In Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico, Caitlin Frances Bruce engages in an extended ethnographic case study of graffiti culture in León, Mexico from the mid–1990s to 2018. Through the framework of attunement, Bruce structures the book around themes of frisson, noise, harmonization, amplification, resonance, and susurration to examine the shifts in attitudes towards graffiti in relation to the sociopolitical circumstances of early twenty-first century León. Terminology is paramount to this framing: the book begins with a glossary that defines terms in writing culture, and Bruce consistently uses “graffiti” rather than “street art” to maintain the medium’s connection to the young people who used graffiti to visually express the realities of precarity in the post-NAFTA moment. The author refers to these youth as “writers,” a term she defines as “a graffiti practitioner,” and uses this term throughout the book to further connect to the idea of voice. Interviews with “writers” (graffiti artists) and archival research of media coverage of graffiti initiatives are discussed through the use of aural metaphors to nuance processes of cultural communication and power dynamics at work in youth practices in León. Organized roughly chronologically, the five chapters and conclusion engage with critical communication ethnography to oscillate between the voices of writers, government officials, community organizers, and media outlets to reveal the complications of institutional attunement.

While the author states that the framework of attunement “allows for more complexity in attending to processes of cultural communication than co-option/resistance or authenticity/inauthenticity” (4), the first two chapters focus largely on the resistance of youth writers to state-defined interests, while the latter chapters discuss the co-option of graffiti into official state narratives and the inauthenticity of the medium that arises as a result. Chapter one, “Frisson: Early Graffiti Writers Remapping the City,” sets the stage for public responses to graffiti through a summary of economic and political shifts in León in the twentieth century before an explanation of the graffiti culture that became increasingly popular in the city in the late 1990s. Bruce juxtaposes “Citizen Wednesdays” (1989–2012), a weekly event during which citizens could request infrastructure fixes from the local government, with “Tagger Wednesdays” (2000–2001), weekly meetups of writers that, in contrast to Citizen Wednesdays, centered on “building collective energies and capacities” (51) and “represented world-making moments when writers became attuned to the collective potential to remake their city” (50).

This co-option/resistance dichotomy is further emphasized in chapter two, “Noise: Desmadre in Neoliberal Geographies: Youth Voice against Zero Tolerance,” in which Bruce evaluates media coverage of graffiti from 2001–2 to argue that “media shaped public attunement to writers as ‘other than’ citizens, a designation that young writers refused by enacting ‘oppositional attunement’” (54). Zero Tolerance policies introduced in 2000 positioned graffiti as criminal activity, a view enforced by articles published in Periódico A.M., one of León’s newspapers that the author illustrates and examines throughout the chapter. News articles were frequently coupled with “demonstration images” that featured property owners pointing to the graffiti on their buildings, and elicited “kinesthetic sympathy” that worked as “an affect generator for broader anger, anxiety, and fear” (63). In contrast to mainstream media’s positioning of graffiti as a social problem, JOCOCO, a group of anarchist youth, voiced their rejection of Zero Tolerance in their zine publications and marched with writers to perform “desmadre,” a term Bruce situates “as a kind of noisy, disruptive subjectivity” (67) that writers perform by “using graffiti as a mode of visual noise” (75). This argument that pits resistant youth against the oppressive establishment obscures the uneven duration and visibility of these two “sides,” as both Tagger Wednesdays and JOCOCO were short-lived endeavors with participation and reach that paled in comparison to their established counterparts. Bruce acknowledges that the “anti-Zero Tolerance protests were an ephemeral moment of desmadre” (81) and positions these case studies as context for the latter half of the book that explores institutional voice.

Chapter three, “Harmonization: Convivencia and Municipal Overtures to Writers,” exhibits a marked shift in tone as the author explores three moments of “harmonization and experimentation in institutional attunement [through] the idea of convivencia” (86) to demonstrate that permission graffiti in institutional spaces encourages “active tolerance and interrelationality” (87). Convivencia “speaks to a desire for social unity and collective attunement” (87) that serves as a “framework for understanding the possibilities for plural voice being harmonized” (111). Through the examination of the Xprésate festival, the Parque Extremo project, and the Upperground exhibition, held between 1999–2011, Bruce explores the compromises required within permission graffiti programs organized by city agencies, as organizers viewed such programs as a way to direct youth energies towards “appropriate” channels, while some writers considered participation in permission programs as collusion with political interests. Still, the author argues that the increased communication between public officials and graffiti writers connects to “the art and possibility of social harmonization across difference” (111), a theme further explored in the next chapter.

Chapter four, “Amplification: Cultivating Acceptance through the Mural as Civic and Affective Form,” centers on the City of Murals project, organized by the Youth Institute of León. The work of writers is now referred to as murals as a way for the state to elevate the medium in the eyes of the public and connect to the history of murals in the nation. Perhaps this shift in terminology, and sponsorship specifically of nationalistic and historical subject matter by the City of Murals program, finally necessitates a mention of the legacy of muralism in Mexico and the art historians whose research centers on the topic. The author eschews traditional iconographic analysis or institutional contextualization of murals and instead examines social media usage and media coverage to consider the affective, yet this chapter includes exponentially more illustrations of graffiti examples than in the previous chapters. The author extensively discusses the subject matter of the images to show how Leónese writers used nationalist and postrevolutionary iconography to position themselves as “heirs to the Mexican school of painting” (132) through images such as Homage to the Three Giants (Homenaje a los Tres Grandes) as “artistic” graffiti of agreed-upon subjects became an acceptable form of civic voice. However, state sponsorship and the repositioning of graffiti was not without its detractors in the graffiti community: some viewed the legitimation as a form of castration, as “acceptable” forms of graffiti narrowed writers’ creative expression, while others saw state-organized projects as antithetical to the conviviality of the graffiti community that celebrated desmadre. While the City of Murals project did not receive universal buy-in from writers, the initiative reframed graffiti “from unintelligible but menacing noise to speech” (126), and through the depiction of national icons, showed the public that graffiti could celebrate and be a part of public culture.

This state-sponsored attempt to shift societal views of graffiti and to control the writers who created it is further explored through the case study of Muraleón in chapter five, “Resonance: Urban Art and Good Vibrations.” The 2016–18 initiative repositioned graffiti yet again, this time as “urban art” that could use color therapy “as a vector for effective civic, individual, and spatial attunement through colorful resonance” (162). Subject matter created by this state-sponsored graffiti team varied across time and traditions yet appeared unified through a consistent color palette to promote a “good vibrations” ideology that attuned citizens to capitalist narratives of the “good life.” Writers were allowed to choose their own style, so that it appeared as though the youth themselves generated their own civic voice. Yet distinctions between “acceptable” forms of graffiti were made increasingly clear by state entities. Youth Institute organizers partnered with the University of Guanajuato to create a certificate in urban art and promoted writer participation as a way to position the state and the university as the “authoritative arbiters of art and value to which youths ought to be attuned” (171). These initiatives offered little opportunity to provide visual commentary on social issues, as “good vibes . . . is not a strategy for reckoning with social inequality and violence” (185). In some ways, it seems as though the story of graffiti in León ends where it began: writers are expected to conform to societal expectations that prioritize decorum over individual expression or be forced to operate within the margins of society.

The book’s conclusion, “Susurration: Cross-Border Institutional Attunements and Social Infrastructure: León as Global Example,” attempts to extend León’s graffiti world to a global reach through comparison of attunement strategies of writers in León to graffiti artists in the author’s town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This overtly voices the argument made throughout the book that Leónese graffiti extends globally, an idea that is repeatedly mentioned, but receives little sustained support from cited research. Rather, the strengths of this book lie in the voices of the writers, and the comparisons between these and the rhetoric of state organizers intent on aligning graffiti with their political agendas. Voices in Aerosol is an important contribution to the field of visual rhetoric. Through its sustained ethnographic case study of graffiti in León, it offers an alternative lens through which to view public art in Mexico that moves the work of contemporary writers out from under the long shadow cast by Mexican Muralism.