UC Berkeley

Abstract

“Prison Bound”: South Central LA Graffiti Writer Narratives of Carcerality and the Making of a Youth Carceral Culture, 1941—2000

by

Alejandro Garcia

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Rebecca McLennan, Co-Chair, Professor Waldo E. Martin, Co-Chair

From World War II to the early 1990s, Black and Brown people maintained peaceful intergroup relations on the streets of Los Angeles, California. The historical record shows that conflicts between these groups remained minimal and isolated, and that race only played a peripheral role. After the mid-1990s, this changed. Black-Brown interracial tensions and violence on the streets became more frequent. I argue that both California’s formal neoliberal carceral state and its informal neoliberal carceral culture decisively shaped this change.The thesis here is that when California developed its formal neoliberal carceral state between the 1970s and 2000s, its informal neoliberal carceral culture was also set in motion. By the 1990s, LA’s street power dynamics and race relations were informed by relational carceral interactions that intersect with the formal carceral state, the informal carceral culture of prisoners, and the free-world of the streets, or what I call carcerality. The primary research bases are archival research, newspapers, policy records, papers of government officials, including papers from the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR), music lyrics and music videos, graffiti writings, gang member narratives, and oral histories of graffiti writers that I conducted. I argue that South Central LA’s interracial graffiti crews of the 1980s and early 1990s echo in part a long history of fundamentally peaceful Black-Brown relations. In addition, I argue that the rupture between them in the mid-1990s reflects in large measure the impact of formerly Brown and Black prison gang members released concurrently onto LA’s streets and into LA’s communities. As mass institutions forge mass culture, then institutions of mass incarceration help create sufficient carceral cohesion to form mass informal carceral cultures. The scholarship on the carceral state and mass incarceration mostly focuses on official top-down processes of incarceration. We still know very little about how informal carceral cultures can appropriate the formal functions of the carceral state. Conversely, the scholarship on informal carceral cultures treats prisoners’ interactions as having little, at best limited impact, on the outside world. However, a historical examination of carceral interactions that intersect a massive carceral state, its informal carceral culture, and the free-world of the streets provides us opportunities to deepen our understanding of the width and breadth of carceral intersubjectivities. The scholarship on LA’s Black-Brown relations emphasizes the interracial tensions and violence of the 1990s. But, that scholarship fails to account for a longer history of Black-Brown peaceful coexistence prior to the 1990s and how it ruptures under massive formal and informal carceral forces in the 1990s. The story of South Central’s interracial graffiti crews helps us understand this. Prior to the 1990s, California prisons were the major site of Black-Brown interracial tensions and violence. When California massively expanded its carceral infrastructure during the 1970s throughout the early 2000s, this changed dramatically. With the release of prisoners from California’s prisons in the 1990s, Black and Brown gang members and the related cultural dynamics spilled out into Black-Brown communities and helped fracture Brown-Black relations. As I demonstrate here, graffiti crews were not gangs, but they were also not exempt from the reach of prison gangs, especially once formerly incarcerated Brown and Black gang members left prisons and rejoined the ‘free’ world. Ultimately, in concert with street gangs, prison gangs sought to discipline or punish interracial graffiti crews, seeking to incorporate them inside the larger informal neoliberal carceral culture of California. To reiterate, as a result, the peaceful relations between LA’s Black and Brown peoples endured a tremendous assault.