With neither national nor local-level discussions of Senate Bill 1070 adequately addressing bottom line issues such as marginalization, access, and civic engagement, an exploration of marginalized rhetorical acts can provide an informative lens for understanding challenges among marginalized people, their rhetorical tools, and their relations to public spheres. Through an exploration of anti-Senate Bill 1070 graffiti, this article examines how the practice of graffiti points to difference manifesting and playing out in the wider public sphere. It calls for scholars and activists to recognize graffiti as a rhetorical tool worthy of study and cross-cultural discourse.

How might current public-spheres theory underestimate the rhetorical potential of an enclave public—portraying, as such theory does, an enclave as an acutely limited resource for rhetorical empowerment (Squires 458)? This is the question this study takes up. To do so, this study analyzes the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex in Chicago, Illinois, as the complex fell siege to policy decisions to demolish it. My analysis shows that these residents’ rhetoric defied limited conceptions of an enclave. Specifically, I argue that by building a network of interconnected coalitions and by using its enclave position as a point of publicity, this group’s rhetorical work complicates scholarship on how groups with little citizenship status might vie for public accountability to them as agents recognized for their rhetorical leverage.