UC Davis

This dissertation examines the relation between graffiti and social crisis by considering its various manifestations across the American hemisphere since the early 1970s. Through an interpretation of three distinct but related moments in which graffiti and crisis erupt simultaneously, this work draws out the latent content bound up in graffiti’s socially determined form. The first chapter thus analyzes graffiti’s double character as text and image through a critique of the reception of 1970s New York graffiti, showing how the tendency to privilege writing emerges from a fear of the image of fully developed capitalism. The second chapter compares the graffiti of the 2006 Oaxaca Commune with Mexico’s post-Revolutionary murals to demonstrate the transition, in representational figures, to a post-national condition. The third chapter interprets the motif of the bleeding eye that appeared among the graffiti of Chile’s 2019 social explosion as a symbol not only of state violence but for the destructive character of social reproduction under capitalism. Together these chapters trace the unfolding crisis through the desire for its overcoming in graffiti.