Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture

Stefano Bloch. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. 211 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography. $19.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-226-49358-9), $70.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-226-49344-2), $18.00 electronic (ISBN 978-0-226-49361-9).

In the introduction to Going All City, Stefano Bloch defines his work as an autoethnography. Just as ethnography finds its origins in geography, however, so is Bloch's life story rooted in spatial practices. Bloch is a graffiti writer, who made a name for himself under another name, Cisco. In fact, in his turbulent youth Bloch was not always Bloch, but he was always Cisco, a steadfast moniker that appeared “All City”: He reproduced his mark throughout an entire metropolitan area, the highest distinction in the graffiti world (as well as a felony in civil society). Part Bildungsroman, part social commentary, Going All City is a study in place making.

Going “All City” means being able to navigate every trick and trap a city has to offer to achieve that goal. From running across freeway traffic to climbing up and down architectural features that open access to higher ground, a graffiti writer must physically overcome the urban layout in his or her quest to conquer it. As indicated in the book's subtitle, that includes a fair number of struggles, including those with gang members and police officers who are not necessarily rivals, but have their own vested interests in what happens in the city. The narrator also addresses the many existential qualms he met along the way, faced with shifting moral orders and repeated reminders of mortality. Achieving All City status means vanquishing transience and in Bloch's case, being able to write his name everywhere meant being nowhere. Chapters 3 through 6 give a particularly harrowing account of his family and social dynamics: The few outsiders who enter his life quickly prove to be unable to withstand it.

The author is never alone, though: His siblings, his parents, and a rotating cast of cohorts share spaces with him. In so doing, they experience urban space in a similarly deep, intimate manner: They inhabit the underbelly of the underbelly of Los Angeles. Although not all have adopted his seminomadic lifestyle, where home is a place to “stay” and public spaces are there to “occupy,” they participate in the same “alternative city” as Bloch calls it. Accordingly, Bloch's kin had to construct their own support devices when city government and schooling usually serve as a structure to most other citizens. In Bloch's case, there are graffiti crews, TUGK, KRS, and CBS. Temporarily, there is also a high school football team, a banal activity among many unusual affiliations.

In this sense, although the backdrop of the book is conspicuously Los Angeles, the experiences described in Going All City resonate further. Some are simple and highly relatable, such as Bloch's childhood fascination with seeing graffiti: There is no denying the appeal of stylized letters on a blank surface, as they would usually appear on road signage. Some are more compounded and intricately threaded throughout the narrative; for instance, issues of race, class, and policing. When juxtaposed and arranged in the narrator's purview, the familiar notions of urban living seem to casually beckon passing observations of inequality.

Still, there is a unique quality to the story of a homeless youth establishing his sense of identity and place, a process that is more commonplace than we would like to acknowledge. Cisco did not go All City anywhere; he was part of a stylistic renaissance for the graffiti world. Similarly, Bloch did not come of age in the cinematic City of Angels, but in the fractured battlegrounds described in Ed Soja and the L.A. School during the 1990s. In fact, Bloch eventually studied geography with Soja at UCLA and the University of Minnesota, and there is a clear echo between the patchwork quilted in Going All City and the kaleidoscope described in Soja's (2014) final opus, My Los Angeles.

It could be the mere acknowledgment of complexity. It might be the result of the spatial deconstruction that they both provide. More simply, Soja and Bloch share an emphasis on the city as a usable space; that is, from the point of people who are living in it rather than conducting business in it. Bloch does not fully explain how Cisco came to life, but the first few pages make it clear that he was born into it. He became a graffiti writer because his brother was a graffiti writer. He belonged to a graffiti crew because he had a crew of friends who did graffiti. There was no moment of reckoning, or no ceremonies; Cisco merely participated in the cultural activities that were available to him, in the city that was presented to him.

Therein lies another peculiar juxtaposition: Writing graffiti was a way for Bloch to escape other, less favorable options. Yet those other options remained available, qualitatively different yet equally illegal. The life of a graffiti writer thus intersects constantly with other marginal practices: gang belonging, drug addiction, petty theft, or grand larceny. Graffiti remained the sole preoccupation, though. Going All City also means that everyone can see proof of your prowess, and eventually, Cisco became the “king of something,” in a world of nothing. In Chapter 10, following his series of encounters with the system, the author realizes that scoring a victory in society presents him only with more obstacles. By contrast, graffiti allowed him to notch a personal victory, and, by effectively threatening the U.S. lifestyle with spray-painted colors, Cisco finally achieved a postmodern American dream.

Bloch looks back at these achievements, always fondly, sometimes with melancholy. He explains his choice of format after the epilogue: Ethnographic methods allowed him to dive deeper, combining epistemologies that are otherwise incompatible. His lived experiences match neither conventional space nor unconventional spaces. More important, Going All City focuses on the existential significance of space: Oscillating between the voices of Cisco and Bloch, the narrative builds a very rich depiction of a very desolate environment. Their shared recollections are at the very least an oral history of a bygone era, enhanced by just a measure of hindsight and academic jargon. For more traditionally referential content, the reader must eschew the body of the text, jump over some gutters, and dwell in the marginalia. Going All Book, perhaps.

It would be difficult to find an author better credentialed than Stefano Bloch to write about subverting urban geography. As a graffiti artist, he was writing in the landscape, and as chance would have it, he has become a geographer who writes on the landscape, now teaching at the University of Arizona. Ethnography is the perfect method to do so: It allows the geographer to get into the dirtiest corners of even the most remote spaces of collective thinking. Going All City is a refreshing piece of modern geography, and an excellent addition to the still growing conversations on spatial justice in the United States.