Venkatesh - Gangs
Venkatesh - Gangs
Venkatesh - Gangs
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American Journal of Sociology.
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The Social Organization of Street Gang
Activity in an Urban Ghetto 1
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Harvard University
INTRODUCTION
The urban poor ghetto, the “socially isolated” inner city, and the “un-
derclass” neighborhood have all become powerful phrases in the popular
discourse on race and urbanism. They are grounded firmly in American
consciousness, and they carry strong, cathected understandings of citizen-
ship, individual responsibility, normative social behavior, and so on. One
of the strongest images produced by these catchphrases is that of the street
gang lurking about in dimly lit streets, preying upon the local residential
population, and destroying community social fabric. Out of the extraordi-
nary attention of media and state institutions, street gang activity has
become depicted as a signature attribute of ghetto life, along with other
resonant behaviors such as teenage childbearing and welfare dependency.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the contribution of a street gang to
its surrounding communities is largely negative and its “positive func-
tions” (Klein 1995) minimal. Often, however, the power of such images
obscures a fuller portrait, in this case, of the range of activities of a street
gang—delinquent, normative, and mundane—and the complex ways it
participates in the social life of a community. To date, this estimation of
1
I would like to thank Daniel Cook and the reviewers of AJS for editorial assistance
and the Chapin Hall Center for Children, Amherst College, and the Society of Fellows
at Harvard University for research support. Direct correspondence to Sudhir Alladi
Venkatesh, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 78 Mount Alburn Street, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts 02138. Email: venkates@fas.harvard.edu
2
Jankowski (1991) and Horowitz (1987) offer the most direct examinations of gang-
community relations. Moore (1991) relies on interviews of gang members themselves:
she asks them to recount their experiences with families, schools, etc. Padilla’s (1992)
account of the gang in the community is surface level—e.g., his community history
narrative is broad and relies largely on secondary, quite general resources. This is
only a partial criticism because his ostensible object of analysis is the entrepreneurial
dimension of street gangs.
3
Concerning the final point, Fagan (1996, p. 42), in a review of literature, writes:
“Changes in gangs have occurred simultaneously with rapid changes in the social and
economic structure of cities and suburbs. . . . What has been poorly understood, how-
ever, are the links between changes in gangs and changes in neighborhoods and com-
munities.”
4
Names of persons and locations have been changed to ensure anonymity, as have
some minor geographic attributes that would enable ready identification of the field
site. However, the lack of disclosure has been minimized in order not to influence the
argument that is proferred.
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who act on behalf of the residential population; the street gangs most ac-
tive during 1992 were the all-male factions; the Grace Center is a social
service organization that provides social, recreational, and educational
programs to Blackstone residents; and, the state, understood as an embod-
ied social actor, is represented by the housing authority and the municipal
police department, whose roles, though formally circumscribed, are im-
mensely significant in their scope and symbolic effect.
For nearly four years, I conducted intensive participant observation in
Blackstone. My ethnography began fortuitously in 1991 when I met sev-
eral street gang members during a foray into an urban poor residential
community. (At the time, I was administering a formal social science sur-
vey for a research project at a local university.) Having befriended these
gang members, I moved into their world, accompanying them into Black-
stone and other spaces where they were actively involved in illicit eco-
nomic activities, member recruitment, and the general expansion of their
street-based organization. My fieldwork quickly became anchored in
“community” concerns; observing the gangs’ attempts to establish them-
selves in different neighborhoods, I wished to understand in greater detail
how the street gang is situated in broader social structures, both at the
level of local social organization and in relation to systemic-level phenom-
ena such as labor market structures, state law enforcement practices, and
the like. To facilitate these interests, I focused more directly on social life
in the Blackstone housing development since one could locate numerous
social institutions—resident based and external—within this geographic
space. Though explicating the minutiae of gang structure became less of
an immediate research objective, I quickly learned that even the organiza-
tional development of the street gang itself was fundamentally a product
of its relations with other actors in its “local and larger community” ( Jan-
kowski 1991). Thus, this article is motivated by this modest fieldwork
epiphany.
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5
Some of the more noteworthy exceptions have focused on the relations of gangs to
educational institutions (Monti 1994; Padilla 1992), law enforcement approaches to
street gang activity (Klein 1995), and the role of the gang in its immediate neighbor-
hood (Suttles 1968; Padilla 1992).
6
In Jankowski’s (1991) framework, any analysis that fails to consider this continuous
interaction in its full import risks numerous analytic pitfalls, only one of which seems
to be the misinterpretation of street gang activity and structure. More fundamentally,
without constructing a community context for the gang, one could mistake the gang
for another similar social actor—e.g., one could fail to differentiate between a street
gang and other social collectives that may exhibit one or another feature of “gang
activity” but not all at once.
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7
A street gang family is composed of numerous, geographic-based subunits, called
“sets.” Each set possesses a leader, lower-ranking officers, and a rank and file. In
Blackstone, there are four such sets, and along with other neighborhood sets through-
out the city, they comprise the Saints street gang “family.” To ensure anonymity, and
because it is not imperative for this analysis, I offer only a limited description of the
Saints’ citywide organizational hierarchy.
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knowledge and skills necessary to survive in their unstable environs (Padilla 1992;
Moore 1978); and, where the values of the “middle class” are “no longer present,”
street gangs have created “their own societies” to fill the normative void (Taylor 1990,
p. 111).
12
“Social disorganization” theory is founded on the notion that community controls
(or the lack thereof ) contribute to street gang activity. Numerous authors appropriate
concepts of this theory, yet few have applied it in toto and in depth to the study of
one particular community where gang activity persists. Instead, as in the case of the
underclass school, one will find acknowledgement of ideas and principles that derive
from a social disorganizational theoretic framework.
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imposes onto this formal space a symbolic map that residents of the neigh-
borhood are aware of and use to guide their own travels. Residents’ fear
of crossing the symbolic boundaries that separate one gang’s “territory”
from another is an exemplary indication that this qualitative map can
affect their everyday interaction as much as any physical obstacle. In this
manner, the space in which individuals constitute their everyday lives—
what I refer to in this article as “social space” following Lefebvre (1970)—
is socially constructed, a product of the interplay of the formal built envi-
ronment and a more personal, meaning-laden geography.
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13
Taylor’s (1990) study of Detroit street gangs is generally void of any larger sociologi-
cal concerns, most notably shifting relations of the street gangs to their respective
communities as a result of monetary pursuits. He does, however, include interviews
of nongang affiliated actors. Kinnear’s (1996, p. 19) explanation for the increased
involvement of older gang members in drug distribution is largely assertive and, apart
from attributions of age-specific motivations for informal economic involvement, is
not well grounded in sociological factors or community-related concerns. Government
reports also reproduce this economic perspective by counterposing “neighborhood”
gangs with “crack-selling” gangs (GAO 1989, p. 47). Padilla’s (1992, pp. 91–116) ac-
count assumes a less economistic stance when describing how the “Diamonds [become]
a business gang.” Yet, he too reproduces the internalist fallacy by emphasizing organi-
zational exigencies such as the need “to develop and maintain a sound financial base”
(1992, p. 113) and saying relatively little about the ways in which the gangs’ social
organizational status affected its embourgeoisement.
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detector goes off! We ain’t asking for much. These gang members is our
kids. We’ll take care of ’em. But, they need work, and we need to have
[you] take care of our homes.”
These strong symbolic ties between gangs and (non-gang-affiliated) resi-
dents are themselves grounded in material linkages that have formed be-
tween the two groups. In the 1980s, the Saints channeled revenues from
drug economies to residents who lacked financial resources or who were
simply willing to remain silent in police investigations. The most direct
examples were loans and lines of credit to residents (which, depending
on personal relations, could either be given interest free or offered at an
exorbitant 100% rate of interest), periodic disbursements of groceries and
clothing to households, and the purchase of bail bonds for jailed residents.
The Saints gang also organized recreational leagues in the community at
which residents would compete for trophies and bragging rights. Partici-
pants were given clothing and uniforms (emblazoned with “Blackstone
and Proud” on the back) as well as shoes and equipment.
To paraphrase Bourgois’s analysis of individual decisions to enter
crack-cocaine economies, the decision by Blackstone’s tenants to accept
street gang monies is “by no means strictly economic” (Bourgois 1989, p.
639) nor a simple response to a field of limited resources and opportunities.
To say only that tenants “adapted” to social contextual constraints dis-
misses the symbolic forces outlined above that motivated their decision
making (cf. Bourgois 1989, pp. 638–40). And, as I suggested, the function-
alist resonances of “adaptation” cannot explain why the response occurred
at a particular moment in time. Consider, for example, “Ms. Willis’s”
struggle to obtain monetary support for a Council-sponsored neighbor-
hood party during a conversation I had with her. Her reluctant acceptance
of street gang resources is replicated by other tenant leaders who are un-
able to locate funding for their activities:
“I asked the housing authority [for the money] first, you know them?
They’re the ones who’s supposed to give us money for these kinda things—
you know little parties, community things. But, we can’t get a damn dollar
out of these folks. They got their little group over there, and we ain’t seen
a penny of the ‘community’ money.”
“So, you want me to give you some money. . . . Well, to tell you the truth,
Ms. Willis, I really don’t have all that much money myself,” I said.
Disbelieving what I said, she shook her head and replied, “Well, now
how you gonna tell me that when you drivin’ round that little sports car
o’yours . . .”
“So, you won’t be able to throw the party, then?” I said, trying to remain
calm.
“Guess, I’ll go back to Ottie [a street gang leader] again. I just don’t like
takin’ ‘dirty money’ if I can avoid it. You know?! But whatcha gonna do?”
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As Ms. Willis made clear, accepting street gang assistance is not only
a difficult decision for residents to make but, as important, before the early
1990s, she says many Council officers (and other tenant leaders) did not
accept such gang largesse. Only after this date could one find systematic
patterns of giving whereby the Saints’ leaders funded the Council’s activi-
ties.14 Others affirm her assessment. For example, until the early 1990s,
Council representatives with whom I spoke stated that they did not feel
threatened by local street gangs. Ms. Jackson, mentioned above, who has
been an activist in Blackstone for nearly three decades, recalls that street
gangs were always present in large numbers, but their status was re-
stricted to intergang activities, and they held minimal influence in commu-
nity affairs. Council officers felt little need to “use [the gang’s] money,
hurting our image in the eyes of other tenants” (Ms. Jackson). When the
street gangs became more influential and increased their own philan-
thropy, Council officers and other tenant leaders felt their own power
threatened: lacking the connections to city agencies, foundations, and
other potential sources of monetary support, the Council turned increas-
ingly to the Saints in order to buy goods, to plan collective activities, and
to get manpower at public events. In other words, though Council mem-
bers acted on the basis of perceived circumstances, their response was not
simply a product of macrolevel forces but was instead mediated by their
perceptions, by specific historical factors, and by emergent political dy-
namics at the social organizational level.
In autumn 1992, a more profound and historically unprecedented rela-
tionship between gangs and residents formed: residents used current and
ex–gang members to establish social order in Blackstone. This gang-
community dynamic, more than any other, brought to the surface the spec-
trum of resident opinions regarding “how much we’ve changed since the
gangs took over the power.” As a result of the cooperative relationships
forming between the Council and street gangs, some tenants publicly
questioned whether the Council had compromised its own vision for the
community’s future. The most extreme statements were skeptical of the
Council’s ability to serve as a representative body.
14
The exact date at which these exchanges began is a matter of debate. Most residents
argue that street gangs began giving money to resident organizations in the early 1980s
but that this became systematized in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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As Jackson makes clear in the quote above, he realized that his efforts to
offer social services to the gangs could marry well with the Council lead-
ers’ interests in violence reduction and conflict resolution. Under his initia-
tive, the Grace Center sponsored several meetings to introduce Council
officers to Peace Now, an organization specializing in gang peace treaties.
Peace Now was directed by an ex–gang member who had influential ties
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[the gangs] that what goes down in that room: they gotta listen to it. But,
this ain’t gonna do nothing as far as getting us better police protection.
You know what, the police is laughing at us: they sitting there watching
us kill each other, and then, we making their jobs easier ’cause now, they
don’t even gotta clean up the mess we made. They laughing at you and
me and all of us in this room. How you figure this is gonna help us live
safer ’round here?”
Others voiced appreciation for the greater level of personal safety that
they felt to be a result of the conflict resolution procedures, but like James
Marcus, they also expressed concern over the use of gang members to
control gang activity. The most active dissension occurred in private and
in informal conversations, both of which spread in the form of rumor
and hearsay. By contrast, in public venues such as town hall gatherings,
Council-sponsored bimonthly building meetings, and Grace Center com-
munity focus groups, resident opinion was mixed. By December 1992, no
consensus existed among residents regarding the adjudicative procedure
that had been introduced into the community. This lack of unanimity did
not provide strong grassroots support for its continuation nor did it pro-
vide Council officers with unmitigated appeals to abandon the procedure
and delimit the scope of Peace Now governance solely to breaches of con-
duct between gangs.
Several factors produced this ambivalence on the part of residents.
First, as Grace Center director Joe Jackson liked to say, “Since you and
I don’t live here everyday, you can’t predict what people will do to get
them some safety and peace of mind”—that is, the willingness of an ap-
pointed body to intervene and respond to gang-related concerns had an
immediate impact on a tenant body that did not have another individual
or organization to help resolve street gang disputes. The impact could be
measured to some degree by the high proportion of votes that tenants
subsequently cast in favor of a Peace Now officer running for political
office in the congressional district that included Blackstone. Whereas I
heard residents frequently complain to their Council officers that the
quasi-court was “turning over the community to the gangs,” I watched
the very same persons stand in front of the delegation and voice their
complaints. One resident, whom I confronted directly regarding this con-
tradiction, replied, “Until something better comes along, well, fuck it. I’m
gonna tell them to stop them niggers from selling drugs ’round my baby.
If police want to stop them, OK. But, right now, they ain’t doing nothing.”
The underlying material generosity of the street gangs also helped dis-
suade residents from actively voicing their dissent, and in this case, their
bought silence proved to be a vote in favor of the Peace Now–sponsored
forum. During the autumn 1992 period, the Saints’ gang leaders actively
lobbied to garner residential support for the “indigenous policing” proce-
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dures that were being implemented. The number of people whom JT and
other Saints leaders contacted and offered money or favors “[wasn’t] that
many, but it was enough to get ’em to not say shit” (Ottie, another Saints
gang leader). JT and Ottie also planned barbecues and basketball tourna-
ments during the autumn 1992 months in order to demonstrate that they
were interested in the affairs of the community. They replaced aging play-
ground equipment and basketball rims, and they exercised greater disci-
pline over the younger Saints gang members, forcing them to minimize
their truant behavior. However, in general, their benevolence was di-
rected at Council officers because they understood that most residents
were inactive in community affairs. When I asked JT why he was direct-
ing much of his lobbying at Council officers and was not waging an out-
right populist campaign, he replied: “It’s only the Council really that we
gotta worry about, ’cause they the only ones who give a fuck, so we just
take care of them.”
Similar to the analysis above, it would be inaccurate, or only partially
helpful, to argue that residents of Blackstone “adapted” to the system of
“law and order” that was being instituted in 1992. Residents’ grudging
acceptance of street gang authority and their use of indigenous adjudica-
tive schemes in protest suggest a degree of self-awareness, agency, and
conscious assessment that belies the blind determinism of adaptation.
Their conscious decision to patronize (or not) the services of Peace Now—
much like their decisions to accept other gang resources—is contingent
on their own social organizational status as well as their ideologies regard-
ing the legitimacy of street gang authority and the responsibility of main-
stream law enforcement agencies. Reflecting Hobsbawm (1959, p. 32),
who analyzes 19th-century Sicilian residents’ preference for the Mafia’s
law enforcement provisions to that of formal state mechanisms, in places
“without effective public order” such as Blackstone, residents’ decisions
to utilize one or another procedure for redress and enforcement is partially
contingent on their own ideologies regarding “the authorities as wholly or
partially hostile or as unappreciative of the things which really matter . . .
or as a combination of both.”
The metaphor of adaptation also belies the complexity of the events
described above because it pretends that the social context being adapted
to was formed independently of those who performed the adaptations. By
contrast, residents actively helped to develop a mechanism that could po-
lice their own community. More than simply “adopt[ing] a variety of tac-
tics in order to survive” (Stack 1974, p. 29), “the poor” residents of Black-
stone attempted to put into place procedures that would enable them to
reproduce a lifestyle in accordance with their own visions of morality,
right, justice, and social order. In other words, their practices helped cre-
ate the larger contextual structures that (in turn) shaped their experiences.
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of areas for exchange and consumption are articulated with, and in some
cases superseded by, previously formed cultural “enunciations” that en-
abled residents to negotiate or make do with their physical surroundings
(de Certeau 1984). This is readily apparent in the reorientation of Black-
stone’s non-gang-affiliated residents to the city. The manner by which
they can move about in Blackstone and surrounding spaces—both where
they can visit and how they get there—is effectively altered once they
are forced to acknowledge and incorporate street gang inscriptions. For
example, consider those residents who arrived in Blackstone before the
1980s and who often fondly recall the era when the “gangs was controlled
by the community, not the other way around.” Until the mid-1980s, street
gang attributes were secondary for their movements in Blackstone. In-
stead, the building in which a person lived, the reigning Council officers,
and the relative proximity to local transportation networks were some of
the important indexes of social space that affected their daily intercourse.15
As the gang’s entrepreneurialism and largesse became entrenched and as
their “law and order” services became more pronounced, their geographic
markings exerted a greater symbolic force. Gang-based distinctions im-
pressed upon a social space where gang symbolism previously held mini-
mal sway. Corey Wilson, a 40-year-old resident in a Saints-controlled
building, makes this point forcefully by arguing for the relative impor-
tance of “the gang who controls the building you live in,” as opposed to
other symbolic attributions that determine safety, personal identity, and
ease of local travel:
It’s like, now I think about myself living in Saints territory. That’s the most
important thing, ’cause they the ones who do stuff around here, they clean
up, give money to people who need food, you know, they the ones who
really, you know, affect how you live. So, I tell my friends I live ‘over there
with the 33rd St. Saints’ where before I might say ‘yeah I live in this or
that building, come and see me.’ Now people want to know what gang
controls where you living, ’cause that’s more important than how far away
you are from them, or if you can take the bus there, you know?
The emergent gang-laden social space has forced Blackstone residents
to reconstitute their “street wisdom” in line with the new dictates imposed
15
These spatial markers were also determinative of personal identity, differentiating
Blackstone’s residents from one another in meaningful ways: “Back [in the seventies],
we used to paint our buildings with signs and drawings, ’cause the building you lived
in was important for who you was, and like I was telling you, they was all ugly so
we needed to show our building was better”; “[The] 331 [building] is the most violent
of all”; “330 has the most unity.” This mode of physical spatial demarcation was also
important for quality of life: e.g., “our floor has always been able to work with gangs”;
“we get the part-time jobs first, ’cause our floor captain’s brother works for the city.”
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16
These examples were offered by tenant leaders in Blackstone but were substantiated
by several housing authority managers to whom I spoke informally.
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stone. An undercover officer working in the city’s “gang crimes” unit made
no attempt to hide law enforcement’s attempt to co-opt the gang’s local
stature for their own objectives: “[Police officers in Blackstone] aren’t stu-
pid. Yeah, you put that in your book! We know that people are scared
of gangs, and that they get things from them. We know they’re working
together. But, until we can stop that, we have to use what we know to
our advantage, you see. We have crimes to stop and this is a tool like any
other.”
In sum, due to this comprehensive presence—spatial, material, ideolog-
ical—I argue that the early 1990s signaled the arrival of the street gang
as an important element in the social organization of the Blackstone com-
munity. This does not mean that, after the events in December 1992, resi-
dents were held hostage by street gangs, nor that the street gangs exerted
an absolute dominance over social life in Blackstone. Instead, the street
gangs’ modus operandi and symbolism simply became incorporated into
what Bourdieu (1992) calls the “rules of the game” that defined the possi-
bilities of social interaction, identity, and experience for residents of Black-
stone. In their daily intercourse and decision making, Blackstone residents
took into account the street gang, whereas in the past the gang did not
have such a determinative influence.
By embedding themselves in community social organization the street
gangs imposed their own expressive patterns, boundaries and territories,
and symbols and markers of identity onto those already in existence. The
social space that had formed decades ago based on the Council system
and building-centered differentiations was challenged and partially over-
ridden in 1992 by the territoriality of the street gang. The gang, in this
sense, became more than a delinquent actor and, to the degree that it
committed socially transgressive acts, it was not simply a “social bandit”
with no other ties to the community other than periodic outbursts of dis-
ruptive behavior (cf. Hobsbawm 1959, p. 6). It became a recognized, albeit
internally contradictory, community institution, performing a range of
“positive functions” (Klein 1995) while simultaneously engaging in behav-
iors that disrupted community social life.
CONCLUSION
In this study, I have focused on a specific historical moment in the devel-
opment of an urban street gang, namely, its turn toward systematic
involvement in drug economies. In the scholarship on street gangs, this
process of corporatization has been a primary variable by which research-
ers differentiate entrepreneurially oriented gangs from their counterparts
that are more interested in defending turf or that are motivated by sym-
bolic factors. However, I argued in this essay that corporatization is a
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actions that occur between a street gang and the broader community. The
focus on social organization in this article allowed me to describe the vary-
ing functions, positive and negative, that street gangs can fulfill and the
ways in which residents can hold ambivalent attitudes toward this social
actor. Specifically, in the context of economic destitution and the lack of
mainstream services, Blackstone’s street gangs have become a resource
as well as a harbinger of insecurity and social instability for residents.
By paying direct attention to the actual interactions among different
actors in Blackstone, I have sought to provide a more nuanced analysis
of gang activity than typically offered in community and field studies. To
bridge the chasm between macrosocial constraints and locally situated
behaviors, I did not rely solely on the trope of “adaptation.” Instead, I
incorporated a dialectical perspective regarding space and social behavior,
arguing that not only do social beings respond to ecological constraints
but their actions also shape such contexts. Moreover, since their actions
are mediated by conflict and contradiction, historical change and ideologi-
cal forces, their responses to social constraints retain a measure of contin-
gency and indeterminacy.
Much of the gang-community dynamics that I have addressed are spe-
cific to the contours of the Blackstone housing development, such as its
demographic makeup and the particular history of its associations among
residents, gangs, and administrative agencies. Other empirical studies
have affirmed the increasing importance of underground economies and
street gang–based resources for residents of economically impoverished
communities (Sullivan 1989; Padilla 1992; Jankowski 1991). Further re-
search is needed on the social organizational status of street gangs in order
to determine whether these processes are in fact endemic to urban poor
communities in which street gangs are socially prominent. Along with
greater empirical data, this article has argued for a more concerted at-
tempt to theorize the gang in the context of its relations with other actors
in its local and larger community.
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