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

1. Gang Identity as Performance

| 1 1 Gang Identity as Performance Rather than containing youth in adult narratives, how might we avoid repeating identities? How can we encourage practices that do not depend on the intelligibility that dominant (adult) narratives presume to be necessary? How might adults come to see the identities we and youth adopt as creative rather than as evolving copies? —Susan Talburt Over the past fifty years, social scientists have increasingly turned from essentializing identity as a fixed characteristic to understanding identity as fluid, contextual, and shifting. Through dress, mannerisms, and language, individuals make and dispute claims to identity based in socially recognized categories, and such claims and contestations become the bases for sustaining interaction. Prominent, one might even say the dominant, literatures in grappling with the complexity of such topics as gender, race, ethnicity, and nationalism all recognize the importance of understanding that these categories are not fixed, but strategically molded in the ways we present ourselves , and that they are always subject to the variable interpretations of our audience. Adolescence is especially recognized as a time when one needs to experiment with identity, as the choices one makes in terms of career and family may have long-lasting ramifications. Being sorted or sorting oneself into a category too soon may lead to future regrets. Even our legal structure recognizes this, providing a separate system for the young so that they need not pay too great a price for early mistakes.1 Yet such insights tend to be overlooked when we speak of inner-city youth, and especially when we talk about gang members: fear clouds our thinking.2 When we feel threatened by those commonly referred to as “monsters” or “superpredators,” it seems irresponsible or even dangerous to appreciate the artful nuances of their ways of performing identity.3 This is unfortunate, for such fear may well play a role in maintaining the conditions that lead to the behavior we seek to redress.4 Out of fear arises seg- 2 | Gang Identity as Performance regation, the isolation of the poor into depressing, neglected neighborhoods, far from decent jobs, goods, and services.5 Schools, depending primarily on local taxes for survival, become run-down and dilapidated.6 The media often contributetosuchstereotypes,referringtothosewhomustresideinsuchareas as the “underclass” and wildly publicizing freak events such as the “wrong way murder.”7 Out of such multiply marginalizing geographies of fear, gangs flourish , but not necessarily for the reasons we think they do.8 Typically, gangs arise to meet the many challenges resulting from the neglect of officials;9 they assist theirfamiliesandneighborstosurvive.10 AsMichaelUngar,anexpertonchildhood resilience, insightfully notes, the characteristics that researchers define as providing the capabilities for young people to survive in difficult circumstances “are potentially available to some children through deviant pathways to health. . . . One need only think of how gangs offer youth a street family, a sense of belonging, even hope and opportunities for ‘decisive risk-taking’ that impoverished families struggling with addictions and under-funded schools may not.”11 This book aims to appreciate such capacities of young people to create a lively social world, despite the limitations imposed by a social structure that all too often tends to marginalize and criminalize them.12 Perhaps, then, if we look closer, not to ignore the obvious role of structural forces but to appreciate how people survive despite them, we may begin to see beyond our culture of fear, to appreciate young people in the inner city just as we appreciate young people anywhere else, for their potential, their creativity, their resourcefulness, and yes, even their dangerousness.13 Inner-city youth are humans after all, with all the wonderful, mysterious, and frightening characteristics that we have long come to associate with our troubled species.14 Grappling with Identity Understanding identity is one of the primary agendas of the social sciences , yet the meaning of the term identity is by no means straightforward or consensually understood.15 Many scholars distinguish between hard, strong, obdurate, fixed versions of identity on one hand and soft, weak, fluid, constructionist versions of the concept on the other.16 According to the former, common in early anthropological accounts and much contemporary journalism , identity serves as an explanatory concept. For instance, some have posited that achieving a coherent, stable political organization in African nations or the Balkans is difficult because of tribalism,17 or women are said to follow a set of moral standards that differs from that of men.18 Such depic- [3.17.75.227] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...