CHAZ BOJÓRQUEZ: "Some people date the first graffiti in LA back to the 1930s, when shoeshine boys would mark their spot on the street by writing their names on the wall. There are tags by the Los Angeles River that date back to the ’40s, painted with sticks and tar. Before spray cans were invented, most of the graffiti was made with paint and brush."
"Chicano gangs were originally formed for protection, in response to racism. When people think of LA gangs, they usually think of drug dealing and violence, but the Chicano gangs were originally more about taking pride in a neighborhood.
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."
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."
"I lived in the neighborhood of the Avenues gang. I was not a gangster, I was a hippie, my cousins were gangsters in prison, and my friends were surfers—but we were all the same, there wasn’t a distinction that you had to be a gangster to tag. We were always at the same liquor store tagging. You could tell the little guys by the bad handwriting, and they would write low, at eye level. And the older guys, they would write bigger and taller. But was it about being the highest and all that? No, that was not the case. Your tag was allegiance to your community. You never went out of your neighborhood to tag.
"The gangs used Old English type because it was seen as the most prestigious. It was on your birth certificate, the newspaper—the LA Times."
MARIN: "It’s a co-opting of legitimacy and a form of code-switching. Switching from one language to another, one culture to another—the formality and the prestige of that and adapting it to your own style—you say two things at the same time."
BOJÓRQUEZ: "And then there’s that other style, ‘Teen Angel’. It’s a script, for tattoos and drawings. We used to write beautiful script letters on the side and back windows of lowrider cars, you know, words like “Pillow Talk” or “Sad Boy,” all that stuff."
MARIN: “I’m so tired of being alone.”
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.”
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.”
MARIN: "You were studying art while you were tagging, right?"
BOJÓRQUEZ: "I started taking art classes when I was about fourteen years old, before I was tagging. I was very aware of the art scene of the time—Andy Warhol, the Ferus Gallery guys—but I did not see a Latino face. Then I was going to the Chouinard School of Art in ’67, and again I was very disappointed because I did not see a Latino face anywhere. That’s why I started tagging—for myself."
MARIN: “In 1972, the Chicano art collective Asco tagged the outside of LACMA, because the museum didn’t show Chicano artists. Two years later, the museum gave another Chicano group, Los Four, a show. But for the museum, it was barbarians at the gate. It was, “Okay, we’ve shown it once, you’ve had your day.”
BOJÓRQUEZ: "Exactly. In art school, I became disillusioned.
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."
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."
MARIN: "Who doesn’t like 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: "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."
"The first time I tagged my skull symbol I did it freehand with a spray can, and it came out badly. So I turned to the latest technology of the ’60s—plastics—to cut out a stencil with more detail and total control. My first tag was on the 110 Freeway from downtown LA to Pasadena, when you’re coming out of the freeway tunnels; I tagged the spiral staircase. That was ’69, and it stayed there ’til the Olympics in ’84. Then, about fifteen years after that first tag, I started seeing it tattooed on gangsters from the Avenues gang. It’s become a symbol of protection: If you get shot and have the skull tattooed on you, it will protect you from death. So since then, I put it away, I don’t make T-shirts, I don’t make nothing—it belongs to them, because they live and die for it. It’d be stupid to commercialize that image."
MARIN: "Is danger part of graffiti? The more dangerous and hard to do, the better—to put it in the spot where you know the guy is fucking rappelling off something to get there?"
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: "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."
MARIN: "Real little micro-neighborhoods, man. And essentially that particular gang that was in that neighborhood lived and died for their four-square blocks."
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: "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."
MARIN: “Is that a good thing? Are we supposed to think globally or should we cling to the specificity of our four blocks?”
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.”
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.”
Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.:
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.
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.
BOJÓRQUEZ: “I fought for that word "Chicano". And I believe that Cholo graffiti is Chicano art. Chicanos were the hard ones to convince. They said it was anti-Chicano because Chicano was family, religion, farmworkers, border and migration issues, not this bad-boy stuff— “it undermines what we’re doing, it’s not art.” I started out as just a tagger, but then I came to define myself as a graffiti artist—and I really had to defend that word "artist". Now I don’t just work in the arts, I do graphic design—I work in culture.
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?”
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?”
Chaz Bojórquez (b. 1949, Los Angeles)
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.
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.
Working on canvas since 1979, Bojórquez mixes powerful variations on Cholo fonts, informed by his study of Asian calligraphy, with the iconography of the Day of the Dead and other traditional Mexican folk imagery.
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.
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.
CHAZ BOJÓRQUEZ
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
ARTE POVERA FOTO BOOKS
Independent publishing company dedicated to releasing limited edition photography books rooted in culture.
https://streetwriters.com/pages/contact-media-inquiries
CONTACT
Arte Povera Foto Books, Inc.
PO Box 421203
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Email: [email protected]
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
ARTE POVERA FOTO BOOKS
Independent publishing company dedicated to releasing limited edition photography books rooted in culture.
https://streetwriters.com/pages/contact-media-inquiries
CONTACT
Arte Povera Foto Books, Inc.
PO Box 421203
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Email: [email protected]
RSS Feed