"Chaz" Bojórquez

Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez is recognized as a pioneering Chicano graffiti artist and painter who helped legitimize Cholo-style calligraphy within the contemporary art world. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bojórquez immersed himself in the city’s cultural and street environments, where graffiti served as both personal expression and social identity. He went on to receive formal training at the University of Guadalajara for Art, California State University, and the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His work bridges the aesthetics of traditional fine art and the raw authenticity of urban culture.

Deeply influenced by the Chicano art movement and artists like Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Bojórquez became one of the first to demonstrate how graffiti could function as a visual language carrying history, identity, and resistance. Cholo-style graffiti, often referred to as one of the oldest graffiti traditions in the United States, was developed by Mexican Americans in the 1940s as gangs marked their neighborhoods with roll calls—lists of names denoting loyalty and territory. Bojórquez elevated this form into an art practice, creating his own variation known as West Coast Cholo, blending influences from Mexican muralism, calligraphy, and pachuco placas.

His seminal 1980 work Placa/Rollcall demonstrates this synthesis, combining territorial marking with a personal register of names close to him, transforming graffiti into both a cultural archive and an abstract visual composition. In Somos La Luz (1992), now housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bojórquez created a roll call of Los Angeles graffiti artists, placing local street culture within the context of national recognition.

Today, Bojórquez is celebrated not only as a master of Cholo graffiti but also as a cultural figure who brought a uniquely Chicano form of expression into museums and galleries worldwide.