Verified by The Night Writer
Graffiti artist and cultural geographer Stefano Bloch explores what writing on walls can mean to a city’s most vulnerable people.
By Devon Frye published September 3, 2024 - last reviewed on September 3, 2024
Most nights of his adolescence, Stefano Bloch snuck out of his house with a singular goal: to spray-paint his nickname, Cisco, on billboards, buildings, bridges, and anywhere else in Los Angeles he and his crew of like-minded graffiti writers could conceivably reach. They aimed to “go all city”—that is, to get their tags seen across all of L.A.—a pursuit that put them in real danger, from police and vigilantes alike, but brought them identity, community, and purpose as they navigated the poverty and violence that characterized their daytime lives. Now a cultural and urban geographer at the University of Arizona, Bloch’s late-night graffiti runs are (mostly) behind him. In his book Going All City and his research on the history of graffiti and the policing of public space, Bloch sheds light on a historically maligned subculture and helps outsiders understand the deeply human motivations that compel graffiti artists, most of them young and marginalized, to pick up their paint and head out into the night.
You estimate that you put up 10,000 tags in your youth. Do any stand out?
I don’t know if this is universal for graffiti writers, but I have a vivid memory of every single tag I’ve ever caught in my life. I’m really bad with faces; I’m bad with names. But I can remember where I caught my first tag in 1991, or my favorite tag from 2003, or the tag I caught at midnight right before Y2K. If I wrote my name on a light pole somewhere I haven’t been in 25 years, when I drive by that pole, I’ll turn my head to look at the spot. Tagging is one of the only vivid forms of memory I have from my childhood; the rest blurs together, given the chaos and the always-changing scenery.
Why does graffiti have such a powerful pull on memory?
I think it has to do with the heightened senses that are activated when you’re about to catch a tag—adrenaline, the fear of being spotted. But the spatial consciousness of writing on something also lends itself to a form of emotional ownership. That thing becomes yours; you’re personalizing it. There’s an intense focus on the structure of your letters, the curve of your arrow, and the bodily mechanics of applying the felt tip of a marker or the aerosol spray onto a surface and hoping it fits just right. It’s all so visceral and emotional that it becomes a full somatic and intellectual experience.
You were such a prolific tagger that, as a teen, you were a sort of local celebrity. How did that affect you?
Being a graffiti writer was my identity, and having a strong, recognizable identity early on makes you more confident in who you are. I didn’t have to forge an identity in self-destructive ways, like drugs or alcohol, and I also wasn’t waiting for others to recognize me as someone who mattered—I wasn’t hoping for a sports trophy, I wasn’t striving to be valedictorian. Graffiti is really a grassroots way to gain notoriety; it allows young people to feel seen and respected in environments where they often don’t, usually because of their socioeconomic situation.
Tagging put you in danger, both physically and legally. Yet you write that it also kept you safe. How?
For good or bad, people respect fame and celebrity. In my case, while I was extra-subject to the penalties of the people in power—the law—I was less subject to the penalties of gangs or people on the street because I earned enough clout to insulate myself from their everyday violence. It affected virtually everyone else in my peer group, but my notoriety saved me.
Outside of that community, how were taggers typically viewed?
Many people, both everyday citizens and police, saw us as part of the violent crime that was affecting society in truly adverse ways at that time. To them, graffiti writers and gang members were one and the same—even though we were so hostile to that notion and, in fact, were graffiti writers precisely because we didn’t want to be subject to the violence. But even people who didn’t see us as part of the same subculture still saw us as contributing to what they might call “the decline of a civilized society.” They were so outraged that vandals could lawlessly move across an urban space writing our names. In their view, even if we weren’t part of those violent groups, we were creating environments in which they thrived.
That view persists—yet by the time you finished college, graffiti had been rebranded as “street art” and had a much more positive reputation. What happened?
Over time, as violent crime rates plummeted to all-time lows—and the graffiti remained because it’s been there for generations—people were no longer able to tell themselves the story that visual blight was creating an environment in which violence could take place unchecked. I also think, in part because of art associated with Obama’s candidacy, as well as Banksy, people were opening up to the political power of street art. They were finally respecting the story graffiti was telling.
What stories were bombers like you trying to tell?
Going all city was a love letter to our environment. It’s wanting to be synonymous with the city’s aesthetic, it’s wanting to move through it and interact with it. People don’t write all over a city because they’re antagonistic to it; in fact, I’ve never met a graffiti writer who isn’t the biggest fan of the city they live in. They may be critical of the power structure; they may be impoverished; they may be having a hard time navigating life in that city. But there’s always an underlying love. What non-graffiti writers don’t understand is that when you write on a place, you’re deeming it worthy to
be written on.
Do you still identify as a graffiti writer?
Yes. I don’t go out on bombing runs anymore, but I still catch tags, though they’re fewer and farther between. I apologize to the mayor and the gods of infrastructure, but I’ll always write my name on something if the time is right. And my name is still very much in the conversation of legendary second-
generation graffiti writers. I’m in my 40s, but I still meet 17-year-olds who ask for my autograph. I’ll even say, in a very hubris-filled way, that if you consider yourself an L.A. graffiti writer, there’s zero chance you don’t know who I am.
How does being a graffiti legend influence your research on the history of graffiti?
Academia can learn a lot from people who have been there, who have bled and sweated over whatever endeavor they’re writing about. That particularly lends itself to criminology; the field benefits from researchers who know what it means to be part of the criminal class. Because of our history, we feel the motivation, the fear.
Where do people who study crime or illicit subcultures sometimes go wrong?
There’s been a very well-meaning attempt to defend groups who have been overly criminalized and demonized—but sometimes, in that attempt, researchers end up creating caricatures or engaging in romanticization. But romanticization is not the counter to criminalization; humanization is. Behind every data point, there’s a very human story to be told. We all have the same desires—messy and complex, often counterintuitive or counterproductive. Humanizing can help people who have never been in a gang see that they share many of the same motivations that lead others to join gangs. It also allows us to hold people, including those we love and respect, accountable for their actions—saying, yes, you were a victim of structural violence in your community, but you also made decisions that led to the proverbial shooting yourself in the foot. And shooting yourself in the foot doesn’t challenge the structural oppression; it only exacerbates it.
I’ve lived in a heavily graffitied city my entire adult life, but until I read Going All City, I barely noticed it. Now I see it everywhere.
I wish I could be in your shoes—seeing it almost for the first time, and then realizing, wow, every one of those little tags is so important to someone. Instead of saying, It’s ugly, it’s indecipherable, it’s illegal, therefore it’s bad—which, sure, could all be true—you can ask, How and why is that tag meaningful to someone?
How can we apply that lesson more broadly?
You don’t have to like something—a genre of music, a political movement—but you can still try to understand the motivation behind its production. Like, it’s exciting for me to hear people talk about music I deeply dislike. When I hear their enthusiasm, their understanding of its structure, it helps me see things in more layers—and that, perhaps selfishly, makes me feel like I live in a more interesting world.
