Special to The News
Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009
Standing outside Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Méndez Rodríguez shakes a can of gold paint and puts his finger to the trigger. He stomps out his cigarette, points the can at a barrier and sprays the word "Spat" - his tag.
Police officers are close at hand, but the 19-year-old "grafitero" pays them no mind. After all, it was the police department who invited him here.
Rodríguez is one of 450 young graffiti artists who participated in the city's second Mega Graffiti Exhibition last weekend. As part of the event, the city's Public Safety Secretariat, or SSP-DF, encouraged high school-age artists to spray-paint their way to cash prizes, asking the teens to cover the stadium's exterior walls with colorful murals and designs.
This year's event received more than 1,000 applications from grafiteros hoping to interpret the stadium's past sporting, religious or political events. To help accomplish the task, Comex S.A., Mexico's largest paint producer, provided 13,000 cans of spray-paint and 2,500 liters of traditional paint to participants.
The contest signals a changing approach to Mexico City's ongoing campaign against graffiti, an urban pastime that officials have previously viewed as a gateway to organized crime and drugs.
The crackdown on graffiti began in 2003 after a group of businessmen forked over $4.3 million to the Giuliani Group - a consulting firm headed by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani - for suggestions on how to deal with the local crime problem. The firm suggested a "zero tolerance" strategy, which punishes minor offenses in order to cut more severe crimes off at the source.
Acting on the advice, the city formed its Unidad Antigraffiti task force, commissioning police officers to catch late-night grafiteros and issue fines and even brief jail time.
Nearly seven years later, the task force has dropped the "anti" from its moniker and has begun opening spaces for young artists to paint legally.
The city wants to channel its young talent and give the youth viable forms of self-expression, SSP-DF official Nora Frias Melgosa said. Last year, the graffiti unit commissioned 7,000 high schoolers in Mexico City to paint murals in designated spaces, she said.
Othón Sánchez Cruz, the police department's director of institutional prevention programs, said the graffiti exhibition brings kids who would normally run from the police together with the authorities, providing a context in which the painters can be encouraged to reject vandalism in favor of more positive expressions.
OPENING SPACES
"Disgo," an 18-year-old grafitero, sprayed away Saturday as traffic streamed behind him, the smells of aerosol and exhaust fusing together under a hot midday sun. He stretched his arms in fast, arching strokes, outlining his caricature of Die-go Maradona, the Argentine soccer star famous for a controversial goal in a 1986 World Cup match played at Estadio Azteca.
"These exhibitions open spaces, and when spaces open, we're interested," Disgo said, surrounded by friends who came to watch him spray. He participates in similar events in the Cuajimalpa borough, taking any chance he can get to make graffiti, he said.
Janet Xolalpa Graciano, 18, stood with three helpers on overturned trash cans, running wide brushes and bright yellow paint across the tall metal wall. Her small cloth painting showed what the mural would become: a linear history of the stadium's most famous guests, including Pope John Paul II.
Crews of young painters flanked her on either side, everyone working non-stop to finish by the Sunday evening deadline.
The graffiti exhibition is billed as a chance for youth to create sanctioned artwork rather than damaging property with tags or threatening messages. But Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist, says the contest is more of a "grand show" than a real solution.
Besides, the predetermined themes hinder the artists' self-expression, he said.
"The more rules you pile on, the more limits you create," Castillo said. "In the end, it contradicts the sense of integration and opening spaces for the youth."
Castillo is the general director at Circo Volador, an arts center in Colonia Jamaica that since 1998 has provided thousands of young artists in marginalized neighborhoods with spaces to create graffiti.
He was first introduced to the city's graffiti culture 20 years ago, when City Hall appointed him to study problems affecting local youth. From the then-1,500 organized crime groups in Mexico City, he recognized a common thread: the desire to say something, to create something and to belong.
"We can't just think of graffiti as a problem or as property abuse," he said. "What we're talking about is a form of expression in which the walls are a canvas and the youth are the writers."
ENRICHING, NOT DESTROYING
"Kid:ghe", a 25-year-old grafitero, says his collective of about 40 graffiti artists is like a brotherhood. Artists here have few patrons, he said, so collectives often lend each other materials and offer open spaces.
He paints long lines, sharp angles and sweeping curls with electric colors on wide brick walls and inside homes. He prefers to paint in abandoned spaces with heavy foot traffic, changing the city's image for all who pass by.
"You can change the significance of an alley or a wall," he said. "I like to enrich people's lives, not destroy them."
Back at the stadium, Spat and his graffiti crew begin painting a mural featuring musician Carlos Santana alongside Aztec pyramids. And although he was putting his best effort into the preconceived project, he said he prefers to make graffiti much more spontaneously.
"How I feel in the moment is what I like to paint," he said.
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