Where are you from?
I'm from Miami. I was born in Cuba and moved here in 1982. By '83 I was already chilling at the Beat Club, by Bird and 97th Avenue. Run DMC came through there, Mantronix, DJ Mohammed, a lot of shows through this small place.
What was the graffiti scene like back then?
I was on a mission, one of a few kids doing it the way I was. In '84 and '85 no one was doing big pieces in Miami. But after Style Wars came out, it changed almost overnight from wak stick letters to arrows and connections. The book Subway Art was huge too. That and the movie were groundbreaking. Everybody was talking about it. There were several dozen of us in the hip hop scene, with the shoes, and the laces, and the breakers, but back then we had to wait for WPBT to show the movie and someone would record it, and then ten people would record that copy, and it would get messed up from watching it so much. We used to have to call the program director of the station just to get them to play it.
