Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang by T.W. Ward, and: Homies and Hermanos: Gods and Gangs in Central America by Robert Brenneman (review)

Youth gangs have become a tricky subject for sociologists and anthropologists now that we define our research in terms of solidarity with the oppressed. Gang youth certainly are marginalized, and at least some of their bad press is exaggerated. They are also victims of our current economic order. So is widespread apprehension about youth gangs a moral panic? Are they actually scapegoats, symbolic villains for popular anger that should be directed against elites and their power structures? Or are gang youth so dangerous to themselves and everyone else that they need to be suppressed? This is an important question in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras where homicide rates have skyrocketed, youth gangs seem to be part of the problem, and out-of-control street crime has become a vote-getter for conservative politicians.

No gang is more demonized than Mara Salvatrucha (aka MS-13). On more than one occasion Salvatruchans have massacred bus passengers in El Salvador and Honduras. They are also famous for tattooing their faces and worshipping Satan. The organization is customarily traced to Salvadorans who escaped the civil war in their country by coming to the United States. In inner city Los Angeles, Salvadoran youth had to protect themselves from black and Latino gangs; when U.S. courts deported them, they spread Los Angeles gang culture to San Salvador and other poorly policed Central American capitals.

So goes the usual story, but participant-observation research in this realm is rare and I’ve never seen anything on MS-13. Now we have T. W. Ward’s Gangsters Without Borders, based on eight and a half years (1993–2001) experience with MS-13 cliques in Los Angeles and another decade of follow-up. Ward’s title suggests a transnational crime organization, but this is not what he discovers. MS-13 originated as a stoner gang in the Los Angeles of the late 1970s, he reports. A stoner gang is less interested in gang wars than getting high. Beating up Disco fans was about as tough as this one got.

Interestingly, Ward dates MS-13’s emergence in Los Angeles to before the Salvadoran civil war and mass migration to the United States. Judging from what later members say about their lives, their Salvadoran families responded to economic hardship with family migration strategies—that is, sending as many people north as possible. What traumatized future Salvatruchans at an early age was being left behind by their parents. They would have preferred to remain in El Salvador but migration was destroying their family bonds, and so, at a tender age, they were brought to Los Angeles where, in one way or another, they found a new source of security in MS-13.

What Ward has seen in Los Angeles, he argues, falls far short of the definition of organized crime because it is not very organized and it is not focused on profit. MS-13’s famous code includes:

1. 1. always maintaining “respect” (that is, the capacity to mount reprisals),

2. 2. never backing down (at least if your friends are watching),

3. 3. never ratting on another member (often violated to avoid long prison sentences), and

4. 4. not taking orders from anyone, which, as Ward points out, makes Salvatruchans very resistant to any kind of organization. The cliques he got to know were deciding many issues by vote in a system of governance he characterizes as democratic anarchy.

Far from being a centralized organization, Ward’s MS-13 is more like a name brand calculated to scare enemies who mainly comprise other gangbangers. I got the impression that, at least in Los Angeles, they are too busy victimizing youth like themselves to bother targeting other kinds of victims. But it’s hard to...