By 1943, when the riots happened against the Latino zoot suiters, it created the foundations for the Cholo culture. Graffiti was a way to define your identity and say, “This is Latino territory.” This is our roll call, our names written on the wall—that’s what’s called a "placa". Placas are usually placed at the edge of a neighborhood, marking the territory for an individual gang. It says, “This is ours.” When I see a tag, I see a complaint; I see a whole bunch of tags, I see a petition."
BOJÓRQUEZ: “They use ‘Teen Angel’ for tattoos across the neck. But it would never go up on the walls; nobody does that in the streets.”
I wasn’t getting support from my art teachers or anything like that, I was getting kicked out of school because they didn’t see any value in my fine-art work. So, I said, fuck school, I’m just gonna go back to graffiti at night.
That’s when I came up with the image of Señor Suerte. It mixes a lot of different styles from the ’60s. The skull, of course, is Mexican, from Día de los Muertos. But also at that time, there was the black civil rights movement—I copied that look you saw in movies in the 1970s, like Shaft and Super Fly, with the pimp daddy hat, the fur collar. I liked that look."
BOJÓRQUEZ: "I was smoking a lot of dope, so the first drawing had a joint, but then I thought, I’m not gonna put drugs in the street, that’s disrespectful. You know, it was the Latino morality. So I crossed his fingers and took the joint out."
BOJÓRQUEZ: "That’s the style from New York. It’s been taken up by new guys, but that’s not West Coast Cholo. I only tagged in Highland Park, I never went out of Highland Park. One time I did Hollywood because I worked at this job, but otherwise when I see young kids hitting all over the place, that’s New York mentality—me, me, me. It wasn’t our tradition. One writer would write for the group, and our tags were about us."
BOJÓRQUEZ: "It’s clannish, it’s really clannish."
MARIN: "So at the moment that mass transit comes in, that separates it from marking territory?"
BOJÓRQUEZ: "I don’t see gangsters on trains. I’ve never hit a train. I never see trains."
MARIN: "Well, buses."
BOJÓRQUEZ: "Tagging buses, that’s a younger man’s game, from the 1990s. We never hit buses. We didn’t hit churches or buses. When New York–style graffiti started coming in here about the mid-1980s, all the young kids went all New York gaga. The documentary Style Wars came out in ’84, and it changed overnight. There was the excitement of the world movement out of New York.
But I want to say that New York was the first to take graffiti to heart because they took their pieces and put a frame around it and made a gallery, the FUN Gallery and all of that.
And they changed it into a product—like Haring with his Pop Shop. But it didn’t last. New York is all about “Been there, done it, next thing.” Then there were the anti-graffiti laws, and that closed off the subways. What happened over here was, it just stayed gangster."
BOJÓRQUEZ: “What’s unique about LA is that we bring our culture into our graffiti. Cholo culture is Mexican-American culture, and our style carries our culture. To the world graffiti movement—99.9 percent New York–influenced—Cholo is a subculture on the West Coast, but we choose to write with cultural pride in our letters and that’s our strength.”
MARIN:”But I think it’s gonna be impossible with every generation, ’cause every generation of kids will interpret it in their own style. Who gets to define what Chicano is? Every generation of Chicanos defines what it means to be Chicano for them, and they have just as much right to say it as a Chicano that grew up in the ’40s does.
The biggest controversy I had when I exhibited my art collection under the title Chicano Vision was using the word "Chicano". “Can we call it Mexican-American art, or Hispanic art, anything but Chicano art?” By definition, it was not art if a Chicano did it; it was agitprop. At the same time, the radical political activist Chicanos, they didn’t want anybody else using that name but them. I was just a fuckin’ dope-smoking comedian. Those Chicanos thought they made up the term in 1968. But I thought, hey, that’s finally a term that defines who I am. I’m not a Mexican, I hated Mexican-American, Hispanic, fuck that. I’m a Chicano.”

Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection
The Cheech Marin collection is notable for classic examples of Chicano art produced from the inception of the Chicano movement to the present, with a concentration in painting from the 1980s and 90s. This exhibition includes a number of widely exhibited works by such first-generation Chicano artists as Carlos Almaraz, Margaret Garcia, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Frank Romero, John Valadez, and Patssi Valdez, whose artistic careers began during the Chicano civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, as well as works by such younger artists as Vincent Valdez and David Flury. Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A. is a Los Angeles-focused selection of Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, an exhibition of the Marin collection that toured nationally between 2001 and 2007.
But the only way to stay where I’m at is to stay pure. I’m always going back to the original letters of Old English to build my foundation, but I include my own style of control of Asian calligraphy. I like the traditions of Cholo and the expressive spirit from Asian philosophy. I came back to my community feeling more like I better get up in my four blocks. I constantly ask myself, how can I paint more pride or strength—how do I add balls to my letters?”
grew up in Highland Park, where he created a graffiti icon that was adopted by the local gang.
Bojórquez first encountered graffiti as a young boy while exploring the concrete riverbeds of the Los Angeles River.
The markings he found there introduced him to the Cholo graffiti that Chicano Angelenos had been developing since the 1930s. While a student at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) in the 1960s, he developed his signature character, a stenciled, fedora-wearing skull named Señor Suerte.
Bojórquez’s position as one of the city’s premier Cholo graffiti artists was cemented in 1975 with the publication of photographer Gusmano Cesaretti’s book:
Street Writers: A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti.
An elder statesman of the Los Angeles street scene, he has exhibited widely and has worked on numerous graphic design projects. The monograph
The Art and Life of Chaz Bojórquez
was published in 2010.
Draws his inspiration from Los Angeles where he was born, grew up and still lives. He received formal art training at Guadalajara University of Art in Mexico, California State University Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute now known as Cal Arts.
Under Chinese Calligraphy Master Yun Chung Chiang, Chaz developed a deep understanding for written language. He worked as a commercial artist in advertising and film before concentrating on painting.
Chaz is the “Godfather of Los Angeles Graffiti Art”.
“I put 50 years in of writing. I am an Original. We started this stuff. We not only had the best book... but, it was the very first book” –– Chaz Bojórquez
https://streetwriters.com/pages/the-artist
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