Cholo Writing

Cholo Writing is the 20th century’s oldest form of graffiti, a Mexican-American phenomenon evident in Los Angeles long before the appearance of tags and pieces in the late 1960s New York. It has had a major influence on the visual expressions of Californian popular culture, including the lowrider, surf, skate and hip-hop movements. Placas are territorial inscriptions created to define a gang’s turf, a genuine, constantly evolving urban calligraphy with strict codes used by Latino gangs for street writing since the late 1930s. Here, the aesthetic evolution of Cholo Writing is documented and the influence of blackletter typefaces and calligraphic models such as Old English is traced through two collections of photographs. One by Californian Howard Gribble, who photographed Chicano gang graffiti over a wide geographic area in the early 1970s, and one by French graphic designer and writer Francois Chastanet, who traveled to the same Los Angeles neighborhoods in 2008 to document early 21st century inscriptions. The main essay of this second edition has been updated according to the latest historical research on lettering sources. With foreword by OG Chaz Bojorquez, East Los Angeles graffiti pioneer and Godfather of West Coast Cholo Writing for over 50 years.

Author Biography

Francois Chastanet is an architect, graphic and type designer interested in written signs in public space, from wayfinding typography to ephemeral handwritings. As a documentary author, he writes on urban epigraphy and the evolution of the Latin letter in the 20th and 21st centuries. Other books by Chastanet include Pixacao: Sao Paulo Signature (2007) and Dishu: Ground Calligraphy in China (2013). Born in 1944 in Wilmington, North Carolina, Howard Gribble grew up in Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, where he immersed himself in gang and lowrider culture associated particularly with youth from the barrios of the Mexican / American community. In the early 1970s he photographed Latino gang graffiti, throughout a wide geographic area in order to encompass a larger variety of styles and variations. In 2007, Gribble showed the photos for the first time on the photo sharing site Flickr. The collection proved to be unique, and the interest was enormous. Born 1949, Chaz Bojorquez is a resident of Highland Park East LA. Growing up, he was exposed to the values and craft of graffiti in the territory of “The Avenues” gang. He began his career by spraying alongside the river banks of the Arroyo Seco and is acknowledged as a pioneer of LA Cholo style graffiti. Bojorquez is represented in numerous museum collections, including The Smithsonian Institute: National Museum of American Art, National Museum of American History, National Museum of American Archives. 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Art Center School of Design, Pasadena.