Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets

Notes

| 201 Notes Preface 1. Proweller (2000) provides a powerful portrayal of the resiliency of, and options for, teen mothers “at promise” rather than “at risk,” in an alternative school not unlike CAA. Ruth Horowitz (1995) shows how welfare workers infantilize teen mothers and reinforce a message of dependency, and Jock Young (2007) critiques the scapegoating of teen moms for social ills. Frank Furstenberg (2003:25), who has studied teen moms for over four decades, concludes, “In the United States, the singularity of the issue has more to do with how our political culture has responded to the ancillary problems of poverty, sexuality, gender relations, and the like, than with the threat posed by teenagers having babies before they want to or their families want them or before society thinks is good for their welfare and that of their offspring.” 2. On cultivating and distancing oneself from the vicious thug image, see Simpson (2005). 3. See Mendoza-Denton (1996, 2008) for a discussion of how young women in Northern California embody and perform gang identity. 4. Last I heard, she was working a double shift, managing a fast food establishment. 5. I was honored that Emily shared her story with me, but also overwhelmed by it. After hearing her tale, I made the decision in the field not to interview women further. I believe my primary reason was my sense of emotional shock in reaction to her story. Tales of violence and victimization from young men were somehow easier to stomach. When I returned to CAA in 2000 I tried again, gathering three interviews with women before I again gave up. Perhaps a reason can be inferred from this excerpt a few minutes into my interview with Maria, my last interview with a young woman. “Are there any parts of the city you try to avoid?” “The city’s a mess.” “How?” “A lot of shooting and killing.” “Has that touched your life?” “They killed my brother two days after I got married.” “Really.” There was a long pause. She cried for the remainder of the interview and after the tape was turned off. “Sorry,” I offered. “Sometimes in these interviews, this kind of stuff comes up.” Silence. I added, “I was talking to a guy earlier, who said his best friend shot him. Why do people do that?” 202 | Notes “I don’t know.” “Is that part of why you want to be a teacher or a social worker?” I asked. “Mm, no.” “This is the first time someone’s really started crying. I feel kind of bad.” There was a long silence here. “I feel like I upset you.” “Oh no.” “So you made it through adult school, and now you’re graduating from here, so you’ve really accomplished a lot.” “Mm, yeah.” “Where do you get all that determination?” Silence. “Do you wanna work on that biology project?” “I’m done. I just have to answer some questions.” “Which ones?” Here the interview ended. I regret that I didn’t interview more women. However horrendous the stories of men could be, and there were times when they were quite horrendous, I could handle them. I couldn’t handle these interviews with women. While I have included their experiences in the analyses, my number of cases, at four, is not sufficient to draw any conclusions from their experiences. I leave those to the many researchers more able to grapple with them, such as Anne Campbell (1991), Ruth Horowitz (1995), Medea Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin (2007), Norma Mendoza-Denton (2008), and Jody Miller (2008). 6. See Nightingale (1993) for an insightful discussion of the ways inner-city American young people represent mainstream American values. 1. Gang Identity as Performance The epigraph is from Susan Talburt (2004:35), quoted in Driver (2007:313). 1. The legal scholar Franklin Zimring (2005) insightfully speaks of adolescence as a “learner’s permit,” requiring just such a system of justice. This system is being whittled away; for cutting-edge ethnographic studies of this process, see Kupchik (2006), Barrett (2007), and Harris (2007). 2. Glassner (2000) and Thompkins (2000) speak of how exaggerated claims about “gangs” contribute to a culture of fear in the United States. Zatz (1987) and McCorkle and Miethe (2002) examine how fears regarding gangs have led to moral panics, showing how the subjective response to gangs has been far out of proportion to any measure of objective threat they pose. The media play a central role in the spread of...