James Diego Vigil

In this work, Vigil adds to the tradition of poverty research and elaborates on the association of family dynamics and gang membership. The main objective of his research was to discover what factors make some families more vulnerable to gang membership, and why gang resistance was evidenced in similarly situatied non-gang-involved families.

Gang and Non-gang Families in East Los Angeles

The Projects

Theodore Roszak

Erik Davis

Jeffrey Kripal

John Graham

Josef Chytry

Janferie Stone

Craig Lockwood

Ted Wells

Brian Chidester

Colette Gaiter

Cal Winslow

California's social and cultural revolution that began after WW II shaped the world as we know it today.

Art and Culture Abide Then Divide Along the California Coast

Bohemian Highways

Anthropologist-historian James Diego Vigil distills an enormous amount of information to provide a perceptive ethnohistorical introduction to the Mexican-American experience in the United States. He uses brief, clear outlines of each stage of Mexican-American history, charting the culture change sequences in the Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Mexican Independence and Nationalism, and Anglo-American and Mexicanization periods. In a very understandable fashion, he analyzes events and the underlying conditions that affect them. Readers become fully engaged with the historical developments and the specific socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociopsychological forces involved in the dynamics that shaped contemporary Chicano life. Considered a pioneering achievement when first published, From Indians to Chicanos continues to offer readers an informed and penetrating approach to the history of Chicano development. The richly illustrated Third Edition incorporates data from the latest literature. Moreover, a new chapter updates discussions of immigration, institutional discrimination, the Mexicanization of the Chicano population, and issues of gender, labor, and education.

The Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture, Third Edition

From Indians to Chicanos

Victor M. Rios

Victor Rios has a vibrant reputation as America s leading ethnographer of Latino youth. His personal storygoing from drug pusher (selling heroin on the streets as a teenager) to a hard worker at a mechanic shop within a matter of weeksshows how he stands in the place of the Latino youths he studies. His story underscores the degree to which delinquent urban youths can become adaptable, fluid, amenable individuals, able to shift their views of the world as well as their actions. Rios rejects the old storyline that said gangs are bad and they do bad things because they are bad people. Kids on the street, he argues, can drift between different identities, indeed, they can shift seamlessly between responsible and deviant displays within a few hours time. The key to understanding gang-associated youth lies in analysis of the way authority figures (teachers and police officers) interact with young people. The kids need caring adults who offer tangible resources. Story and characters are always front-and-center in Rios s narrative: Jorge, Mark, Wilson, and others, are boys we get to know as they negotiate day-to-day life on the streets and across institutional settings. We learn a great deal about Cholo subculture, the clothing and hairstyles, and the argot that are adopted by Latino youth in response to the forces that seek to marginalize or punish them. The crisis of a perceived epidemic of police brutality in our post-Ferguson era is a product of culture in Rios s view: contested symbols, negative interactions, and day-to-day encounters that freeze youth identities as gang-associated, and that freeze authority identities as negative shapers of youth attitudes and actions are the dynamic. Fear of young males of color leads to police misreading and dehumanizing of young black and Latino men. Rios raises our awareness of how this dynamic operates by studying his subjects whole: following young gang members into their schools, their homes, their community organizations, their detention facilities, and watching them interact with police, watching them grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets. Get killed. This book will be a landmark contribution to the social psychology of poverty and crime."

Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth

Human Targets

Multiple Marginality and Gangs: Through a Prism Darkly unravels the youth gang problem in a multidimensional approach that encompasses the place, status, social control, subcultural, and identity facets of urban street gangs. The power of place and the status of persons and groups are the major forces that generate the many situations and conditions that give rise to gangs. In its simplest trajectory, Multiple Marginality can be modeled as follows: place/status to street socialization to street subculture to street identity. It is the actions and reactions among them that we fathom. As we witness detrimental or absent family influence, we also observe weaker, underfunded schools that limit educators’ reach. At the same time, there has been an increase in the militarization of law enforcement to deal with the youth street populations, the heaviest hand is that of the police. There is a causal relationship between social marginalization factors and gang membership. A psychological analysis also entails how street socialization leads to a street identity. In a place and status group, the cascading effects of marginalization have certainly affected—and mostly thwarted—social control institutions.

Through a Prism Darkly

Multiple Marginality and Gangs

James Diego Vigil

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