South Central L.A.’s Kings and Queens: An Oral Street History of the rise of US Carceral Landscapes of the West, 1980s-1990s

Alejandro Garcia
History
UC Berkeley

During the rise of the Carceral State in the 1980s, South Central Los Angeles witnessed youth come together in interracial graffiti groups. The oral histories of these youngsters not only illustrate race relations never witnessed before in L.A., but also their experiences, engagements, and disengagement with US expanding carceral landscapes. The landscape of carcerality was not restricted to official top-down power relations, but also with bottom-up carceral forces: that is, the extra-legal street power relations legitimizing state police surveillance and access to South Central youth. This project is an oral history of how the rise of graffiti crews, and their interracial decline illustrate lager top-down and bottom-up aspects of California’s role in carceral in the West, and also how Black and Brown youth navigated and created alternative networks of resistance and resilience outside commonly understood cohorts of gangs.