L.A. Graffiti’s Tribal Marks Deciphered

Graffiti can be found all over the world and in every period of history--some of the earliest examples were scratched into the pyramids of ancient Egypt by the nameless workers who built them. But nowadays, tagging can be a matter of life or death, as we are reminded in “Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A.” by Susan A. Phillips (University of Chicago Press, $25, 383 pages).

In 1995, a Sun Valley man, for example, shot two Latino teenagers when he came upon them as they were tagging an overpass. Open warfare is likely to break out if one gang dares to cross out the graffiti of a rival gang. Even the act of tagging a freeway sign requires a kind of acrobatic daring that can result in injury or death. Yet the impulse to make a mark on the urban environment is so urgent and profound that it seems it simply cannot be suppressed--and the evidence can be found on walls and fences all over Southern California.

“Graffiti allows people to create identity, share cultural values, redefine spaces, and manufacture inclusive or exclusive relationships,” Phillips explains. “To look back on graffiti is to hear voices that otherwise would have remained silent.”

Phillips is an anthropologist by training and profession, and “Wallbangin’ ” is based on her doctoral dissertation. But her work is informed by something more than a scholarly interest in urban ethnography. She can also be regarded as an art historian and a photo-documentarian, and at certain intimate moments, “Wallbangin’ ” is more nearly a memoir than a monograph. Above all, Phillips is an acutely perceptive and deeply intuitive observer of Southern California’s urban scene, and she writes with urgency and clarity about a world that is otherwise barred to most of us.

Phillips acts as a guide and an interpreter for those of us who are utterly ignorant about the inner world of gangs and graffiti. She introduces us to the technical jargon of graffiti, explaining the differences among “tags,” “throw-ups,” “hit-ups,” “placas,” “strikes” and “pieces.” She distinguishes the boundary-marking tags of street gangs from the purely aesthetic efforts of “hip-hop” graffiti artists.

She contrasts the graffiti of African American gangs and Chicano gangs--Chicano graffiti artists tend to use elaborate lettering styles, while African Americans favor “the mystical role of numbers.” She likens the graffiti that decorates our urban landscape to cave paintings and rock carvings found only in the wilderness--all of them can be seen as tribal markers that express secret meanings known only to insiders.

“Once I developed an eye for locating it, everywhere I found puzzles with historical clues and hints to be uncovered, pondered and deciphered,” she explains. “These puzzles gave me a new way to relate to my city; they came to affect my view of ‘the town I live in,’ as the gang members say it.”

If Phillips is compassionate and even affectionate toward graffiti artists, she burns with outrage toward the place where they live and thrive.

“It is no accident that things like graffiti and gangs thrive here--Los Angeles, the place where anything is possible, where there is room to grow, where there is space to alienate populations, to shove away problems, to avoid dealing with others,” she writes. “The graffiti of Los Angeles is the graffiti of groups that Los Angeles has created--through its history, its segregation, its illusion of complacency and of contentment.”

Phillips succeeds in her stated goal of creating “a buffer of understanding” around graffiti--no one who reads “Wallbangin’ ” will look on street-corner graffiti in quite the same way again. What was once a mysterious and frightening scrawl on a garage door or a lamppost becomes something meaningful and compelling, if also deeply unsettling. “Through graffiti,” she writes, “people who would otherwise never come into contact are forced into interaction--even if it is only the walls that speak.”

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The title of “Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States” by Manuel G. Gonzales (Indiana University Press: $29.95, 336 pages) allows us to glimpse a controversy that rages among scholars of Mexican American history and culture. Gonzales pointedly uses the phrase “Mexicans in the United States” rather than “Chicanos” because he regards “Chicanismo” as a movement rather than a field of scholarship.

“Chicano historiography has focused almost completely on heroes when describing the Mexican community,” Gonzales insists, “but most people, of whatever ethnic background, are not heroes, at least not most of the time.”

“Mexicanos,” then, is an effort at writing a “balanced” history that describes “our triumphs as well as trials and tribulations.” Although “Mexican American” is a term that is properly used only after 1848, when vast stretches of the Southwest were ceded to the United States after the defeat of Mexico by the “Colossus of the North,” Gonzales starts in prehistoric times and moves briskly through 2,000 years of history before summing up the current scene in a chapter titled, significantly enough, “Pain and Promise.”

By the 1990s, as the result of what one demographer calls “the greatest historical mass migration to the United States from a single country,” the Mexican community in Los Angeles was the fourth largest in the world. Yet the sheer numbers did not translate into political or economic clout, and both Mexican Americans and Mexicans in America continue to suffer from a vicious xenophobic backlash. “In some places in California, like Orange County and the San Fernando Valley,” Gonzales writes, “it verged on hysteria.”

Yet, as “Mexicanos” allows us to understand, Mexicans ought not to be regarded as aliens in a place that passed from Mexican to American sovereignty only because of what Gonzales bluntly calls a “war of conquest,” and characterizes as “one of the sorriest chapters of the American epic.” The same bitter irony can be detected throughout the book, and that’s what makes it so provocative and illuminating.

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.