Abstract
“To me, being a man, dog, is like, trying to … understand what life is giving you … to do something significant” (p. 130), exclaims Sergio, a recovering gang member from Edward Flores’s fieldwork in Los Angeles. Flores conducted thirty-four in-depth interviews and eighteen months of fieldwork, shadowing and engaging with men recovering from gang life through two Christian urban street ministry organizations—Homeboy Ministries (Jesuit) and Victory Outreach (evangelical-Pentecostal). God’s Gangs shares powerful reflections from men like Sergio who are grappling with their evolving understanding of manhood. Ultimately, Flores provides a moving analysis of how faith-based programs can empower delinquent youth to resist a toxic racializing and marginalizing climate by transforming their relationships with family, home, and community via new definitions of masculinity and faith.
Using an extended case study method, Flores provides rich details of both research sites and the city of Los Angeles. Victory Outreach, influenced by Pentecostal theology, directed members to focus on evangelizing and institutional embeddedness and mobility. Homeboy Ministries, influenced by Jesuits’ social justice theology, directed members to focus on securing jobs and community embeddedness. Both organizations integrated recovering gang members into tight social groups, provoking significant cultural memory and reappropriated gang experiences. Los Angeles, the gang epicenter of the United States, offers pervasive historical and demographic realities of “cyclical and intergenerational racism, poverty, and crime for immigrants and their children” (p. 84). Recovering gang members in Los Angeles are a fascinating case for examining segmented assimilation and the study of downward assimilation and countercultures.
Flores uses three subarguments to claim that faith-based masculine negotiations facilitate recovery from gang life. First, borrowing from the Latino Threat Narrative framework, Flores coins the term Latino crime threat as “racist/sexist depictions of male Latino gang members as undocumented immigrants, career criminals, and terrorist” (p. 25). He articulates the gendered and racialized aspects of modern crime policy and reform that contribute to and helped produce the racist incarceration realities of the United States. Flores argues that crime and immigration policies target gang members as domestic terrorists, discursively aligning racial inferiority as “common sense.” Second, Flores addresses cyclical entrenched poverty and Latino marginality by examining demographic transformations in inner-city Los Angeles. He found that poverty rates decreased as population aged, while large numbers of peopled moved out of the inner city. Further, the respondents’ reoriented masculinities played a particular role in challenging reactive ethnicity and downward mobility arguments of segmented assimilation. Third, Flores details respondents’ shift from “Latino machismo”—a street-oriented culture produced through gang life—to a “Latino macho masculinity”—traditional European-style patriarchy (economic and household control). Spiritual practices and new definitions of manhood challenged old habits (drugs and violence), criminal records, lack of education, and drug addiction. Simultaneously, redemption sequences and scripts prompted earning money legally and providing for and engaging in family life. Flores defines these masculine expressions that characterize recovery from gang life and push toward embracing domesticity as “reformed barrio masculinity.”
The construction of reformed barrio masculinity achieved through faith-based practices encompassed both discursive and embodied social interaction. Discursively, recovering gang members learned nurturing behavior that invited negotiations of Chicano manhood and practice talking about gang masculinity as self-destructive while promoting a warm, nurturing “breadwinner” hegemonic masculinity. Yet, these organizations also encouraged men to redirect meanings associated with clothing, handshakes, body size, dances, and pain, paired with a denouncing of drug addiction, violence, and gang mannerisms. They began to embody these changes. Flores found that the discursive and embodied propensities facilitated by religion and doing gender were bedrock for exiting gang life.
God’s Gangs is an incredible exploration of how Latino men in gang recovery deal with racialized exclusion and marginality. Flores demonstrates the centrality and pervasiveness of “new masculinities,” challenges downward assimilation predictions, and, significantly, adds to the limited gang exit scholarship. The argument is convincing and innovative. I would have liked to see a more critical analysis of the hegemonic notions of “reformed barrio masculinity.” These men are living healthier, happier, and more productive lives. Yet, I was interested in reading more about all of the consequences associated with this trade. This is something in which other scholars (like Victor Rios and Adam Reich) critically interrogate, and perhaps this is something to expect from Flores in the future.
God’s Gangs is an important book and Flores does a great job of concisely concluding each chapter in accessible language. Upper-level undergrads and graduate students would benefit from this text. The book would be great for discussion on public policy and race, discourse and embodiment, gang and crime rehabilitation, religion and intersectionality, and a range of masculinities.