Los Angeles graffiti styles, "Going All City," urban autoethnography
Stefano Bloch is an American author and professor of cultural geography and critical criminology at the University of Arizona who focuses on graffiti, prisons, the policing of public space, and gang activity.[1][2]
Stefano Bloch is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and faculty member in the Center for Latin American Studies and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory.[10][11][12]
Bloch is a graffiti historian[13] and provides expert testimony on legal cases focusing on gang activity and identity.
In 2024, Bloch's commentaries on violent crime trends and "the most dangerous drug on campus" were published in the Arizona Daily Star.[23][24]
The September 2024 issue of Psychology Today credits Professor Bloch's research with "shedding light on a historically maligned subculture and helps outsiders understand the deeply human motivations that compel graffiti artists, most of them young and marginalized, to pick up their paint and head out into the night."[25]
Education and career
Bloch was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brown University Cogut Center for the Humanities,[26] and Presidential Diversity Fellow and a Senior Research Associate in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University.[27]
Bloch worked under the socio-spatial theorist, urbanist, and co-founder of the Los Angeles School, Edward Soja. As a graduate researcher in the Department of Urban Planning within the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Bloch collaborated on Soja's My Los Angeles[28] and Seeking Spatial Justice.[29]
Bloch is a member of the American Association of Geographers, the American Society of Criminology, the UA Center for Latin American Studies,[30] the Institute for LGBT Studies,[31] and is an executive board member of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona.[32]
Bloch's writing on gang member identification appeared as an op-ed in The New York Times[33] and his work on police shootings involving pet dogs co-authored with sociologist Daniel E. Martinez appeared in Slate.com.[34]
Scholarly writing
According to the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Gangs and Society,[35] Bloch's research "infuses cultural geography with critical criminology to advocate for the inclusion of gangs and gang members in geographical theories of space and place. He contends that a deeper understanding of notions of territoriality and neighborhood would benefit geography generally and gang research specifically. [He] charts the path forward for how to make 'geography a home for gang studies.'”[36]
In a 2018 article published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Bloch coined the term "place based elicitation" to describe interviewing techniques that allow for reflexive, in-situ expression by members of criminal subcultures.[46]
Bloch's 2024 peer-reviewed research on the use of civil law to circumvent people's constitutional protections is published in the Antipode (journal).[47]
Praise for Going All City
Linguist and activist Noam Chomsky hails Going All City as "a vivid autoethnography and a shattering account of life in the LA 'gang hoods – and the warmth and companionship that somehow survive the horrors.'" Writing:
Bloch provides a remarkable picture, presented with insight and sympathetic understanding."[48]
Bloch knows how dangerous art can be for aerosol warriors: their imaginations arrested and expressions pathologized. He also elucidates the undeniable brilliance exploding on walls, utility poles, and underpasses.[49]
Stefano Bloch is the ultimate insider in an outsider subculture, a legend for his productivity and tirelessness... Few works explore L.A. with the depth that Going All City accomplishes—and, at 240 pages, so economically—while also touching on the importance of art, the difficulties of family, and the struggle to belong. . . It is a work not simply of insight and gravity, but also of unflinching wisdom regarding those deemed to be the least of society."[51]
According to author and cultural criminologist Jeff Ferrell, writing for Times Higher Education:
Page after page of this tensely engaging memoir documents Bloch's elaborate, daily remapping of streets, blocks and neighbourhoods along shifting coordinates of physical access, subcultural status, public visibility and the daily dangers offered up by street gangs and the police."[52]
Chaz Bojorquez, the "god father of Chicano graffiti,"[53] calls Stefano Bloch "the first true graffiti writer scholar, tagging his story and name on the walls inside your mind."[3]
Susan A. Phillips, noted anthropologist and author of Wallbangin',Operation Flytrap, and The City Beneath states:
Going All City is an amazing read that is impossible to put down. A cutting-edge geographical exploration of under-examined Los Angeles landscapes, this poignant, insightful book is unique within graffiti scholarship and expansive in our understanding of the city. Depicting the pain of a childhood spent in poverty, the ambiguity of race, and the subjective experience of policing and gangs, this is the remarkable story of just one of thousands of young people who have found power in the clandestine practice of graffiti.[54]
The Minneapolis Star Tribune states that "Stefano Bloch's memoir about growing up in 1990s Los Angeles, is a surprising and intimate look inside the life of a graffiti writer."[55]
Stefano Bloch offers a riveting, eye-opening insight into the formative years of Cisco, one of the most prolific taggers in Los Angeles during the 1990s. These days Cisco is better known in the rarefied circles of academia: Cisco is Bloch himself, now a distinguished ethnographer and professor of cultural geography. As a teenager, however, he was obsessed with the phrase that lends the book its title. To go all city is to saturate visible surfaces with one's tag throughout a conurbation – a challenging but effective way of gaining the admiration of other graffiti writers (aka "bombers" or simply "writers") and even the tacit respect of hostile gangs…a valuable and enlightening means of better understanding the dynamics behind tagging.[56]
Bloch's autoethnography is not only one of the most compelling books ever written about writing graffiti, it is one of the best memoirs of someone growing up in the San Fernando Valley.[57]
Bloch unflinchingly peels back all the layers of artifice, hype, and sensationalism to reveal a stark portrait of struggling to survive and make meaning in a landscape of disorder and deprivation.[58]
It would be difficult to find an author better credentialed than 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. . . . 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.[59]
In Hyperallergic, critic and art historian Bridget Quinn calls Going All City "that rarest text, both a gripping memoir of life on the street, as well as an academic treatise."[60]
Personal life
As stated in his 2019 memoir, Going All City, Bloch attended North Hollywood High School as Stefano Sykes, a name given to him. Under his pseudonym, Cisco, Bloch is a member of the Los Angeles-based CBS graffiti crew and former writing partner of Mear One, and appears in the 2022 documentary Can't Be Stopped.[61]
As Cisco, Bloch is widely credited as an innovator of 1990s-era graffiti writing styles including "topless letters" and "top-to-bottom freeway silvers,"[56][62] and is known as "one of LA's most prolific (and, in some circles, legendary) graffiti writers" according to Times Higher Education.[63]
Bloch lives with his family in Los Angeles, California and Tucson, Arizona.
^Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile". Progress in Human Geography. 45: 136–155. doi:10.1177/0309132519901306. S2CID213131608.
^Bloch, Stefano (November 14, 2019). Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-49344-2.
