There’s a certain breed of “self respecting” San Franciscan who believes — and constantly vocalizes — that it’s absolutely unacceptable to refer to the city by the bay as Frisco.
Most famously, British immigrant Joshua Norton once declared himself the emperor of San Francisco, and tried to ban the use of the word in 1872. Roughly a century later, Herb Caen denounced Frisco during his heralded time as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, and, in 1953, published a book titled “Don’t Call It Frisco.” And in perhaps the oddest of anti-Frisco incidents, two fugitives were arrested in Berkeley in 1995 when they told police officers they were from Frisco. The officers said they were suspicious since “no one from here ever says that.”
A collective notion still remains that Frisco is an unsuitable identifier. In 2018, a poll found that 63.5% of San Franciscans outright reject the use of the word. Last month, a new round of Frisco discourse kicked off after a photo of a “San Fran” Giants jerseys went viral, launching a broader social media debate about other controversial Bay Area terminology. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Peter Hartlaub — who tweeted the photo in question — wrote a dope historical essay about the historical evolution of “Frisco” in response to the furor. (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another.)
Whenever a Frisco conversation reignites, I have the same reaction: Frisco’s history, its worthiness, is too often centered on the romanticized opinions of the city’s white, affluent demographics, whose livelihoods and ZIP codes are upheld as an aspirational — and largely unattainable — standard, while other residents are erased (both literally and figuratively) from San Francisco’s map.
Gunna Goes Global at the corner of Grove and Buchanan in San Francisco, CA September 8th, 2022
Lance Yamamoto/Special to SFGATE
In actuality, for plenty of San Franciscans, Frisco isn’t a phrase that evokes rejection or disgust. Instead, it’s rooted in resistance, identity and pride, despite decades of marginalization.
“Frisco comes from Black San Francisco,” says Gunna Goes Global, formerly known as E-Gunna, a veteran rapper from the 800 Grove and Buchanan block of the Fillmore.
In his telling, the word was popularized among Black San Franciscans before hip-hop fully bloomed, going back to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s, when community leaders like David Hilliard spoke out for oppressed residents and represented the needs of those living in the most neglected parts of Frisco, inviting others to join the cause.
Bobby Seale, left, and David Hilliard, photographed on June 11 1971.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Imag
Frisco’s rappers and activists, a group more qualified than anyone else to speak about a region’s sense of linguistic versatility and cultural trends, have kept the term alive ever since. For anyone who grew up listening to Bay Area rap — particularly rappers from the SFC, or “Sucka Free City” — Frisco is easily the most identifiable term used to describe San Francisco. It’s a unifying, empowering declaration passed down through each generation of working class San Franciscans, as if to say: we’re still here.
“The spokespeople for any community is the artist,” Gunna told me. “They document everything.” Gunna named off a host of San Francisco rappers who’ve had no issue with the word Frisco: Cougnut, RBL Posse, San Quinn, Messy Marv, Rappin’ 4-Tay, Andre Nickatina and, yes, Tupac, who lived in the Bay Area as a teenager. “On ‘California Love’ [Tupac and Dr. Dre] call it Frisco,” he says. “Even Biggie. He used Frisco, too. It’s a popular consistency among the cultural creators.”
Frisco isn’t just buried in the lyrics of hip-hop — it’s front-and-center in track titles, too. There are classics like rap group I.M.P’s 1993 track “Frisco.” Or the RBL Posse releasing “Frisco, Frisco” in 2002. Or JT the Bigga Figga putting out “Frisco SS” in 2006. Or Berner dropping “Frisco 2 Rosa” in 2012.
Even today, in spite of the noxious complaints, popular artists like Larry June and Stunnaman02 claim Frisco in their music to identify with their hometown. Songs like “Meet Me in Frisco” and “In the Bay” (which features Gunna) uphold a proud tradition of lyricists repping Frisco as their turf.
Larry June performs onstage at HipHopDX during SXSW at The Parish on March 16, 2018 in Austin, Texas.
Hutton Supancic/Getty Images for SXSW
With all that context in mind, the casual dismissal of Frisco reads as out-of-touch to Gunna. It reinforces that there are rapidly diverging versions of the city where he was born and raised; in many cases, the mainstream portrayal of San Francisco is one where rappers and culture makers like him don’t exist. But Gunna and his community do exist. And he is making sure to share his perspective in art and films like “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” a movie in which he appears.
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Frisco’s eighth poet laureate, uses his own creative field for similar purposes. “Growing up, Frisco was the only way we said it,” Eisen-Martin told me after a performance at Syzygy SF cooperative. Eisen-Martin often dives headfirst into the void of capitalism, homelessness and violence as a Black man in an aggressively shifting San Francisco. He is the embodiment of a San Franciscan who’s trying to navigate a new city while keeping his voice and experience alive.
“The start of mass destruction/Begins and ends/In restaurant bathrooms/That some people use/And other people clean,” he writes in his poem “Faceless.” It’s a disarming sentiment that distills the hierarchy of class in San Francisco and illuminates how a majority of residents live worlds apart.
It’s not just the city’s poets and rappers who are invested in reclaiming Frisco for themselves in the face of cultural displacement. Krea Gomez-Jones is a third-generation 415er who works as a youth organizer in her community, and is a fierce Frisco advocate.
“The term Frisco has always existed,” says Gomez-Jones, who is of Quechan and Yoeme descent. “It predates the Gold Rush. Like many things that are denounced by the elite, working-class San Franciscans reclaimed it.”
For Gomez-Jones, who grew up in historically blue-collar areas of the city like Bernal Heights, the Mission and the Fillmore, the aversion to Frisco from other San Franciscans largely has to do with socioeconomic biases and discrimination against Black and brown communities. During the 1980s and 1990s in particular, the term Frisco had a spike in popularity, especially among working class people of color, who were involved in street cultures that stemmed from rappers, lowriders and motorcycle gangs like Hells Angels.
“This isn’t the Frisco transplants come here to experience,” she says. “This isn’t the Frisco our local government wants tourists to know about. To say ‘Frisco’ is to stand in solidarity with Black, Latino, Samoans [and] Filipinos who are still here. That is why to ignore this as part of our lexicon is erasure. It’s another way to make us invisible.”
San Francisco has long been a place of social upheaval and transience. Native populations as far back as the Ohlones have been uprooted in the name of territorial and economic expansion for newcomers, who often disregard the cultures that existed before their arrival by imposing new languages and ideals.
For those who say Frisco, this is a matter of preservation, of visibility, to protect what’s left of their home. It’s more than just a word that gets tossed around in online debates. It’s a philosophy, a soil.
Gunna Goes Global at the corner of Grove and Buchanan in San Francisco, CA September 8th, 2022
Lance Yamamoto/Special to SFGATE
And that’s not lost on Frisco’s biggest defenders. When I texted Gunna about scheduling a time to connect for this story, I asked if he needed an extra half-hour to prepare his explanation about what Frisco means to him and his community.
“I’ll be ready,” he responded. “This is a lifestyle.”
Alan Chazaro is a Bay Area writer and teacher. His books, “This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album” and “Piñata Theory,” are available through Black Lawrence Press. Follow his updates on Twitter and Instagram @alan_chazaro.
