Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico

By Caitlin Frances Bruce

How a city government in central Mexico evolved from waging war on graffiti in the early 2000s to sanctioning its creation a decade later, and how youth navigated these changing conditions for producing art.

The local government, residents, and media outlets in León, Mexico, treated graffiti as a disease until the state began sponsoring artistic graffiti through a program of its own. In Voices in Aerosol, the first book-length study of state-sponsored graffiti, Caitlin Frances Bruce considers the changing perceptions and recognition of graffiti artists, their right to the city, and the use of public space over the span of eighteen years (2000–2018). Focusing on the midsized city of León, Bruce offers readers a look at the way negotiations with the neoliberal state unfolded at different levels and across decades.

Issues brought to light in this case study, such as graffiti as a threat and graffiti as a sign of gentrification, resonate powerfully with those germane to other urban landscapes throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Combining archival work, interviews, considerations of urban planning, local politics in Mexico, and insights gained by observing graffiti events and other informal artistic encounters, Bruce offers a new lens through which to understand the interplay between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of cultural expression. Ultimately, Voices in Aerosol builds a strong case for graffiti as a contested tool for "voicing" public demands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477327692

Book preview

Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History

Jessica Stites Mor and Ernesto Capello, Series Editors

Voices in Aerosol

Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico

CAITLIN FRANCES BRUCE

University of Texas Press

Austin

The volume has been published with the assistance of the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund.

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2024

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu

All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruce, Caitlin Frances, 1986– author.

Title: Voices in aerosol : youth culture, institutional attunement, and graffiti in urban Mexico / Caitlin Frances Bruce.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Series: Visualidades: studies in Latin American visual history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

LCCN 2023005955

ISBN 978-1-4773-2767-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2768-5 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2769-2 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Political aspects—Mexico—León (Guanajuato) | Graffiti artists—Mexico—León (Guanajuato) | Public art spaces—Mexico—León (Guanajuato) | Art and state—Mexico—León (Guanajuato) | Art, Municipal—Mexico—León (Guanajuato) | Group work in art—Mexico—León (Guanajuato)

Classification: LCC GT3913.16.L46 B78 2024 | DDC 751.7/3097241—dc23/eng/20230407

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005955

doi 10.7560/327678

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Introduction

ONE. Frisson: Early Graffiti Writers Remapping the City

TWO. Noise: Desmadre in Neoliberal Geographies; Youth Voice against Zero Tolerance

THREE. Harmonization: Convivencia and Municipal Overtures to Writers

FOUR. Amplification: Cultivating Acceptance through the Mural as Civic and Affective Form

FIVE. Resonance: Urban Art and Good Vibrations

Conclusion. Susurration: Cross-Border Institutional Attunements and Social Infrastructure; León as Global Example

Notes

Index

Para la banda

Illustrations

Figures

Figure 1.1. León’s central plaza

Figure 1.2. Map of León, Guanajuato

Figure 1.3. Colonia Flores Magón mural

Figure 1.4. San Juan Bosco mural

Figure 1.5. San Juan Bosco mural

Figure 1.6. San Juan Bosco mural

Figure 1.7. Drunk, Bush and Fox drawing

Figure 1.8. Drunk, Bush and Fox drawing

Figure 1.9. Wes, Invadin’ the World

Figure 1.10. Winnie, Policia de mierda

Figure 2.1. Angélica Anguiano, Dejando vándalos huella por todo López Mateos

Figure 2.2. Xóchtil Larios García, Marcan graffitis zona hotelera

Fig. 2.3. Angélica Anguiano, Destrozan la Madero

Figure 2.4. Angélica Anguiano, Una muestra

Figure 2.5. Elvia Rodríguez López, Invaden graffitis la ciudad

Figure 2.6. JOCOCA, internal newsletter

Figure 2.7. JOCOCA, detail of zine

Figure 2.8. JOCOCA, detail of zine

Figure 3.1. IMPLAN, planning for Parque Extremo

Figure 3.2. Mario Sánchez Tapia, Propuesta

Figure 3.3. Citta Arquitectos, mock-up of Parque Extremo

Figure 3.4. Upperground exhibition

Figure 3.5. FLAI cartoon

Figure 4.1. Galería Tulān entrance

Figure 4.2. Nikkis, Spok, Wes, Sent, Apolo, Orion, and Drop, Cine de Oro mural

Figure 4.3. Nikkis, Spok, Wes, Sent, Apolo, Orion, and Drop, Cine de Oro mural

Figure 4.4. Drop in front of Cine de Oro mural

Figure 4.5. Orion, bicentennial and centennial mural

Figure 4.6. Tony Calavera, portrait of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Figure 4.7. Wes, mural of the history of León

Figure 4.8. Wes, alien figure

Figure 4.9. Nikkis, María Félix and Cantinflas

Figure 4.10. Drop, Catrina figure

Figure 4.11. Sent, Catrina figure

Figure 4.12. Nikkis, Catrina figure

Figure 4.13. Wes, pachuco figure

Figure 4.14. Wes, liar figure

Figure 4.15. Wes, abusive official figure

Figure 4.16. Globo festival mural

Figure 4.17. Nikkis, Globo festival mural

Figure 4.18. Ardhe, Orker, and Kart, Globo festival mural

Figure 4.19. Nikkis, Kif, and Xape, Los Ángeles mural

Figure 4.20. Drop, Bombin’ My History

Figure 4.21. Dalem, streetscape with two cholos

Figure 4.22. Asme, burner on the Malecón del Río

Figure 4.23. Nukleo and Waxny, shared journal

Figure 5.1. Urban Art Certificate poster

Figure 5.2. Zanko and Mersi, work in progress

Figure 5.3. Mictlarte mural

Figure 5.4. Zhot, Dante, and Kart, Macario section of Mictlarte mural

Figure 5.5. Chuen, Xochipilli

Figure 5.6. Uriel preparing the Malecón del Río

Figure 5.7. Wes, Malecolor piece

Figure 5.8. Ardhe, Malecolor pieces

Figure 5.9. Mixer crew, Malecolor piece

Figure 5.10. Back and future generations of IKS crew

Figure 5.11. Gogue and future generations

Figure 5.12. Mayor López Santillana tours Malecolor

Figure 5.13. Brote and Wes with Mayor López Santillana

Figure 5.14. Repainted Panam sneaker

Figure 6.1. Wes, The Wall Cry

Figure 6.2. Orion, steelworker piece

Figure 6.3. Vamp/Danny Yinzer, Kif, Stef, Smae, and Wes, Carrie Furnaces pieces

Figure 6.4. Wes, Fox Way mural

Figure 6.5. Orion, Fox Way mural

Figure 6.6. Bel2, industrial worker figures

Figure 6.7. Kart, C. Clayton, and Shane Pilster, Pachamama

Color Plates

Plate 1. León’s central plaza

Plate 2. Colonia Flores Magón mural

Plate 3. San Juan Bosco mural

Plate 4. San Juan Bosco mural

Plate 5. San Juan Bosco mural

Plate 6. Citta Arquitectos, mock-up of Parque Extremo

Plate 7. Upperground exhibition

Plate 8. FLAI cartoon

Plate 9. Galería Tulān entrance

Plate 10. Nikkis, Spok, Wes, Sent, Apolo, Orion, and Drop, Cine de Oro mural

Plate 11. Nikkis, Spok, Wes, Sent, Apolo, Orion, and Drop, Cine de Oro mural

Plate 12. Drop in front of Cine de Oro mural

Plate 13. Orion, bicentennial and centennial mural

Plate 14. Tony Calavera, portrait of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Plate 15. Wes, mural of the history of León

Plate 16. Wes, alien figure

Plate 17. Nikkis, María Félix and Cantinflas

Plate 18. Drop, Catrina figure

Plate 19. Sent, Catrina figure

Plate 20. Nikkis, Catrina figure

Plate 21. Wes, pachuco figure

Plate 22. Wes, liar figure

Plate 23. Wes, abusive official figure

Plate 24. Globo festival mural

Plate 25. Ardhe, Orker, and Kart, Globo festival mural

Plate 26. Nikkis, Globo festival mural

Plate 27. Nikkis, Kif, and Xape, Los Ángeles mural

Plate 28. Drop, Bombin’ My History

Plate 29. Dalem, streetscape with two cholos

Plate 30. Asme, burner on the Malecón del Río

Plate 31. Nukleo and Waxny, shared journal

Plate 32. Zanko and Mersi, work in progress

Plate 33. Mictlarte mural

Plate 34. Zhot, Dante, and Kart, Macario section of Mictlarte mural

Plate 35. Chuen, Xochipilli

Plate 36. Uriel preparing the Malecón del Río

Plate 37. Wes, Malecolor piece

Plate 38. Ardhe, Malecolor pieces

Plate 39. Mixer crew, Malecolor piece

Plate 40. Back and future generations of IKS crew

Plate 41. Mayor López Santillana tours Malecolor

Plate 42. Brote and Wes with Mayor López Santillana

Plate 43. Repainted Panam sneaker

Plate 44. Wes, The Wall Cry

Plate 45. Orion, steelworker piece

Plate 46. Vamp/Danny Yinzer, Kif, Stef, Smae, and Wes, Carrie Furnaces pieces

Plate 47. Wes, Fox Way mural

Plate 48. Orion, Fox Way mural

Plate 49. Bel2, industrial worker figures

Plate 50. Kart, C. Clayton, and Shane Pilster, Pachamama

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book, as is the case with any long-term project, resulted from collective social infrastructure, not individual heroism. That said, any faults with prose and argument are my own. I want to thank, first, the writers. The scene in León is immense, impressive, and varied. There is so, so much talent, heart, and ingenuity in this city that the world should know about. I want first to name Kif, Wes, Kart, Orion, and Spok, who had ongoing conversations with me as I completed the text and also, at various points, visited Pittsburgh to share their insights with colleagues and neighbors in my home city. You all have and are building some beautiful worlds, and I’m honored to know you and so excited to see what you will do next.

Thank you to the writers who shared narratives in interviews and allowed me to document their amazing work: Anónimo, Ante, Ardhe, Armick, Aser7, Asme, Astre, Back, BDK, Ben, Biers, Bone, Brote, Bundy, Chuen, Crook, Cuate, Dafne, Dago, Dalem, Daños, Dante, Danz, Dermy, Dethes, Doos, Dos, Drop, Drunk, Ear, Easer, Ekla, Gaber, Gogue, Gryz, Jhard, Juan, Kenek, Kiddo, Kiers, Kritik, La Causa, Los de Arriba, Mane Purarte, Mariselva, Mersi, Monstruo, Mupet, Naza, Nespo, Nikkis, Nose, Nuckleo, Onza, Orker, Otem, Penril, Puerk, Quena, Qweis, Rans, Read, Sabio, Sacre, Shady, Sirik, Siter, Skum, TeamEdge, Truko, Viex, Warner, Waxny, Wreck, Yuda, Zanko, and Zhot. Rubén Jasso, a friend of many writers, a philosopher, and an advocate for la banda welcomed me to León along with many others in 2012, inspired me, and keeps me thinking. Toby provided crucial information about the Zero Tolerance period and the autonomous anarchist youth movement in León. Héctor Gómez Vargas, a media theory and youth studies genius and expert on León was generous with his work, collegial network, and time, helping me to frame individual narratives around larger institutional, urban, and national histories. Leonese Youth Institute members, present and past, were generous in sharing their perspectives as well, and I would like to thank in particular Pedro Rangel, Aram Saul Martínez, Mariano Gonzales, Jose de Jesus González Lara, Victoria Hidalgo, Lalo Camarena, Misraim Macías, David Gonzales, and Ricardo Morado. Angeles López provided important information about the broader landscape of youth and nonprofit work in the city. Robin Alexander taught me about the history of labor activism in León and introduced me to Angeles. Daniela Z. Camarena shared her invaluable archive of Leonese graffiti from 2001 to 2012, when doing such research was risky and was not recognized as it is today. Susana García offered access to photos from the Festival Leonés de Arte Independiente. At the Hemeroteca Municipal, Agustín was a huge help, and at the Instituto Municipal de Planeación, José María Frausto Vargas helped me put together some crucial context on the city’s planning history. Luis López and José Castro helped facilitate some image permissions. Zach Brodt at the university archives for the University of Pittsburgh helped me to learn about the ideological, cultural, and architectural history of my home university, thus informing my thinking about my own institutional attunements.

A Northwestern University School of Communication Ignition Grant funded my first trip to León in 2012. Research funding for visits in 2014, 2015, and 2016 came from the University of Pittsburgh, from Dietrich School Type I and Type II Grants and a Hewlett Grant. The Villanova University Waterhouse Family Institute Fellowship provided a very generous grant to support a long trip in 2015. Later support was provided by the University of Pittsburgh Central Research Development Fund for research from 2016 to 2018. An Eastern Communication Association Urban Communication Research Grant enabled a return trip in 2018. A University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center Internal Faculty Fellowship in 2019 provided a course release for much-needed writing time, as well as structured feedback from brilliant colleagues Lara Putnam and Michael Goodhardt. Other presentations of the work helped its development, and I shared it at the University of New Mexico’s Race and Media conference in 2015, the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in 2017, the Latin American Studies Association in 2018, Penn State University’s Visualizing the Self in Flux conference in 2019, Duquesne University’s CIQR in 2022, and the College Art Association in 2022.

Thank you to the University of Texas Press for supporting this work and to Kerry Webb, an excellent editor. I am grateful she saw promise in the project over a Zoom meeting during the pandemic. I was not at my best that day, frantically flipping kibble over to my cranky teething puppy, Rus. Christina Vargas provided invaluable help navigating image production. Thanks to the rest of the press team for their attention and care with this project, including Abby Webber and Danni Bens. It is an honor to be part of the Visualidades series, curated by Jessica Stites Mor and Ernesto Capello, at a press that publishes the work of so many academic rock stars whom I admire.

The Fulbright–García Robles / COMEXUS Postdoctoral Fellowship allowed me to live in León from 2017 to 2018. I am immensely grateful to Fulbright and COMEXUS for this opportunity, and to Renée Gonzalez de la Lama for her support for this project and my collaborative cross-border artwork with writers from Mexico. During this fellowship, I was hosted by the Universidad Iberoamericana León, and I am forever grateful to my colleagues there for their generosity in sharing their intellect, space, time, and care. In addition to thanking Héctor, I would like to thank Carmén Obregón Rodríguez, David Martinez Mendizibal, Isaura López Villaseñor, Lupita Navarrete, Fabrizio Larusso, Guillermo Adrían Tapia, and Ignacio Gómez García, among others. The Social Inequality Working Group at IBERO León taught me about broader issues in the region in order to better understand the graffiti movement. I’m so grateful, as well, to Laura Morales, Sara Mata Lucio, Tarik Torres, José Luis and Era, Luis López, Laura Alejandri, Zapata, and Mariselva for making me feel at home. Anne Pfister, a Fulbright colleague, connected me with folks in León and is also a sterling human. And a shout-out to hangout and interview spots in León: Viento Libre, La Rufina, Café Mudejar, and many others.

During the fellowship, funding from the Dietrich School dean’s office supported the visits of Stef Skills and Kane One to León, who executed impressive pieces and helped to continue a cross-border exchange. I want to thank my collaborators in the Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project: Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, and Max Gonzales, who are brilliant artists, talented programmers, and caring compatriots. Hemispheric Conversations is one of the best experiences I have had with ongoing experiments in attunement through international art exchange experimenting with a kind of undercommons. The artists we’ve worked with, including Stef, Gloe, Orion, Kif, Wes, Kart, Bel2, Eva Bracamontes, Tomas Garcia, Sasha Primo, Spok, Nicole Marroquin, Alison Zapata, Zeb One, Juliandra Jones, Jerome Charles, Scott Brozovich, Ashley Hodder, and many others: you all are the bomb.

Writing and thinking for this project was supported by collective dialogue. First, a big shout-out to my writing group, the LDP, which includes Kimberly A. Singletary, Michaela Frischherz, Lisa E. Silvestri, Emily Winderman, and Heather Suzanne Woods. Working with you all is a privilege and a joy: you are incredible academics and humans. When I talk about social infrastructure, you and your work come to mind.

Feedback—in writing or over coffee, tea, and walks—also came from valued colleagues such as Christa Olson, David L. Marshall, Bruce Campbell, Joe Austin, Frederick Evans, Luisa Herse, Jennifer Josten, Zachary Stiegler, Ricardo Klein, Benjamin Arditi, Oliver Barcenas Cruz, Calum Matheson, Amy Lueck, and Karen Whedbee, and from the many graduate students with whom I have had the fortune to work over the years. David Marshall’s writing seminar afforded some detailed comments on chapter one from Max Dosser, Nadia Hussein, Rachel Clancy, Reed Van Schenck, Tim Barr, and Sierra Abrams, and David later provided crucial framing advice. My colleagues’ intellectual generosity is inspiring. Jessica Pabón Colón introduced me to Kif back in 2011, who introduced me to León. Lauren Berlant, whose work shaped my own in so many ways, provided some initial thoughts on this project at a meeting in 2015. You are missed very much.

Graduate research support was essential and provided bibliographic help, incisive feedback, and research assistance. The students include Emily Herrington, E. Chebrolu, Corinne Sugino, Christine Choi, and Alex Holguin. You all are amazing and brilliant, and I am so excited for your future work.

Ongoing developmental editing from Kimberly A. Singletary helped make what was often an incoherent laundry list of musings into a more graspable argument. Kimberly, you are the best: a model of integrity, care, and brilliance. Your margin comments gave me life.

I also want to thank colleagues who provided affective and professional support throughout my journey from assistant to associate professor and throughout the writing of this book. Anjali Vats, Lisa Corrigan, Karma Chávez, Leslie Hahner, Greg Siegworth, Claire Sisco King, Isaac West, Jeff Bennett, Cara A. Finnegan, Victoria Gallagher, Damien Pfister, Imani Owens, Jules Gill Peterson, Peter O’Dell Campbell, Elizabeth Rodríguez Fielder, Myra Washington, Khirsten Scott, David Tenorio, Matt Detar, Sara VanderHaagen, Erik Johnson, Amber Kelsie, Jessica Greenberg, Dave Molina, Lester Olson, Barbara McCloskey, and Chris Nygren, your work enriches academia, and I am so lucky I get to know you and hang out with you, whether at the Cathedral of Learning, at conferences, or during travels. From dumplings in Seattle to coffee at Constellation to drinks at Tina’s, this is the life of the mind as much as the archive. If I forgot anyone’s name, apologies for my sieve brain.

To my friends, who made me feel held during losses, buoyed me during challenges, and created spaces for joy—Polly Solomon, Rachel Haig, Randall Bush, Megan Bernard, Jesse Baldwin-Philippi, Sasha Tuzel, Kate Carter, Latonya Starks, Sumaya Ullah-Restagno, Daniela Bloch, and, again, Peter—I love you all.

Finally, I researched and wrote this book in the midst of some tumultuous years, both globally and for my family. We have lost people since I began this project back in 2012, and I would like to name them: my mother, Catherine Bruce; my grandmother, Esther K. Oriol; my uncle-in-law, Eric Johnson; my niece’s father, Scott Nelms; and my grandfather-in-law, Pat Elliott. My mother wanted me to be always traveling, exploring, and researching, and she provided, as my high school teammate Robert Samuels framed it, the support to make those dreams a reality. Although it was hard to be apart when she was alive, I always felt her love, and I still do now. Mom, Grandma, Pat, Eric, Scott: we love you, we miss you, and we are always thinking about you.

To those who remain: To my father, Ted, your faith and focus are admirable; I’m glad we are getting to continue to discover new places together, and I hope someday to visit León with you. To my brother, Sebastian, you are a sweet soul, and I am proud of you and your dog-parent skills for my fur-nephew, Gizmo. To my sister, Sam, you are my best friend and a force of light, and I couldn’t have made it through the last few years without you. Thanks to my extended family for love, counsel, and support: Serge, Cassia, Seth, Carol, Peter, Jodie, Saundra, Nancy, Darrin, Grandpa Oriol, Diana, Tina, Beth, and Brian. To my in-laws, Laura, Stephanie, Libby, and Kirk, and to my niece and nephew, Aidan and AJ, thank you for making Nashville feel like home.

Crucially, to the best and most loyal writing companions, my pets—Patches, Rus, Miranda, and the late Sir Pax—you got us through so much and are loved beyond measure (but not enough to give you as many treats as you would like). Pax, we miss you, sweet bun.

To my partner, Paul Elliott Johnson, who is brilliant, funny, and caring, thank you. You have lived with this project from the day I left Pittsburgh in 2012 for my first trip to León to the beginning of 2023. You fed visiting artists, keenly listened to concerns and churning theories, cared for Pax and home (and later Patches) when I was in Mexico, helped me get hyped about Club León football while visiting me there, and read most pages of this book that were in various stages of lucidity. I am excited for future life projects, including reencountering the world with Clifton Eric Bruce. My luck simply staggers my imagination. I love you.

Glossary

Terms in writing culture

tag a writer’s moniker

bomb a moniker written in larger scale, usually in two colors

piece/burner a much more elaborate form of a writer’s name, usually multicolored and sometimes accompanied by images

writer one who writes their name; a graffiti practitioner

grafiterx a gender-neutral term for a writer in Spanish

grafitero a term for a male writer in Spanish

grafitera a term for a female writer in Spanish

Introduction

In May 2002, on an unremarkably sunny Sunday afternoon, a group of young people ranging from fourteen years old to midtwenties marched through the colonial-style historic center of León, Guanajuato, and descended into a concrete riverbed flanked by the city’s central highway, the Malecón del Río. The Malecón, a central space for graffiti-writing culture in León in the 1990s, had been the subject of numerous op-eds in 2001 that attuned the public to the growing graffiti crisis. In youth writer circles, it figured as a legendary space where all the greats of the culture had once written their names. This time, it was a place for protest, its centrality and visibility holding the possibility of amplifying youth voices and galvanizing the attention of media, citizens, and authorities. Once they arrived at the base of the riverbed, the youths took paint cans out of their backpacks or pants or sweatshirt pockets and began to write, Cero Tolerancia no pasará: no more Zero Tolerance. Zero Tolerance was a statewide policy implemented by Guanajuato’s governor that was modeled on Mexico City’s law to enforce visible order in public spaces. Often mobilizing militarized police forces to cut down on informal practices such as street vending, loitering, and graffiti writing, Zero Tolerance was consonant with the goal of attracting foreign investment in newly beautified and domesticated spaces.¹ The youths embodied multiple international cultural and political styles: some wore shirts and jackets adorned with Rastafarian or ska iconography, others displayed punk symbols, and some in baggy pants nodded to a hip-hop aesthetic. Media and policy discourse overwhelmingly framed these youth cultures as evidence of a generational crisis and a threat to the city, the nation, and the family. The government’s response to the youth gathering in the Malecón was swift and massive. About forty police in full riot gear, replete with helmets and body armor, kettled the writers, banging on shields. A helicopter flew overhead. One writer, Kaos, was arrested, and the others fled.

The protest and its quick repression was one instance in a larger corporate, media, and government campaign that sought to attune citizens to graffiti and graffiti writers as threats.² The Leonese writer Kif recounted that the campaign miseducated the people about graffiti, convincing them that [we] were vandals, criminals, dangerous. A radio jingle was even created for the campaign called No manches, la ciudad es nuestra casa (The city is our home, don’t dirty it). Kif recalled that the song included the lyrics, If you are taggers, don’t do it, don’t risk it . . . ​focusing on sports and life works better.³ But even those writers who sought entrepreneurial opportunities in artistic graffiti were surveilled. Nikkis, one of the leaders in the artistic graffiti movement, explained that writers were often detained or beaten just for having a backpack and cap. ⁴ This dramatic confrontation between police officers and young people was part of a longer generational and cultural battle over values: those of public space, collective life, and civic voice in the wake of political and cultural transformations largely conditioned by neoliberalism and globalization. In the years immediately before and after Mexico signed on to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the fall of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, (Partido Revolucionario Institutional [PRI]) in 2000, youth practices such as graffiti were lightning rods for debate about the urban image, the role of the state, the value of corporations as civic entities, and the possibilities of youth voices being audible as citizen voices.

The story of graffiti in León did not end with the tense standoff between police and writers in 2002. Graffiti continued to be a medium that the state was closely keyed into in 2010, as Mexico celebrated the bicentennial of the 1810 War of Independence from Spain and the centennial of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The 1910 revolution—led by both peasant and elite militants who sought greater social equality and democratic governance—broke the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and led to a period of national reconstruction that used muralism as a prominent visual emblem for the nation. In 2010, a group of writers painted a tunnel in an underpass of the Malecón, creating a mural of famous figures largely from Mexico’s golden age of cinema (Cine de Oro), a period from roughly 1936 to 1956. The writers Nikkis, Sent, Gogue, Bote, Orion, Apolo, Drop, Spok, and Wes created striking black-and-white film stills of stars such as María Félix and Pedro Infante who were part of a genre strongly marked by ranchero culture, or Mexican folk music. Such figures were beloved by older generations in the city, and indeed, Nikkis recounted, instead of the usual jeers of Paint your ass! the writers heard cheers as drivers sounded their horns in appreciation, yelling, Well done, kid! The mural, spearheaded by a group of young people in their early twenties to early thirties, functioned to tune a broader audience into the aesthetic and emotional possibilities of spray-can art as a medium for collective memory and identity. The mural’s potential was amplified in media coverage weeks later, as writers were celebrated in the city’s major newspapers not as dangerous vandals but as talented artists.

In 2017, the Malecón again served as the site for a highly visible graffiti project, Malecolor, which convened 140 writers who were provided food, spray paint, and transportation to paint the multi-kilometer-long walls. The subdirector of the city’s Municipal Youth Institute (Instituto Municipal de Juventud), Rodrigo Lalo Camarena, remarked that the project would inaugurate the largest tolerance zone for graffiti in the world and generate the openness to all youth that we are trying to create, enabling the Youth Institute to sensitize the public to the art and strengthen connections between writers, government, commercial sponsors, and citizens.⁵ One can see from the previous examples that within the space of seventeen years, media and municipal descriptions of writers had shifted. Once described as vandals and delinquents in government and newspaper reports, writers were now often described as artists and sometimes even as citizens. The shifts in atmosphere in León encompass what Claire Fox has figured as both policy’s potentially transformative and its normative aspects, and they reveal how the production, refusal, or imagination of voices is bound up with questions of institutional attunement.⁶

In the following pages, I offer a rhetorical ethnography of graffiti and of institutions. I tell a story of the shifting terms through which graffiti becomes audible as voice, offers forms of worlding, and elucidates and refuses frameworks for value through practices of attunement. I address the following questions: How do institutions change and young people transform as they tune into each other’s expectations and values? How do these processes of attunement shape what counts as voice and how voice is heard? What happens when the state becomes the primary sponsor for a formerly subcultural practice?

To answer these questions, I make two primary arguments, one conceptual and one empirical. First, attunement offers a helpful framework for understanding how cultural expressions circulate, are given saliency, or are refused, and it allows for more complexity in attending to processes of cultural communication than co-option/resistance or authenticity/inauthenticity. While I originally thought to modify the word voices with citizen—citizen voices—the civic realm does not fully capture the dynamics of attunement, worlding, and work in youth practices in León. Attunement is a concept that already has some purchase in rhetoric but can provide conceptual and methodological space to attend, in a multimodal way, to power dynamics, especially in the context of youth culture and aesthetic practice. Second, empirically, the institutionalization of subcultural expression is not a straight line from exclusion to inclusion. Attunement helps one to listen, to look, and to feel for the oscillation, unification, disagreement, static, susurration, amplification, frisson, noise, and harmonization that occur as different subjects claim or inhabit modes of voice.

Institutional attunement describes the ways that cultural practitioners and institutions of various sorts (media, education, government, cultural) navigate and seek to produce frequencies for recognition, shared vibrations, audibility, and attention but also relegate certain voices to noise, static, or interference, incentivizing inattention at best and energizing expulsion at worst. The three moments I previously introduced—of graffiti’s treatment as a danger, as a potential resource for nostalgic identification, and as a medium to facilitate harmony between commercial, citizen, and municipal entities—illuminate rhetorical processes that I name institutional attunement to or with voices. Attunement is practiced by municipal agents who seek to tune into youth cultures and to help the broader citizenry hear writers’ visual expressions as civic voice, but who also often demand that young people occupy the right frequency and align their voices and practices with the needs and norms of older generations and capitalist society. Institutional attunement also speaks to how young people have their own practices of modulating their voices so that they are audible within institutional frequencies, or, in the case of some writers, how youths might refuse to let the noise of their art be heard as speech, instead insisting on maintaining noisy forms of expression. Attunement is rhetorical insofar as it is about transforming capacities for reception, persuasion, and attention through aesthetic practices that activate and modulate public emotions (affects).

I define attunement as the process by which voice is identified, attended to, made audible and amplified, contoured to fit within resonant circuits, and redistributed through recognizable frequencies: the making of what might be considered voices and worlds. Attunement is a tuning up to something, a labor, freighted with the stuff the world is living through.⁷ Attunement is a synesthetic metaphor for communicative and rhetorical processes that accounts for affective dynamics of receptivity, interference, and engagement that take place between subjects, publics, and worlds. Attunement unfolds in multiple arenas (interpersonal relationships, institutional plans, aesthetic practices), but I attend to visual culture as a particular register through which individual, collective, and geographic imaginaries are transformed in the wake of different aspirations about the good life. Attunement is rhetorical and involves acts of attending, listening, speaking, judging, and understanding that play out in official and ordinary contexts beyond the deliberative-rational model that many in the field of rhetorical scholarship have criticized for supporting a white, bourgeois, heteropatriarchal fantasy. Even when it comes to institutions that understand their purview to be deliberative, rationality bound, and technical, I want to insist on the incoherence and porousness of institutions, the value of noise, and attunement as ongoing and mobile.

To establish a context and an argumentative scaffolding for the book, I briefly introduce my rationale for the case study by extending my definition of institutional attunement to contextualize it within this book’s methodology. I then articulate some of the broader context