Spatializing Gang Identity and Youth Criminalization

• In Event: Policing the Boundaries: Gangs, Identity, and the Social Control of Marginalized Populations in Urban Settings

Abstract

In this paper we call for distinguishing gangs from broader collective identities that gang-involved youth may commonly affiliate with (i.e. Crip, Blood, Norteña/o, Sureña/o, or Bulldog affiliations), and propose a nested strata model to conceptualize how and why these identities differ. Through in-depth interviews with current and former gang members and ethnographic observations collected from two juvenile justice facilities, we found that gang-involved youth differentiated these broader affiliations from the peer groups they described as gangs. For example, many of our participants identified as Bloods or Crips, but these identities did not correlate with the gangs they claimed membership within; instead, we found several neighborhood gangs with mixed Blood and Crip memberships. Participants in our research understood gangs within a range of place-based identities as neighborhood-centered peer groups at the local level. In contrast, Crip or Blood affiliations existed at the broader end of this range, not as gangs but as symbolic identities whose meaning shifted with changing spatial contexts. But while youth recognized this distinction, the conflation of these identities by law enforcement facilitated the criminal labeling of young people – both gang-involved and not – by providing a simple schema for categorizing youth as criminal gang members.

Authors

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Santa Clara University

• Michael Lawrence Walker, University of Nebraska at Omaha