Youth of Color and the City

The books under review here highlight the innovative work being done on the histories and contemporary experiences of young people of color. Rather than focusing on youth strictly as a consumption-based subculture, these texts draw together sites such as schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces, with subjects such as gangs, political engagement, immigration, assimilation, and commercial and grassroots media and popular culture. While these texts are methodologically diverse—drawing on archival research, oral history, media analysis, ethnography, surveys, and quantitative analysis—they are connected by their interest in the everyday lived experiences of young people of color in urban settings. Andrew Diamond’s Mean Streets and Luis Alvarez’s The Power of the Zoot call for urban historians to pay attention to youth by showing how young people shaped and navigated twentieth-century Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Sunaina Maira’s Missing and Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway’s Inheriting the City chart the successes and obstacles for young people of color in terms of their cultural, political, and economic belonging in present-day New England and New York. Compelling in their own right, the topics examined in these books will become increasingly relevant for American studies scholars, since demographers project that young people of color will become the majority of their age cohort by 2023.¹

The two historians, Diamond and Alvarez, approach youth culture from a comparative ethnic studies perspective. In Mean Streets, Diamond demonstrates how white, black, and Latino youth gangs and peer groups helped to shape the racial geography of Chicago between the 1910s and 1960s. Diamond focuses his study of these youth subcultures on grassroots political action and the formation of racial and ethnic identities. This focus is important because it enables Diamond to show not only how young people came to see themselves as Irish, Polish, Italian, African American, Mexican, or Puerto Rican, but also how they played “leading roles in articulating community identities” and in “defending neighborhood boundaries” (4). Diamond also makes a clear connection between youth subcultures and politics, arguing that “these fighting-gang subcultures served as conduits into the political sphere . . . because they served to magnify racial injustices in the field of everyday life, as well as to articulate and reify ethnic and racial bonds that constituted powerful bases for grassroots mobilization” (8). Diamond emphasizes how young people, by playing essential roles in community formation and collective action, also became integral parts of the political culture of working-class Chicago.

One of the strengths of Diamond’s study is that he provides evidence, across a period of more than fifty years, of how youth gangs played highly visible roles both in everyday racial tensions and in large-scale race riots. Diamond begins by looking at the white ethnic (primarily Irish American) athletic clubs who created a culture of gang violence in the 1910s. Hundreds of male social and athletic clubs populated Chicago’s neighborhoods. Most of these clubs functioned as street gangs who exercised their physical and symbolic power through fights over neighborhood turf. This culture of intra-and interethnic gang violence was already well established by the mid-1910s, but as the migration of southern African Americans increased, the athletic clubs’ violence became more antiblack in its orientation. From 1917 to 1919 white gangs bombed twenty-four black homes and vandalized dozens of others. This violence peaked in the Chicago race riot of 1919. The...