Catch 22: Street Socialization as Resistance and Oppression among San Diego Chicana/o Youth

• In Event: Latina/o Criminology Panel 1: Gangs, Communities, and Resistance

Abstract

My ethnographic study examines how youth engage in Street Socialization (Vigil 1988) to learn how to navigate a hypercriminalized barrio (neighborhood) in North San Diego County. This study interrogates how youth socialize one another in a moment when the lines between the left arm of the state (the nurturing arm of the state) and the right arm of the state (the criminal justice system) are increasingly becoming blurred as both structures share punitive practices that impact the lives of young Chicanas/os who live in the shadows of barrios in Southern California. The following methodologies were utilized: ethnography, semi-structured-conversational interviews, and shadowing. My preliminary findings suggest that young Chicanas/os socialize each other to develop an oppositional consciousness that, on the one hand, protects them from the damning judgment of law enforcement officers, school administrators and community members. On the other hand, as youth adopt styles of dress and communication that embraces an oppositional stance they are pushed deeper and deeper into what Rios (2011) calls, the “Youth Control Complex.” Young Chicanas/os, then, are faced with a dilemma. Comply with the demands of authority figures, and become pleasantly obedient, and suffer the accompanying loss of identity and self-esteem. Or, resist this hyper-criminalization in ways that further criminalize them. My interviews and ethnographic work with young Chicanas/os highlight how this very dilemma figures prominently in not only how they come to view themselves, but also how they socialize one another to navigate the world in which they find themselves trapped.

Author

• Stalin Plascencia-Castillo, University of California, Riverside