Barrio Gangs

Author : James Diego Vigil
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292786778
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barrio Gangs written by James Diego Vigil and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the Mexican American barrios of Los Angeles, gang activity, including crime and violent acts, has grown and flourished. In the past, community leaders and law enforcement officials have approached the problem, not as something that needs to be understood, but only as something to be gotten rid of. Rejecting that approach, James D. Vigil asserts that only by understanding the complex factors that give birth and persistence to gangs can gang violence be ended. Drawing on many years of experience in the barrios as a youth worker, high school teacher, and researcher, Vigil identifies the elements from which gangs spring: isolation from the dominant culture, poverty, family stress and crowded households, peer pressure, and the adolescent struggle for self-identity. Using interviews with actual gang members, he reveals how the gang often functions as parent, school, and law enforcement in the absence of other role models in the gang members' lives. And he accounts for the longevity of gangs, sometimes over decades, by showing how they offer barrio youth a sense of identity and belonging nowhere else available.

Author : Edward Flores
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147987812X
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God's Gangs written by Edward Flores and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2014 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award presented by the Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles’ eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality—for a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as Edward Orozco Flores argues in God’s Gangs, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. Flores here illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over 600 chapters, Flores demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community. The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. As Flores convincingly shows, gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality. With the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.

Author : Mike Tapia
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 0875656641
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Barrio Gangs of San Antonio, 1915-2015 written by Mike Tapia and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barrio Gangs is the most comprehensive academic case study of barrio group dynamics in a major Texas city to date. This is a sociological work on the history of barrio gangs in San Antonio and other large Texas cities to the present day. It examines the century-long evolution of urban barrio subcultures using public archives, oral histories, old photos, and other forms of qualitative data. The study gives special attention to the barrio gangs’ “heyday,” from the 1940s through the 1960s, comparing their attributes to those of modern groups. It illustrates how social and technological changes have affected barrio networking processes and the intensity of the street lifestyle over time. Intergenerational shifts and the tension that accompanies such changes are also central themes in the book. Few other places are so conducive to such historical exploration as is San Antonio. Street ignobility in the barrio no doubt mirrors processes found in other Chicano communities in Texas and the Southwest. The gang contexts in major Chicano population centers have lengthy historical bases rooted in weak opportunity structures, oppression, and discrimination. This work shows that participation in street violence, drug selling, and other parts of the informal economy are functional adaptations to the social structure; the forces propelling the formation of barrio gangs are not temporary social phenomena.

Author : Mike Tapia
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 13 : 0826361102
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gangs of the El Paso–Juárez Borderland written by Mike Tapia and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso–Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlands—the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárez—to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law. Tapia looks extensively at the role of history and geography on criminal subculture formation in the binational urban setting of El Paso–Juárez, demonstrating the region’s unique context for criminogenic processes. He provides a poignant case study of Homeland Security and the apparent lack of drug-war spillover in communities on the US-Mexico border.

Author : James Diego Vigil
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292788517
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Rainbow of Gangs written by James Diego Vigil and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Politics in a Local or Urban Setting , Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association, 2002 This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups--Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian. With nearly 1,000 gangs and 200,000 gang members, Los Angeles holds the dubious distinction of being the youth gang capital of the United States. The process of street socialization that leads to gang membership now cuts across all ethnic groups, as evidenced by the growing numbers of gangs among recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America. This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups—Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian. James Diego Vigil begins at the community level, examining how destabilizing forces and marginalizing changes have disrupted the normal structures of parenting, schooling, and policing, thereby compelling many youths to grow up on the streets. He then turns to gang members' life stories to show how societal forces play out in individual lives. His findings provide a wealth of comparative data for scholars, policymakers, and law enforcement personnel seeking to respond to the complex problems associated with gangs.

Author : Joan Moore
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 1439903948
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Going Down To The Barrio written by Joan Moore and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the changes and continuities among three generations of barrio gangs.

Author : Luis J. Rodriguez
Publisher : Children's Book Press
ISBN 13 : 9780892392032
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book It Doesn't Have to be this Way written by Luis J. Rodriguez and published by Children's Book Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reluctantly a young boy becomes more and more involved in the activities of a local gang, until a tragic event involving his cousin forces him to make a choice about the course of his life.

Author : Robert Duran
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023115867X
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gang Life in Two Cities written by Robert Duran and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refusing to cast gangs in solely criminal terms, Robert J. Durán, a former gang member turned scholar, recasts such groups as an adaptation to the racial oppression of colonization in the American Southwest. Developing a paradigm rooted in ethnographic research and almost two decades of direct experience with gangs, Durán completes the first-ever study to follow so many marginalized groups so intensely for so long, revealing their core characteristics, behavior, and activities within two unlikely American cities. Durán spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, conducting 145 interviews with gang members, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other related individuals. From his research, he constructs a comparative outline of the emergence and criminalization of Latino youth groups, the ideals and worlds they create, and the reasons for their persistence. He also underscores the failures of violent gang suppression tactics, which have only further entrenched these groups within the barrio. Encouraging cultural activists and current and former gang members to pursue grassroots empowerment, Durán proposes new solutions to racial oppression that challenge and truly alter the conditions of gang life.

Author : James Diego Vigil
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292717318
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Projects written by James Diego Vigil and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2008 — ALLA Prize for Best Book on Latina/o Anthropology The Pico Gardens housing development in East Los Angeles has a high percentage of resident families with a history of persistent poverty, gang involvement, and crime. In some families, members of three generations have belonged to gangs. Many other Pico Gardens families, however, have managed to avoid the cycle of gang involvement. In this work, Vigil adds to the tradition of poverty research and elaborates on the association of family dynamics and gang membership. The main objective of his research was to discover what factors make some families more vulnerable to gang membership, and why gang resistance was evidenced in similarly situated non-gang-involved families. Providing rich, in-depth interviews and observations, Vigil examines the wide variations in income and social capital that exist among the ostensibly poor, mostly Mexican American residents. Vigil documents how families connect and interact with social agencies in greater East Los Angeles to help chart the routines and rhythms of the lives of public housing residents. He presents family life histories to augment and provide texture to the quantitative information. By studying life in Pico Gardens, Vigil feels we can better understand how human agency interacts with structural factors to produce the reality that families living in all public housing developments must contend with daily.

Author : Scott Cummings
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438400195
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gangs written by Scott Cummings and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-03-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an examination of contemporary gangs in American cities. Gangs have proliferated over the past ten years and pose a new set of challenges to public officials, law enforcement agencies, and urban educators. Most major cities are now confronted with serious problems derived from gang violence, drug traffic, and disruption of the public educational system. In the face of deindustrialization and deepening recession, many minority youngsters view gangs as attractive alternatives to a futile search for employment in a deteriorating urban economy. Perhaps most significant, gangs are now beginning to emerge in small and medium-sized cities. Some of the nation's leading scientists and scholars have been brought together in this book to examine the contemporary contours of America's gang problem, including Daniel J. Monti, Joan Moore, Scott Cummings, Howard Pinderhughes, Diego Vigil, Ray Hutchison, Felix Padilla, Jerome H. Skolnick, Pat Jackson, and Robert A. Destro. New material dealing with wilding gangs, migration and drug trafficking, and public educational disruption appear in this volume. Other topics covered include how gangs are organized, what social function they serve, their relation to conventional society, and the social and psychological factors that contribute to their rise. The relationship of the contemporary gang problem to past research is explored, and a rich variety of case histories and comparative analysis is presented. The book also includes a section on public policy.