For Susan Phillips, graduate Education at UCLA has provided a scholarly focus for exploring the art and politics of Los Angeles's mutlicultural neighborhoods. The result: her dissertation and her first book will be published about the same time, both describing graffiti by Chicano and African American gangs in Los Angeles.

People who only know graffiti from hurried "tags" around town would be surprised at the "astounding things in spray paint" that can be found in hard-core gang areas, Susan says. "The hearts of the neighborhoods are a gold mine of information."

Her book, Wallbangin': Graffiti, Gangs and the Racial Politics of L.A., was written during a year as a Getty Center fellow. It blends first-rate photographs with extensive explanations and commentary, combining the disciplines of cultural anthropology and archaeology. Susan quickly learned that gang graffiti is "deeply involved socially. Once you learn what it means, you see that every different part of their identity is layered on the wall."
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Chicano gangs, she found, emphasize the artistic elements in graffiti, with different kinds of lettering and clearly defined artistic styles. The spray painters are well-regarded cultural figures in their neighborhoods. Bloods and Crips are more focused on political expression, on how to construct neighborhood and personal identities. Much of their work involves drawing a line between friends and enemies.

Her graduate adviser, Allen Johnson, calls Susan "one of our graduate program's outstanding students... The difficulty - and danger - of her research makes Susan a special kind of anthropologist."

Susan acknowledges that she often felt out of place in the neighborhoods of West Los Angeles and South Central where she did most of her work. But she found that the subject of her research provided her with a sort of diplomatic immunity. Neighborhood residents "are interested in their graffiti and in documenting it," she says. Conversations seemed to develop naturally from her interest in their street art, and once people got to know her, they looked after her while she took photographs and conducted interviews.

Susan hopes that her work on graffiti will form a foundation for a scholarly career that might embrace graffiti in other cities and countries. She has already begun to assemble an archive, with donations from researchers who previously looked at Los Angeles graffiti. After receiving her doctorate degree, she hopes to be accepted for postdoctoral study or to secure a teaching position at a university.

Susan's book on L.A.'s gang graffiti, to be published by the University of Chicago Press, should give her a good start. Johnson says it "is an outstanding piece of work that should gain wide recognition for the depth of its insights and the compelling portrait it draws of gang culture."

Published in Fall 1997, Graduate Quarterly