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Stefano Bloch
Born
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Alma materUniversity of Minnesota (Ph.D.)
UCLA (M.A.)
UC Santa Cruz (B.A.)
Los Angeles Valley College (A.A.)
Occupation(s)Author, Educator, and Tenured Professor of Geography, Latin American Studies, and Social, Cultural and Critical Theory
SchoolLos Angeles School
InstitutionsUniversity of Arizona
Brown University
Main interests
Cultural geography, cultural criminology, gangs, graffiti, social theory, gentrification, autoethnography
Notable ideas
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]

Bloch is the author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture[3][4] published by University of Chicago Press, and appears in the documentaries Bomb It, Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression, and "Can't Be Stopped" as "Cisco."[5][6][7][8] Times Higher Education identifies Bloch as "one of LA's most prolific (and, in some circles, legendary) graffiti writers."[9]

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.

Bloch's research and commentary on urban space and protest has been quoted in Smithsonian[14] and his research and perspectives on graffiti have been quoted in the Los Angeles Times,[15][16] New York Times,[17] Washington Post, [18] NBC news,[19] and in other media including Smithsonian Magazine[20] and in interviews with NPR Morning Edition,[21] LAist[22] and the Los Angeles Lakers on NBA.com in which Bloch discusses graffiti in LA and the Lakers' impact on the street art scene, crediting the Lakers organization and its players with bringing some sense of unity to an otherwise racially and economically divided city.

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

[edit]

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 graduate of the University of Minnesota (Ph.D.), UCLA (MA), the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA), and Los Angeles Valley College (AAS).

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]

In 2020, Bloch's master seminar "Researching and Writing an Autoethnography of the Street" was convened by Tricia Rose at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.[33]

Bloch's writing on gang member identification appeared as an op-ed in The New York Times[34] and his work on police shootings involving pet dogs co-authored with sociologist Daniel E. Martinez appeared in Slate.com.[35]

In 2021, Bloch was awarded an "Early Career Scholars Award" for excellence in research, service, and teaching at the University of Arizona,[36] and was awarded a College of Social and Behavioral Sciences "Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award."[37]

Scholarly writing

[edit]

According to the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Gangs and Society,[38] 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.'”[39]

Professor Bloch's research on policing, carcerality, race, and displacement has been published in academic journals including Antipode (journal) (2021) with Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo,[40] Geography Compass (2021),[41] Critical Criminology (journal) (2020),[42] Progress in Human Geography (2020),[43] in Urban Studies (journal) with anthropologist Susan A. Phillips,[44] Environment and Planning,[45] Dialogues in Urban Research,[46] Antipode (journal),[47] Human Geography on Edward W. Soja,[48] and in other scholarly venues.

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.[49]

Bloch's 2024 peer-reviewed research on the use of civil law to circumvent people's constitutional protections is published in the Antipode (journal).[50]

Praise for Going All City

[edit]

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."[51]

Luis J. Rodriguez, former poet laureate, Chicano activist, and author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., writes:

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.[52]

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020, Ryan Gattis, author of All Involved"[53] stated:

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."[54]

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."[55]

Chaz Bojorquez, the "god father of Chicano graffiti,"[56] 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.[57]

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."[58]

According to the Times Literary Supplement in London:

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.[59]

Writing for KCET, Mike Sonksen states:

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.[60]

For Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing:

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.[61]

As written in a featured review of Going All City in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers in 2020:

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.[62]

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."[63]

Personal life

[edit]

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.[64]

As Cisco, Bloch is widely credited as an innovator of 1990s-era graffiti writing styles including "topless letters" and "top-to-bottom freeway silvers,"[59][65] and is known as "one of LA's most prolific (and, in some circles, legendary) graffiti writers" according to Times Higher Education.[66]

His father, Gregory Bloch, who died in 1988 from AIDS, was violinist (It's a Beautiful Day, Premiata Forneria Marconi, Saturday Night Live Band). His paternal grandfather is clarinetist Kalman Bloch. His paternal aunt is Michele Zukovsky. From his paternal grandmother, Frances Heifetz Bloch, he is related to violinist Jascha Heifetz. Through Jascha, his second-cousin once-removed, is drummer Danny Heifetz. He is also distantly related to violinist Daniel Heifetz and academic Ronald Heifetz.

Bloch lives with his family in Los Angeles, California and Tucson, Arizona.

Works

[edit]
  • Bloch, Stefano (2019). "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture". Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226493442

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Stefano Bloch". University of Chicago Press. Retrieved April 11, 2020.
  2. ^ "Stefano Bloch". June 11, 2019.
  3. ^ a b Going All City. University of Chicago Press.
  4. ^ "No One is Nothing: On "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture"". February 14, 2020.
  5. ^ "Can't be Stopped". IMDb.
  6. ^ Bloch, Stefano (November 2019). Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-49358-9.
  7. ^ Harvey, Dennis. "Variety Reviews "Vigilante, Vigilante: The Battle for Expression"".
  8. ^ "'Going All City': How a UA Professor is Changing the Conversation About Graffiti in LA". February 11, 2020.
  9. ^ "Stefano Bloch: life and death in LA's graffiti subculture". Times Higher Education (THE). February 20, 2020. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  10. ^ "Stefano Bloch". August 30, 2019.
  11. ^ "Stefano Bloch". June 11, 2019.
  12. ^ "SCCT Faculty | Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory".
  13. ^ "A graffiti artist-turned professor on the history and evolution of the artform". KJZZ. September 13, 2023. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  14. ^ "How Urban Design Can Make or Break a Protest".
  15. ^ "Taggers seen in action at graffiti-covered L.A. skyscraper. Across street in 2 days: The Grammys". Los Angeles Times. February 1, 2024. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  16. ^ "Two arrested in connection with tagging graffiti-covered L.A. skyscraper across the street from Grammys venue". Los Angeles Times. February 2, 2024. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  17. ^ Carballo, Rebecca (February 4, 2024). "Multiple Floors of Los Angeles Skyscrapers Are Covered in Graffiti". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  18. ^ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/02/08/los-angeles-graffiti-building/ [bare URL]
  19. ^ "City to vote on having owners clear graffiti from downtown LA high-rise". NBC Los Angeles. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  20. ^ "Graffiti Artists Tag 27 Floors of Abandoned Skyscraper in Los Angeles". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  21. ^ https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1237888140/a-new-public-art-project-in-los-angeles-is-creating-a-lot-of-controversy [bare URL]
  22. ^ "Uncovering The History And Impact Of Graffiti Writing In Los Angeles". LAist. February 22, 2024. Retrieved February 22, 2024.
  23. ^ https://tucson.com/opinion/column/local-opinion-some-good-news-about-violent-crime/article_1983f344-0d50-11ef-bf1d-0788a292ce44.html [bare URL]
  24. ^ https://tucson.com/opinion/column/local-opinion-the-most-dangerous-drug-on-campus/article_abfed946-58f0-11ef-8ca5-c7ccaa008442.html [bare URL]
  25. ^ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202409/the-night-writer
  26. ^ "Past and Present Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows | Cogut Institute for the Humanities | Brown University".
  27. ^ "Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows 2015–2017 | Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED) | Brown University".
  28. ^ Soja, Edward W. (March 2014). My Los Angeles by Edward W. Soja. Univ of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-28174-5.
  29. ^ "Seeking Spatial Justice".
  30. ^ "Stefano Bloch". August 30, 2019.
  31. ^ "Affiliated Faculty of the Institute for LGBT Studies". July 7, 2019.
  32. ^ "Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory | Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs".
  33. ^ "researching-and-writing-autoethnography-street" "Upcoming Events | Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America | Brown University".
  34. ^ Bloch, Stefano (February 4, 2020). "Opinion | Are You in a Gang Database?". The New York Times.
  35. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Martínez, Daniel E. (July 6, 2020). "Cops Are Also Shooting Pets in Black and Brown Communities at Much Higher Rates". Slate.
  36. ^ "SBS Faculty Receive Prestigious University Awards for Research and Teaching". June 9, 2021.
  37. ^ "Congratulations to SBS Teaching Award Winners, Spring '21". May 12, 2021.
  38. ^ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-gangs-and-society-9780197618158?cc=us&lang=en&
  39. ^ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Pyrooz/publication/377756348_Introduction_to_the_OUP_Handbook_of_Gangs_and_Society/links/65b90dd51e1ec12eff642ce5/Introduction-to-the-OUP-Handbook-of-Gangs-and-Society.pdf
  40. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Olivares-Pelayo, Enrique Alan (2021). "Carceral Geographies from Inside Prison Gates: The Micro-Politics of Everyday Racialisation". Antipode. 53 (5): 1319–1338. Bibcode:2021Antip..53.1319B. doi:10.1111/anti.12727. S2CID 233627909.
  41. ^ Bloch, Stefano (2021). "Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis". Geography Compass. 15 (3). Bibcode:2021GComp..15E2555B. doi:10.1111/gec3.12555. S2CID 233897432.
  42. ^ Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Broken Windows Ideology and the (Mis)Reading of Graffiti". Critical Criminology. 28 (4): 703–720. doi:10.1007/s10612-019-09444-w. S2CID 151186127.
  43. ^ Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile". Progress in Human Geography. 45: 136–155. doi:10.1177/0309132519901306. S2CID 213131608.
  44. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Phillips, Susan A. (2021). "Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles". Urban Studies. 59 (4): 750–770. doi:10.1177/00420980211010426. S2CID 236550571.
  45. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Meyer, Dugan (2019). "Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 37 (6): 1100–1118. Bibcode:2019EnPlD..37.1100B. doi:10.1177/0263775819832315. S2CID 150509940.
  46. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Meyer, Dugan (2023). "Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies". Dialogues in Urban Research. 1 (3): 206–225. doi:10.1177/27541258231179188. S2CID 259814243.
  47. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Olivares-Pelayo, Enrique Alan (2021). "Carceral Geographies from Inside Prison Gates: The Micro-Politics of Everyday Racialisation". Antipode. 53 (5): 1319–1338. Bibcode:2021Antip..53.1319B. doi:10.1111/anti.12727. S2CID 233627909.
  48. ^ Bloch, Stefano; Brasdefer, Thomas (2023). "Edward W. Soja's Radical Spatial Perspective". Human Geography. 16 (3): 233–243. doi:10.1177/19427786231175849. S2CID 258793982.
  49. ^ Bloch, Stefano (2018). "Place-Based Elicitation: Interviewing Graffiti Writers at the Scene of the Crime". Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 47 (2): 171–198. doi:10.1177/0891241616639640. S2CID 146912741.
  50. ^ Bloch, Stefano (January 30, 2024). "A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces". Antipode. 56 (4): 1152–1171. Bibcode:2024Antip..56.1152B. doi:10.1111/anti.13028. ISSN 0066-4812.
  51. ^ "Stefano Bloch: Life and death in LA's graffiti subculture". February 20, 2020.
  52. ^ "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture (Hardcover) | Turning The Page Books". www.turningthepagebooks.com.
  53. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (April 29, 2015). "Review: 'All Involved' by Ryan Gattis is Set in the Days After the Rodney King Verdict". The New York Times.
  54. ^ "No One is Nothing: On "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture"". February 14, 2020.
  55. ^ "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture, by Stefano Bloch". November 14, 2019.
  56. ^ "Chaz Bojórquez: The Godfather of Graffiti | DOPE Life". September 12, 2017.
  57. ^ "PRESS".
  58. ^ "Don't miss: 'Going All City,' by Stefano Bloch". Star Tribune.
  59. ^ a b "In Brief: Going all City by Stefano Bloch book review | the TLS".
  60. ^ "Seven Books to Help Understand Judith Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles and L.A. Itself". June 30, 2020.
  61. ^ Bloch, Stefano (November 14, 2019). Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-49344-2.
  62. ^ Brasdefer, Thomas (2020). "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture". The AAG Review of Books. 8 (2): 66–67. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722458. S2CID 216209854.
  63. ^ "A Gripping Memoir Dives into LA's Graffiti Subculture of the '90s". January 6, 2020.
  64. ^ "Can't be Stopped". IMDb.
  65. ^ "Going All City: An Interview with Cisco".
  66. ^ "Stefano Bloch: Life and death in LA's graffiti subculture". February 20, 2020.
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