Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Global Youth Culture

11. Islanders among a Sea of Gangs: Diasporic Masculinities and Gang Culture among Tongan American Youth

230 11 Islanders among a Sea of Gangs Diasporic Masculinities and Gang Culture among Tongan American Youth joseph esser On one of those overly humid afternoons in the Island Kingdom of Tonga, G-Money sits on a beat-up, old brown couch, reminiscing about his childhood experiences of gang life on the streets of Los Angeles. G-Money’s arms, buff from prison-yard workouts, are marked with tattoos signifying his affiliation with one of LA’s many Crip sets as well as his identification as a Tongan. Outside his rented house on the outskirts of the capital city, boys dressed in wraparound skirts and finely woven waist mats are beginning to return home from school. As they chase a robust pig digging for food in the middle of the muddy dirt road in front of the house, the disparity between G-Money’s experiences as a Tongan youth in Los Angeles and the lives of the young men passing are intriguingly apparent. In his XXXL royal-blue T-shirt, khaki Dickies shorts, and matching Chuck Taylor shoes, G-Money embodies an LA gangsta, specifically, a Tonga Crip Gangsta (TCG). Unlike the lives of the bucolic youths in the street, G-Money’s adolescence was one of excessive violence and ethnic loyalty: To be from a gang that you have so much pride. . . . Especially a gang that’s supposed to represent your creed, your ethnicity. I’m a Tonga Crip. If someone says fuck Tonga Crips, they are like saying fuck my race and they are saying fuck the Crips. It gives you even more endurance, more motivation. It’s like, man . . . I’m a patriot. Do I have pride or not? You have people with so much dedication and loyalty, you know. You throw “Tongan” up into it, and that’s one more motivation to be like, man? That’s like sayin’ “Fuck my momma.” Islanders among a Sea of Gangs | 231 As a result of his involvement in gangs ,G-Money spent extended time in juvenile hall, leading to incarceration shortly after his eighteenth birthday , eventually resulting in G-Money’s deportation back to Tonga and the people he had so actively sought to represent in the hood. His affiliation with TCG ran deeper than the bonds and security he found in the gang alongside other Tongan youth whose families had also migrated to the same violent landscape in inner-city South Los Angeles. The gang offered a platform through which G-Money and his peers were able to give voice and meaning to their experiences in the multiple cultural worlds they traversed. As immigrant youth like G-Money experience racism, cultural marginalization , poverty, and urban decay, they articulate their shared experiences and negotiate culture and ethnicity through gangs and violent, hypermasculine identities. The proliferation of gangs, John Hagedorn states, “is clearly related to familiar economic and social changes now associated with globalization—urbanization, immigration and social marginalization” (2007, xxv). Through what Manuel Castells refers to as “resistance identities” (1997, 8), displaced, marginalized youth make powerful statements about gender, modernity, and globalization through enacting hypermasculine and racialized identities through gangs. One must, however, avoid essentializing such experiences and identities, since clearly gang members like G-Money inhabit multiple social worlds and multiple identities. G-Money holds both LA Crip and Tongan nationalist identities through the gang and is involved in the dynamic process of redefining each. “It is not just that collective identities and ways of life are created, but that they are internally contested, that their boundaries are porous and overlapping, and that people live in more than one at the same time” (Calhoun 1995, 47). The cross-cultural popularity of gangsta culture rests in its ability to articulate shared experiences and to confront cultural and social marginalization (see Alonso 2004; Hagedorn 2007; and Quinn 2005). Eithne Quinn explains that while gangsta is a kind of dissident, everyday political culture, it is also a hypervisible commercial form, making it a powerful and compelling image in the lives of youth. “It both contains common subversions of authority predicated on a history of discrimination and offers a highly commodifiable brand of youth and race rebellion” (2005, 23). It is “a simplified code—young males’ obsession with power and prowess,” 232 | agency and refining youth identities Ward Keeler further adds, that makes gangs, gang imagery, and gangsta music so...