Thinking Out Loud

With my topic I studied the importance of child development in relation to the risk of gang involvement. James Vigil wrote an article called, "Urban Violence and Street Gangs." He describes the socialization process of acquiring the 'locura' in Mexican-American street gangs. Locura basically means a semi-controlled insanity gang members use to act tough in the streets and erase some of the fear involved. He writes that this is formed when a child lacks guidance from their home, their school and the law. Instead they spend a majority of time out in the street where they encounter more kids in their same situation. They group together and seek guidance from the elders for surviving in the harsh environment of the streets. In most cases the elders are in fact current gang members that lead point them in the direction and the locura and eventually becoming a gang member.

Vigil's description of the kids grouping together also coincides with Pierre Bourdieu's Genesis of Groups theory, which in sum states that groups are created by people from similar background and similar preferences. Vigil's theory on grouping appears strong, but he lacks reasons as to why teens can't avoid gangs through their high school activities because if you really think about it high school and gangs are quite similar. Both involve grouping together under societal norms with an authoritative leader. To further understand why a gang member might possibly fall out of the school system I looked at the rationale choice approach taken by Bill McCarthy on criminology.

The rationale choice approach states that a person performs a crime based on his/her preferences, attitudes towards risk and the benefits of the cost. Perhaps gang members fall out of school because a typical profile of a member prefers to hang out on the streets where drug dealing is a commonplace, has a disregard for risk because he/she needs to take them in order to build their rep and get respect, which also falls under the benefits of cost. Performing a major crime will boost your rankings in the gang.

For the first half of my paper my sources seem to either reinforce each other, or pick up where one has left off. From the information I have researched I am beginning to lean towards the idea that gangs arise from community disorganization, which revolves around the lack of guidance from home life, the schools and law as stated by Vigil. However I am having a difficult time writing about the connections between tribal warfare and gang violence. I am definitely finding obvious connections between the two, but I feel like all I can do is state the connections and not put them into context of my question, which is; why do teens join gangs? I am considering just axing that portion of the paper, even though it's so interesting and I don't want to do that, but maybe just focusing on community disorganization would be better suited for the context of the subject.