Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context by Kevin D. Lam (review)

Kevin D. Lam's Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context is a groundbreaking study that critically analyzes the lived experiences of Vietnamese Americans whose adolescent years intersected with gang membership. This work is situated in Southern California during the 1980s and 1990, which were times marked by intense antiyouth legislation and racialized tensions that fueled violence in the public schools and on the streets. Drawing on "liberatory, pedagogical, and transformational notions of youth culture, identity, and education" (10), Lam, who is a 1.5-generation Vietnamese American and a former classroom teacher from Southern California, situates the life experiences of his three research participants as "fundamentally tied to my own history and subjectivity" (148).

The first two chapters provide an in-depth overview of Vietnamese American experiences within the context of their collective experiences as racialized bodies of war. Here, Lam "critically examine[s] the dialectical relationship between large-scale forces like empire, immigration war, and geopolitics with the particularities of youth gang formation" (10). A materialist critique of Asian American studies as an intellectual and institutional enterprise serves as a crucial reminder that the qualitatively distinct histories among Asian American ethnic groups have led to various forms of inequities and stratification within the pan-ethnic community.

The third chapter analyzes the causes and consequences of Asian American gang activity within the context of the San Gabriel Valley in the 1990s. Lam links how "state-sanctioned racism" (65) was legitimated through California's Three-Strikes Sentencing Law of 1994 and other racially motivated anticrime initiatives that disproportionately criminalized youth of color. Drawing from Augusto Boal's theater of the oppressed framework, Lam provides three case examples detailing how Asian American youth gangs engaged in violent forms of "gangster nationalism" (68) that also mirrored the various interracial tensions that they experienced on the streets and through the school-to-prison pipeline.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to presenting the narratives of three Vietnamese American gang members. Through dialogic engagement, Lam uncovers the complexities of their life experiences. Lihn, the sole female participant, is a second-generation Vietnamese American. Her parents, like many other first-wave Vietnamese, came from an elite class in Vietnam that facilitated opportunities for them to attain middle-class status in the United States. When she transferred from a predominantly white Catholic school to an urban public high school, Lihn joined the Westside Islanders, a predominantly Filipino/Pacific Islander gang. While she enjoyed the social status that gang life afforded, she experienced multiple traumatic events that led her to reconsider her involvement including coping with a friend's suicide and witnessing a shooting that left her boyfriend in a coma. After starting college, Lihn decided to turn her life around, and eventually broke ties with her gang.

Melo and P-Dog, the two male participants, were born in Vietnam, and came to the United States as toddlers. Like many other second-wave Vietnamese refugees who predominantly came from rural villages, their working-class families encountered downward mobility in the United States. They joined Asian Boyz, a gang whose membership is primarily Southeast Asian American. They are also two-strike felons whose futures remain uncertain. Indeed, the threat of deportation for 1.5-generation Southeast Asian Americans such as Melo and P-Dog represents a national crisis that still looms today, and raises serious questions about the morally unjustifiable ways by which they are subjected to a higher level of criminalization and surveillance by law-enforcement officials and the state as racialized bodies.

The fifth chapter synthesizes the emergent themes across the three narratives with connections to how their experiences link back to their families' migration and resettlement histories. Lam outlines several details about Southeast Asian American gangs including his participants' experiences in them that complicate dominant theories of black-brown analyses of gang...