In the 1980s, gang signs were the secret visual language of the streets
Hands up, sets out
In 1988, Los Angeles was in hysterics over the mounting visibility of its homegrown street gangs. Public shootouts and innocent victims in affluent neighborhoods were making national headlines, and all of a sudden local gangs hailing from discrete pockets of South Central and East L.A. were coming up in cameo appearances in Hollywood films and pop music. The Los Angeles Police Department dubbed it “The Year of the Gang.”
Attention on this scale may have been unprecedented for L.A.’s network of loosely affiliated neighborhood “sets.” But in many ways, grabbing for visibility was embedded in gang identity. Graffiti, clothing, and tattoos constitute a layered vocabulary for members to communicate with one another. Complex hand symbols, or “stacking,” are also a gestural code to be brandished at will.
“Depending on context, hand signals can be used a variety of ways such as to greet, identify, confirm affiliation, disrespect rivals, conduct business, and bond members together,” writes parole board administrator Herbert Covey in his 2015 study, Crips and Bloods: A Guide to an American Subculture.
Caught posturing for Axel Koester’s camera in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, these men and women are openly affiliating with their communities and local gang sets. But they do so with full knowledge that the gap between what we see and what they know is vast—the lexicon embedded in the subtle pinch of a forefinger to thumb is quite literally beyond our grasp.
