“We have arrested people who were 34 years old,” said Benitez, the police director. Curiously, many suspects are 18 and older.
TAGGER TIENDA CRACK
“The police over here are mean.”Īs police crack down, graffiti-related arrests have gone from about a dozen a month in early 1993 to 83 arrests in January. “The police over (in San Diego) are tough,” Chance said. They accuse the police of meting out curbside justice, and say that officers have sprayed captured taggers head to foot with confiscated aerosol cans.
counterparts, Tijuana taggers claim to be peaceful, misunderstood artists, complaining that the public confuses them with violent street gangs.
TAGGER TIENDA CODE
Avenida Revolucion provides prime targets, including the headquarters of the Tijuana municipal police the most daring culprits add the numbers 1036, the radio code for “fleeing suspect,” to their scrawls as a taunt to the black-garbed Tactical Group, a SWAT-like unit trying to fight rising youth crime. They have “bombed” Tijuana buses and the San Diego trolley that serves the border area. The taggers have defaced the traffic signs above the steel sea of vehicles at the freeway border crossing at San Ysidro. He and his cronies do their clandestine handiwork near the international line, “where the tourists and the taggers from the other side can see it.” He clearly relishes his newfound celebrity. Or a subculture, anyway.”Ĭhance, who travels to San Diego each weekday to attend high school, said Tijuana tagging crews have appeared on local television and in Alarma, a Mexican crime tabloid known for gory photos of murder victims. The residents of Tijuana are still dazed, said Chance, a husky 17-year-old who speaks fluent English and wears his hair shaved close with a braid in back. Mothers alternately scolded and appealed for reason: “Mijo (my son), why are you doing this?” one asked. During a recent appearance by a delegation of taggers on a popular radio forum, irate callers denounced them. The rebellious vandals of this border city have encountered little of the sympathy won by the indigenous guerrillas of the south. Ski masks-head wear made fashionable in Mexico by Subcommandante Marcos, the charismatic masked leader of this year’s armed uprising in the state of Chiapas-are $18. Madness sells baggy jeans for up to $70, T-shirts for $18, caps and backpacks for toting spray-paint cans during “bombing” runs. The business caters to the craze that has united immigrants from dusty shantytowns, “juniors” from elite families and even university students with artistic pretensions.
The reverse migration is because of “the economy, the riots, the earthquake, the fires, you name it,” said Angel, the barrel-chested manager of Madness, a paint-splattered store that opened on Boulevard Agua Caliente last year. Some youths have brought U.S.-style urban marauding back with them. The ringleaders of the tagging crews tend to be English-speaking teen-agers who go to San Diego schools or former immigrants from a number of Mexican families that have abandoned Southern California recently. It is an ironic twist on the perennial complaint by some Californians that social ills ooze north from Mexico. It brings these influences.”Īn unprecedented rampage by at least 25 newly formed tagging “crews” with hundreds of members has become the hot topic of radio talk shows, academic forums and angry neighborhood meetings. “The movement of people back and forth is large. “All of the fashions of the United States arrive sooner or later,” said Federico Benitez Lopez, director of a municipal police force that has deployed a full-scale anti-graffiti campaign, along with city social workers. The walls tell the story of how the graffiti culture of Southern California has surged over the border in the last two years. “HAP” alludes to a group of taggers known as Homeless Altamira Punks and/or Haciendo Artes Prohibidas (Making Prohibited Art). “HEM” stands for Hecho en Mexico (Made in Mexico). “PK” means police killer (as it does in Los Angeles). Los Taggers have left their mark on Tijuana.ĭefiant slogans are smeared across the slums lining the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the gated mansions of hilltop colonias, the downtown malls and boulevards.
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