The Projects: Gang and Non-Gang Families in East Los Angeles

PREFACE

Preface In 1991, having just completed an on-site evaluation of a Los Angeles Housing Authority drug intervention program run by the Housing Authority in Pico Gardens, I approached Father Gregory Boyle to ask whether he would help me if I initiated a long-term study in that same housing development. Father Boyle agreed to do so, and soon after, I was able to write a proposal for a three-year study examining the connection between family life and gang membership. With funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (90-CL-1105), the study was begun in 1992. I had already completed a book on barrio (neighborhood) gangs in Southern California (Vigil 1988) and was developing plans for a comparative work on gangs throughout the city of Los Angeles (Vigil 2002b). Earlier, I had assisted in studies conducted by my mentor, Joan W. Moore (distinguished professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) and her team of community researchers at the Chicano Pinto Research Project (Moore 1978, 1991; Moore and Long, 1981). This team primarily comprised ex-cons and ex–heroin addicts from the barrios of Los Angeles, mostly in East L.A. The team compiled longitudinal data on two barrio gangs dating from the 1940s, El Hoyo Maravilla and White Fence, carefully detailing family life going back several decades. One product of that work was an article I co-authored with Moore that summarizes some of the findings on the relationship between families and gangs (Moore and Vigil 1987). For several reasons it was convenient to focus on this neighborhood, with which I had been familiar since childhood. Pico Gardens is a section of a public housing complex that anyone traveling north on Highway 101 passes; you can see it if you look to your left and down as the highway turns west, xiv The Projects just before the Union Station and the Hollywood freeway. You can almost touch the skyscrapers that cover the horizon. Bringing to mind a Mexican saying (“so close to the United States but so far from God”), the projects are so close to the power center of downtown but so far from the resources needed to stem gang activity. From my earlier research, I was familiar with the gangs in and around Pico Gardens, two of which have storied histories like those studied by the Chicano Pinto Research Project. During the course of researching local drug use and drug trafficking for the intervention program evaluation, I renewed my acquaintance with Pico Gardens. The focus of the long-term study would be family life and its connections with gang membership. While looking at the structure and organization and daily rhythms and routines of household heads and the members of the household, we might find differences among families that could tell us something about gangs. In the meantime, as with any good community study in the best tradition of anthropological fieldwork, we also might discover other things about the lives of the people who make up the projects. But, as I have said, the interrelationship between family dynamics and gang membership was our primary focus. Research on this facet of the gang phenomenon goes back to the early gang researchers (Thrasher 1927; Ashbury 1927; Glueck and Glueck 1950) and has continued to be a focus of modern investigators. Some scholars have put the onus of responsibility almost entirely on the family, with little emphasis on other, larger forces in the equation. It was this position that I hoped to challenge and correct. When Greg Boyle stepped in, little did I know that he would open so many doors for me. Almost instant trust was accorded me, something that urban anthropologists can struggle for months or years of fieldwork to achieve (sometimes without success), and our rapport was immediate. Particularly significant in the initial phase was when Greg took me to a household where I met a couple, Bebee and Pam McDuffie, who were deeply involved with the resident gang, Cuatro Flats. From then on it was a mostly smooth fieldwork experience. Bebee told me several years later that, when Greg crossed the threshold with me into Bebee’s home, it was a clear sign that I was to be trusted implicitly, without reservation. Previous visitors brought by Greg to the threshold—political representatives and media folks out for a story—had been left right there, in the doorway, until Bebee and Pam made a decision about whether they should be allowed in...