Gangs. Gangsters. Gangbangers. OGs.
“Where’re you from?” This is the forbidden question. In gang-heavy cities, this is how turf is defended and fights are instigated. The answer is not "Los Angeles," "Pasadena, " or "the Valley." The answer to this question is more likely something like: "Hoover street Crips, where’re you from?!" or "White Fence, Boyle Heights, homie, where you from?!" I used to make the mistake of asking new students this question as a way to start conversation and get to know each other. They’d look back at me, cock their head to the side and respond: “Where’m I from? Or Where am I from?” They would chuckle and say, “Miss, I don’t think I can answer that.” I quickly learned to ask this question differently, the way they would ask me or how they would ask one another: “Where do you stay?” I find this phrasing particularly interesting, as it implies a certain kind of transience and instability inherent their situations. This suggested impermanence is often very true to their lived experience, childhoods moving in and out of broken homes, crashing with friends, being assigned to different foster families and “placements” or living “on the run”.
About 90% of my students claim a gang. It is tatted on their arms. It is tagged all over their assignments. It is etched into their desks. These gangs don’t only organize the power dynamics “on the outs” they also are fully active inside the prisons and in my classroom. On the streets, these gangs have been killing each other for years in a vicious cycle of violence. What happens when you force all of these rivalries to coexist locked up together?
This summer, I ran two five-week programs with about 40 students in each summer module. The latter of my summer programs has proven to be one of the most challenging classes I have ever taught. I’ve seen students of different races, neighborhoods and gangs coexist quite peaceably, and even form friendships. But this summer, in addition to some staffing difficulties and a rocky start on an experimental curriculum, I had one of the most overtly segregated and underhandedly hostile classes I’ve even worked with at Camp. African American students sit on one side of the room, exchange high-fives and swap boisterous stories of street victories or disturbingly debaucherous pastimes. The Latino students sit on the other side of the circle, slouched quietly or resting their heads on the desks, once in awhile listening in or dropping racially charged insults under their breath. This is the notorious “black/brown rivalry”. The moment students arrive in camp, they are sized up; they will side with their race and then subdivide into their racialized gang affiliations. The black students dominate this class only slightly in numbers but overwhelmingly in the forcefulness of their presence and in “juice”. Juice is how much pull you have with probation, camp or school staff, teachers and other wards who may have some power, such as those working on kitchen or laundry duty. (Even my students tell me “I have juice” because I am allowed to come and go freely around the camp and bring in whatever I want.) Essentially “juice” is social capital.
On a given day, a dominant Latino student or a high-ranked rival black gang member will join the class, and the power dynamics are subtly shifted. Those knocked from the top of the hierarchy act sour and those rising from the usually more subordinate group get giddy at the idea of a little taste of social revenge.
Meanwhile, I am still trying to teach a class.
But to do so without an awareness and sensitivity to these underlying factors is futile. Our curriculum is designed to address these issues head-on by teaching about conflict resolution, talking about education as a form of oppression and/or liberation, critiquing our relationship to and perpetuation of stereotypes, and attempting to build community, trust and respect in the classroom as an exercise for the wider world. We are talking about heavy issues and in a way trying address the cycles of racism, violence, and incarceration that gangs so successfully perpetuate. For me as a teacher, it is better to work with this reality than to deny or condemn its presence.
My experience goes beyond practicing an awareness of the gang culture. It is also a challenge for me to understand what this social phenomenon is all about, trying to see it from their perspective and withholding my judgment even despite my strong convictions about violence and my academic perspective on gangs.
Gangs enter in in the absence of stable families, strong communities, functioning schools or accessible and healthy alternative activities. This is taken in conjunction with the heavy marginalization that these youth experience, both in their experience of structural violence, systemic classism and racism and in some cases xenophobia.
Maybe you live in a country where your language is disparaged. Maybe you feel discriminated against because of the way you look or speak. Maybe you feel constantly disrespected by peers, employers, school principals or patrolling police.
We all experience a human need and desire for community, acceptance and social protection. In these communities, gangs serve this purpose. And for a teenager in a less-that-safe neighborhood, this protection and “family” is all the more crucial for survival. Perhaps it is just a matter of reframing how we think and talk about ”gangs” and addressing their social, economic and political causes rather than just the negative symptoms that we read splattered across the front pages.
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