Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles

After being out of print and in demand for years, Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles is available again. Now with a beautiful hardcover edition.

Cholo Writing is the oldest form of 20th-century graffiti, a Mexican-American phenomenon that existed in Los Angeles long before the emergence of the more popularized tags and graffiti paintings that appeared in late 1960s New York. Cholo Writing has had a major influence on the visual expressions of Californian popular culture, including the lowrider, surf, tattoo, skate, and hip-hop movements. "Placas" are territorial inscriptions created to define a gang's territory, a veritable, ever-evolving urban calligraphy with strict codes used by Latino gangs to mark the streets since the late 1930s. In the book Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles, the aesthetic development of Cholo Writing is documented, and through two collections of photographs we can follow how it was influenced by Blackletter typefaces and calligraphic models such as Old English. The first collection of images was taken by Howard Gribble, who photographed Chicano gang graffiti in the early 1970s, while the second was taken by French graphic designer and writer François Chastanet, who traveled to the same Los Angeles neighborhood in 2008 to document texts from the beginning of 2000s.

The main essay in this second edition of the book has been updated according to the latest historical research on typefaces, and includes a foreword by Dr. Chaz Bojórquez, graffiti pioneer in East Los Angeles and godfather of West Coast Cholo Writing for over 50 years.