Samantha Reyes
Soc 4 Sec # 0533
April 21, 2016
Graffiti on the Great Plains
A Social Reaction to the Red River Valley Flood of 1997
By, Carol A. Hagen, Morten G. Ender, Kathleen A. Tiemann and Clifford O. Hagen, Jr.
Have you ever seeing graffiti on the wall and thought about why would
someone do that? Have you imagined what kind of person it was and wondered
what was their motive? I remember growing up and seeing mostly gang related
graffiti. I also remember connecting graffiti to people like; school dropouts,
unemployed men that had nothing else to do, and to guys in gangs who just wanted
to vandalize property and claim territory for drug related purposes. Never did I
think that graffiti I was seeing as “art” or something that had meaning or a purpose.
But in the article, Graffiti on the Great Plains graffiti is talked about being a form of
communication, a form of expression and a way of providing a functional symbolic
cue to demarcate flood-damaged property for the victims of the Red River Valley
Flood in 1997.
Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota were the two
major cities affected by the flooding in 1997. A couple of weeks after the flood, as
people began to dig out their homes and their property; they were instructed by the
public officials to put their damaged things out by the sidewalks and that soon they
would be removed and cleaned up. As the rubbish began to pile up all over the
community, the appearance of graffiti started showing up on all types of flood
damaged stuff. As floods were a result of a natural weather catastrophe the graffiti
linked to that became known as “catastroffiti”. Appliances, cars, home walls, road
signs and even piled up debris were all spray-painted with graffiti. But the graffiti
that was on these items is not the stereotyped gang related vandalism you would
see in a ghetto neighborhood.
For the sake of their research the sociologists began conducting their project
on May 27, 1997, approximately five weeks after the flood and during the first
weeks evacuated residents started returning to Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.
They began to comb thru the city in either car, bicycles or on foot. They took color
pictures of the graffiti they saw on berms and on houses and trailers. They each
started in a location where they knew of the existing graffiti. But as a result of the
severe floods some streets were impassible and some were all jammed with clean
up crews and heavy machinery as well, and according to the researchers, that made
it a little more difficult for them to collect their data in the systematic way they had
first planned. The researches approached the neighborhoods at different times of
the day to secure photographs and after rigorously combining the streets of Grand
Forks and East Grand Forks for new graffiti for several weeks, they reached a point
of saturation. And for confirmation the researchers compared their independently
collected data and noted considerable the duplication of materials. To study and
analyze a total of 290 pictures that contained some sort of graffiti, the researchers
created different categories to sort out their data. They began with 19 categories
and individually coded each piece of graffiti according to the most dominant theme.
Next they collapsed the 19 categories into 5 more useful categories to facilitate their
analysis and discussions. Humor, social and political commentary, frustration,
drawings and “other” were the final categories they came up with.
Humor was the dominant theme within the catastroffiti. Within the humor
category there were 5 sub-categories, jocular, sarcastic, satirical and miscellaneous
humor. According to the team much of the graffiti represented social and political
commentary in relation to one’s flood experience. With the exception of only one, all
the political commentaries had negative messages directly related to the floods.
Frustration, one of the categories they came up with since the beginning, is one of
the main emotions, which people who live through natural disasters must cope with.
The graffiti that was classified, as an act of frustration was graffiti either directed at
the river or at the government officials and federal agencies, because the residents
of these cities believe they were lied to about the magnitude of the flood or they
have been mistreated by the organizations. For the category of drawing, the
researchers did not categorize sexual or non-sexual in nature because only 2 out of
60 were sexual in nature. They sorted drawings into symbols and sketches. The
“Other” category was graffiti too broad but salient.
These researchers believe that the graffiti they studied was a method of
ephemeral (short-lived) cultural expression. The messages within the graffiti
reflected loss, coping with loss, recovery and hope from the Red River Valley Flood.
Catastroffiti was a social reaction to the post flood devastation of Grand Forks and
East Grand Forks.