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"In and Out" : Segmentary Gang Politics in Los Angeles

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”In and out” Segmentary gang politics in Los Angeles Tero Tapani Frestadius University of Helsinki Faculty of Social Sciences Social and Cultural Anthropology Master's thesis November 2009 Page | 1 Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................3 1.1 Research questions and theoretical framework ............................................................................................5 1.2 “No more problems”- note on fieldwork .................................................................................................. 11 1.3 The backdrop ............................................................................................................................................... 14 1.4 L.A. gang basics .......................................................................................................................................... 22 2. The neighborhood ................................................................................................................................26 2.1 “Amputations from the trunk”.................................................................................................................... 26 2.2 A walk in the Hazard Projects .................................................................................................................... 27 2.3 The pathologized neighborhoods of social sciences ................................................................................. 30 2.4 “We call it neighborhoods ‘cause the neighborhood is where you live”................................................. 32 2.5 “My stompin ground”................................................................................................................................. 36 2.6 Segmentary gang politics ............................................................................................................................ 38 2.7 Honor............................................................................................................................................................ 42 2.8 Gangs and the reproduction of social relations ......................................................................................... 45 3. The system ...........................................................................................................................................48 3.1 Beyond the neighborhood ........................................................................................................................... 49 3.2 In and out ..................................................................................................................................................... 50 3.3 The prison reshuffle .................................................................................................................................... 54 3.4 “The biggest gang in L.A.”......................................................................................................................... 56 3.5 Politically incongruous?.............................................................................................................................. 60 3.6 The state and the war machine ................................................................................................................... 62 3.7 Armed young men ....................................................................................................................................... 65 3.8 Hagedorn’s tale of two gangs ..................................................................................................................... 66 3.9 Interior / exterior.......................................................................................................................................... 68 4. The legit society ...................................................................................................................................72 4.1 Excess of life................................................................................................................................................ 73 4.2 Beyond politics? .......................................................................................................................................... 74 4.3 “License to operate”.................................................................................................................................... 77 4.4 Tattoo removal ............................................................................................................................................. 81 4.5 Emblematic Transformations ..................................................................................................................... 84 5. The limbo .............................................................................................................................................90 Page | 2 5.1 Raul .............................................................................................................................................................. 91 5.2 Chino ............................................................................................................................................................ 92 5.3 Noel .............................................................................................................................................................. 93 5.4 “No more studies”- note on fieldwork ...................................................................................................... 96 6. Summary ..............................................................................................................................................98 7. Discussion ..........................................................................................................................................106 References ..............................................................................................................................................109 Appendix: Community-Based Gang Intervention Model Page | 3 1. Introduction While still in Finland I read a brief interview in Helsingin Sanomat, the major newspaper in Finland, of a visiting American criminologist who plainly stated that there are no gangs in the United States. This was confusing, while simultaneously confirmed the doubts I was faced with when doing preliminary research on gangs in Los Angeles. California, the eighth largest economy in the world, was reportedly the home of a multitude of gangs controlling neighborhoods and waging violent wars against each other, the fatality of which became apparent as I browsed the Homicide Report of Los Angeles Times.* What had struck me the most in all the material was the precarious and ambivalent status of the people involved in these neighborhood-based groups which seemed to exist economically, socially, and politically quite indifferent to their surroundings. I was dismayed by the prevalence of violence, but as a student of cultural anthropology intrigued by this supposed divide between the so-called great society and the world of gangs I had become vaguely acquainted with in documentaries, films, and music, and which was now confirmed by the academic literature I could get my hands on. But despite all this opposing evidence Finland is a long way from Los Angeles, California, and the big question had once again resurfaced: Were gangs just a media hype, a self-perpetuating teenage fad gone awry, reified and shaped into a marketable shock horror story, and developed into a self-serving academic cottage industry? With my plane tickets already booked, I was disheartened by the unambiguous statement in the interview. I was making a veritable clown of myself. Well, if nothing else, the weather was supposed to be great. Once in L.A. my doubts vanished into thin air. “It doesn't really take a genius to evaluate the situation,”as Noel, a former gang member put it. What also became apparent as I randomly ran into the hip, the well-off, and the white in the city is that you can live your life in Los Angeles and remain quite oblivious of gangs. Divisions in terms of ethnicity, class, and space in the City of Angels surpassed all my expectations, as did the pervasiveness of moral individualism which effortlessly vitiates the historical weight of these divisions. The aforementioned divide, the difference, the great fetishism of anthropology, was surely there, apparent on a very concrete level of experience, although * (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/homicidereport/) Page | 4 the tattoo claiming “Only the Strong Survive” on the neck of an old gangster sitting on a curb and the “I Love Me”license plate of a Hummer gliding in Melrose Boulevard seemed to me proclamations of the same reality, just from the opposite ends of the socio- economical spectrum. The phrase “in and out”was used by the people I met, mostly former gang members, to denote their back and forth movement between the incarceration system and the society outside. The phrase also points to their geographical, economical, and political exclusion and the consequential differentiation of social existence and political concerns from those of the so-called conventional society. Ultimately I adopted the phrase to the title of this work because I believe “in and out” to be an apposite description of the state of in- betweennes which characterized the lives of the people, all
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