In the widespread and growing hip hop graffiti underground, a new subcultural practice has recently become popular: the illegal painting of graffiti on outbound freight trains as a means of sending graffiti images out from their initial, circumscribed points of production into wider circulation. Using ethnographic methods appropriate to such a fluid, dislocated, and visually rich subject of study, I examine the proliferation of freight train graffiti, and the cultural and historical dynamics surrounding it. I also document the ways in which freight train graffiti both reproduces and expands long-standing orientations in the hip hop graffiti underground toward spatial mobility and symbolic expansion. Finally, I explore a variety of cultural and theoretical trajectories that freight train graffiti suggests: the development of criminal and deviant subcultures as dislocated symbolic communities; the interweaving of crime, cultural space, media, and audience; and the emergence of postmodern or anarchistic forms of everyday criminality.
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