The Writing's on the Wall

“The walls are the publishers of the poor.” —Eduardo Galeano

But the student sat outside on a bench, pretending to text instead. Why? She admitted that she hesitated going in “for reasons I’m not very proud of”—there were four people on the street, all of them older than her and speaking Spanish, a language she didn’t understand. Three of them had tattoos and piercings. Was she encroaching on their neighborhood? Would that be considered offensive?

When you feel scared and intimidated, what do you do next? She busied herself in her phone until she thought they were gone, and then entered the store.

Later, she wrote:

So I went in, only to discover they were inside as well. I quietly went to look at candles, hoping no one would talk to me. However, the lady I wrote about to the class—the mother who had come to ask Doña Victoria for a prayer of protection for her son, the woman who helped me pick out a candle and patiently answer all of my questions—was the same woman I had avoided outside of the store. She was so willing to help a complete stranger who was so obviously not from the area that I felt incredibly guilty for judging based on her appearance.

Even though I am well aware this entire story sounds like something out of one of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books for preteens that teach lessons of cultural acceptance, volunteering for good, creating lasting friendships, etc., everything is completely true and the significance is only becoming apparent as I reflect back. I witnessed the blessing of candles for long-lasting love and safety from violence that day. I also walked away with a unique experience and new impression of Humboldt Park. No other neighborhood that I visited welcomed a complete stranger with such open arms.

Students are so often afraid when I ask them to go to the main street in Humboldt Park, “Paseo Boricua,” the heart of a Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. They are assigned to take a bus, look for mural art, stop in at a restaurant or coffee shop, buy something within their price range (which can be a dollar for a few tomatoes), and exchange simple pleasantries with sales people.

Some female students write that their uncles, fathers, and boyfriends protest that the assignment is not safe. Other students post reports of violence in Chicago two miles away, insisting it is the same area. Some Latino students had families who moved out of these neighborhoods years ago, and their parents protest them going back. Even the statistics of how crime has dropped in the neighborhood, or how hundreds of students have done these assignments over the years without incident, do not allay their fears.

But the students, most of them, do the assignment. And we talk about how the word “safety” is so often code for racial fears.

A conversation on the walls

“Education is not an act of consuming ideas but of creating them.” The words come from a banner across the top of my course site. What does it mean to put the tools of “creating” ideas into student hands?

Students get a simple assignment at the beginning of the course. I ask them to walk for a few blocks around their homes and take pictures of the “scriptorial landscape” they find.

The first week, we think about “street literacy,” looking at the world of writing that goes on in public spaces that is meant to be seen by many and understood by few. Street art and graffiti are in a language of images and script that are supposed to be seen but also to obscure the meanings from most people. It is much more ephemeral and intangible than what resides in libraries. But paying attention provokes us into considering why people write and communicate through symbols and what that means for the human differences that coalesce in urbanscapes.

Before students head out to the streets, they read a short article that critically examines the dichotomies we create about whether graffiti is “art” or “crime.” Some students—without even looking in their own neighborhood—take off for areas they consider more run down or “gritty” than their own and come back triumphantly with pictures of work they consider “gang graffiti.” It is almost always simple tagging, piecing, or “throw ups.” In all the years I’ve given this assignment, less than 10 percent of students find actual gang graffiti, but most of them think that they have.

Very few know that gang graffiti is communicative—letters written over letters, turned upside down, colors thrown on someone else’s colors, symbolic meaning encoded in the curves of the lines. A conversation is happening on those walls—and just because one is unaware of its presence does not mean there is silence.

Some students share their surprise that a few-block walk in their own neighborhood easily nets them at least 10 photos. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have a student who has actually done some street art, and they find out to their surprise that they have skills and knowledge that give them an advantage in the discussion board. Someone wrote something on a wall with an intention. Whether or not one agrees with that intent, I argue to the students, you should still be able to “see” it.

By far the greatest response to this exercise is surprise that the unofficial and unsanctioned “writing on the wall” exists at all. Most students have been walking by the scriptorial landscape of the city on a daily basis and have never even seen it. They are astonished at this discovery, and it shapes the rest of the course. What does it mean to not see what is right in front of us? Is it an inconvenient truth? Why is it invisible? Who wrote those words, and why do we consider their effort unimportant and insignificant?

This sets the base for the next part of the course, where students explore the concept of the “imagined community” by going on quests to find print newspapers in languages they cannot speak or read. Where do you go to find a newspaper you cannot read? What can you learn by leafing through a newspaper with words you cannot comprehend?

We contemplate the role of the Chicago Defender in making space for black journalism, and the role of the newspaper in the great migrations to Chicago in the early part of the 20th century. Many of the students did not even know that there were migrations of African Americans into Chicago during and after the world wars. We face what we cannot read on the walls, and we face the many languages we cannot understand in the newspaper communities that still exist in Chicago.

A deeper kind of knowledge

Once students are sensitized by experiences like these, we go on to contemplate various issues in the segregated city of Chicago:

Gentrification. What happens when developers and real estate people turn back to those same neighborhoods and start investing again, after the wealth was drained out? I have students walk through neighborhoods that have a deep history of protesting gentrification. They read the signs, the walls, the newspapers. They read Jesse Mumm’s article on “intimate segregation,” eat in the restaurants and watch who moves around whom, who talks to whom in restaurants. Who are the regulars? They learn to ask the hard questions about what it means when poor neighborhoods become homes for artists, activists, students, and those who seek cheap cultural literacy among the disenfranchised, displacing the very people who made those neighborhoods attractive to them.

Walking the city like this helps students attain a deeper kind of knowledge that cannot be achieved just by reading—especially if they are reading with music in their ears, movies in the background, attending to constant notifications from social media and surrounded by household and dorm sounds.

The end of the printing press era?

For generations, the printing press has shaped the book and our ways of learning. The printing press lies at the core of this—able to spit out pamphlet after pamphlet, book after book, and map after map, making possible a commonality of knowing.

The printing press, embedded in the culture of the guilds, built universities filled with books—institutions that reward those who read, write, and interpret them. Scholars, known by the size of their libraries, read the same books and come together (and split asunder, as they are known to do) with their interpretations. They fill reams of paper in journals and books—such is the measure of a scholar.

We are entering a world in which reading a book is no longer the primary technology available to thinkers and seekers of knowledge. Students, all except the most perfectly domesticated, often spend more time on image-filled blogs and relationally defined social media. The “imagined community” joined together by books and shaped by the printing press is no longer the village square of knowledge. We are moving from a build-knowledge society to a knowing-how-to-find-it-and-share-it society. Ideally, we are also learning how to process and apply it. Perhaps, in this, we are still very young.

Our world is “written upon”—everywhere—far beyond the reaches of institutionally sanctioned text. It is not that our students no longer read; it is that their eyes are almost completely colonized by the requirement to read in other forms—billboards, advertisements, maps, directions, and social media. Cyberspace is also about text, but it is much deeper and richer than simple text. Images, color, design, and sound shape the interactive and communicative environment.

How to misunderstand the “other”

Diego de Landa was an infamous bishop in the 16th century who thought he had learned how to write the Maya language. He was on a crusade to convert the “Indians” of Mesoamerica to Christianity, and he ordered hundreds of Maya books destroyed. “We found a large number of books,” Landa wrote, “and as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which [the Maya] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

Landa, in his passionate pursuit to root out all “evil,” frenetically learned all he could about the Maya. He was recalled to Spain because his fellow priests thought his cruelty excessive and his zeal harmful. He waited for years for his audience with the king, and during that time he wrote a book about the Maya (Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan) to convince the king how much cultural information he had amassed and how deeply he understood the Maya. The book is the earliest record of the Maya aside from their own writings, which outsiders did not understand until recent decades. In a tragic irony that is all too common, Landa’s book is a widely used primary source on all things Maya.

Why is this story important to graffiti and to our thinking about street literacy? Landa believed he discovered the key to the Maya writing system. This was quite advanced thinking for his day—until then, researchers thought about Maya writing as simple pictures, at a much lower level than symbolic and abstract writing. Landa sat down with Maya scribes and asked them to write the glyphs for an “A,” a “B,” and so on, using the Roman alphabet. He did not ask anyone to write the Maya glyphs for phonemes such as “Ba,” “Be,” “Bi,” “Bo,” and “Bu.” They answered his questions and wrote down what he wanted, but his questions were a great example of “seeing with his own eyes and hearing with his own ears”—it turns out that the Maya glyphs are written more like syllables than letters. He was a captive of his own script, the Roman alphabet, and his book made the rest of outside understanding of Maya script stall out for almost 400 years.

Scripts are often more complex than they seem. Particularly the scripts of “others” considered barbaric or uncivilized or in need of conversion (in Landa’s case) and dismissed as scribbles and erased—buffed by city paint and obliterated. What does it mean when we restrict the reading of the streets to the commercial and sanctioned use of the walls?

How can we begin to “see” the informal, unsanctioned, and often-illegal scriptorial landscapes on the walls of city streets and elsewhere? A small first step is to admit our own illiteracy.