One of Tijuana’s first taggers studies at a high-priced private school and drives a new Bronco. Another self-described “original gangster” is Bens, 17, whose family lives in Colonia Hipodromo, a luxurious enclave near the racetrack. His tag decorates a giant HEM insignia across the street from Madness, accompanied by the numeral 1993--the year the taggers invaded.

Bens spends many nights away from home and does not work or go to school. He feels more comfortable speaking Spanish, but slides frequently into English slang. His face mixes scorn and melancholy when he dismisses his family as “ muy stuck-up.” After living for two years in Whittier, where his cousins were avid graffiti vandals, he returned to Tijuana and joined Made in Mexico, one of the biggest crews.

“I like the name HEM because it’s 100% Mexican,” Bens said, sitting cross-legged on a counter amid a group of friends at Madness.

Like adolescents everywhere, the Tijuana taggers are driven by a youthful drive for danger and adventure. But Valenzuela said that youths at the border are also affected by social forces, such as the disintegration of families because of immigration and the maquiladora industry, which has made many women breadwinners. He also blamed the city’s anarchic urban sprawl: Tijuana offers meager green spaces, jarringly haphazard architecture and, most significantly, a tradition of ignoring the law when it comes to construction safety codes and property rights.

“Visually, it is not always very attractive,” Valenzuela said. “The taggers tell me, ‘The city is ugly, the city is sad. I am giving it more life.’ ”

The municipal government disagrees. In addition to tougher law enforcement, city officials emphasize their desire to engage in dialogue with youths and are working on a binational prevention program with officials in San Diego. Both cities will conduct an “anti-graffiti day” next month.

“It’s not an attack” on taggers, said Rosa Alicia Luna, a doctor in Tijuana’s public health department. “We are trying to channel them into appropriate alternatives.”

Authorities do not have the money for the repeated cleanups that have become standard million-dollar expenditures by city and state agencies in California. When graffiti goes up in Tijuana, it has a better chance of staying up.

Alva, the owner of Madness, is banking on the potential of hip-hop clothes, music and art. He already has customers in Guadalajara. And he has developed a bilingual hip-hop magazine that will begin publishing in both nations this spring.

The title: Controversia.