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Graffitti in Santurce, Puerto Rico.

Spray can, markers, liquid paints, a stencil and a surface... graffiti art is created in public places, for all to see, and is free. Its life span tends to be short: Inclement weather and the human hand may change or eliminate its existence. Its history has been painted as one of transgression and persecution, as well as rejection and praise in equal measure. Its defenders call it public art while its critics consider it an attack on public property, the law and the "good image" of a neighborhood, city or people.

Murals and writing on the walls of caves may be its predecessors, but it is in the hip-hop culture — with its four currents: rap or emceeing, disc jockeys, graffiti and break dancing — where graffiti finds its current expression. The artistic movement that originated on the walls of New York, in the 1960s and 1970s, is today a worldwide phenomenon. The Caribbean is no exception. In fact, people from the Caribbean were tied to the birth of graffiti in New York through the sons of Caribbean immigrants, the Puerto Ricans or Nuyoricans, and other minorities gathered in the Big Apple.

García Canclini states that graffiti, as a transcultural medium, has been a vehicle used by marginalized social groups that lack public expression and representation and have used it to tell their story. Therefore, according to García Canclini, graffiti artists create their art in public places with a lot of traffic to appropriate those spaces, in one form or another.

At least in New York, Caribbean syncretism — such as that which molded the Haitian and Cuban cultures — also influenced today's graffiti through street names and the "tags" (the labels that serve as pseudonyms) that various artists use to hide their identities from police authorities while revealing their authorship in the graffiti artists community.

Although graffiti did not proliferate in Caribbean societies to the same measure as in parts of Europe or the United States, that does not mean that Caribbean society has not been a part of this discursive practice. In fact, Best argues that the Caribbean derived much of its inspiration for graffiti from forms in the United States. The omnipresent defiance of graffiti arrived in the Caribbean setting in the 1980s, with full awareness of the reprisals that graffiti artists in the United States had faced in the previous decade.

To understand the writing on public spaces requires an understanding of the art's discourse, which reflects the voice of generations of young people who cry out in the form of pain against the establishment and the political and social inconsistencies they witness. Hip hop has bravely brought these compositions of vibrant colors to signs, walls, mailboxes, trains and the public transportation system buses despite anti-graffiti campaigns of painting over graffiti or the risk of the act itself under the law.