The Gang Member Stands Out: Stigma as a Residual Consequence of Gang Involvement

The topic of stigma and discrimination has been explored among various criminal justice populations; however, few studies have examined the stigma associated with being a former gang member. This study explores the stigmatic experiences among a sample of 30 self-identified former gang members to highlight the ongoing discrimination they experience in the time following involvement. Using grounded theory, results indicate that two thirds of study participants either anticipated or directly experienced stigma on behalf of the police or general public in the time since gang exit. These experiences were believed to impede future avenues of success and social integration. In addition to highlighting the frequency of anticipated and experienced stigma, we describe the sources of stigma that indicate former gang involvement. The sources of stigma include aspects of voluntary self-presentation such as tattoos and style of dress as well as official sources of gang intelligence that is most closely associated with gang databases. We conclude by discussing potential avenues for addressing reintegration and adjustment strategies among former gang members.

Liminal Redemption

When a marero seeks to be something other than a marero, what scripts can possibly make this transformation legible—to himself, to his gang, and to his community—and what routes can lead away from a violent death so certain that it seems like fate? This chapter details the disappearing escape routes for gang members who try to leave gang life behind. Collective conceptions of the maras and mareros as fit only for extermination mean that former gang members must find ways to “perform” this shift to convince others, often drawing on Evangelical Christianity as a means to find belonging outside the gangs. It discusses the built-in conundrums involved in how church groups, members of the Guatemalan public, and international funding organizations, among others, seek to measure and pinpoint whether and how a gang member has redeemed himself. The chapter moves through former gang member “conversion narratives” before returning to Calavera’s story of seeking to survive after leaving prison and the moments of chance and contingency that shape his struggle.

From the Streets to the Swamp

Two of Marvel Comics’ B-list heroes of the 1970s, Luke Cage and Man-Thing, are seemingly antithetical on the surface: one is a former gang-member and prisoner who acquires super-strength and an impenetrable body, while the other was once a promising scientist who is transformed into a distorted swamp creature; one patrols the urban streets of New York City while the other haunts the Florida Everglades. Yet a comparison of the two reveals some striking similarities in how their creators handled class issues in the books’ narratives, with varying degrees of subtle and overt commentary on issues of class in 1970s America. Examining how these two characters and their 1970s comics series address issues of class, power and socio-economic status connect across their disparate adventures, this essay reveals how Marvel Comics regularly embedded a concern for working class politics within two of their less well-known books from this period.

Critique of Urban Violence: Bismarckian Transformations in Managua, Nicaragua

Urban contexts are widely conceived as inherently violent due to their putatively disorderly nature. Such a conception of violence effectively conceives it as singular and fundamentally destructive, neither of which necessarily hold universally true. Drawing on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and the life history of Bismarck, a former gang member turned drug dealer turned property entrepreneur living in a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article highlights how different forms of urban violence interrelate with each other over time, and how they shape an individual’s urban experience and environment. In doing so, it underscores how urban violence is not a singular phenomenon, how it intertwines with a range of urban social processes, and how it is often socially constitutive rather than destructive. Seen from this perspective, the key question to ask is less to what extent violence is a hallmark of urban contexts but rather how different articulations of violence emerge in cities, and why it is that they can play such contrasting roles in the constitution of urban life.

Gangs, Globalization, and Critical Security Studies: Teaching Counternarratives to Public Audiences

Working on gang issues as a whole demands that I, as a scholar, engage different scales that collapse individual and community, local and global, and that make action and study into indistinguishable partners. It is not just that we need to facilitate one woman’s path toward finding an academic who will help her husband and their family; we need to work on the bigger thing and ask the Department of State to hold itself to at least the same (flawed) standards as domestic law enforcement regarding the use of tattoos to determine gang affiliation. I do not know if this particular push will be successful, because of the heightened security that I discuss below. But being involved in the struggle is itself transformative, because it creates new narrative threads and strengthens possibilities and openings that can lead to change. Sanyika Shakur, also known as Monster Kody, is a former gang member who wrote, “I am a gang expert—period. There are no other gang experts except participants.” His assertion raises a bigger question about study and embodied identity. Whether or not expertise exists in the manner that Shakur is talking about, the need for “expertise” as a putative legal category is evident in the many intersections of gang membership and the law, which are increasingly playing out on transnational stages like the one between the United States and Mexico. The question then becomes how an academic can use purported “expertise” without strengthening the oppressive systems that created those categories in the first place.