Chicano Gang Members at Risk
Containment, Flight, and an Alternative Vision of Sociality in Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272518 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Roberta Wolfson (California Polytechnic State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 21-45 |
| Publication date | 2018-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlx081 |
| OpenAlex | W2782862260 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
This article reflects on the emergence of a new literary genre in the 1990s, the gang memoir, which chronicles the lived experiences of current or former gang members living in highly policed, gang-ridden urban areas of the United States, particularly Los Angeles. Taking up Luis J. Rodriguez’s 1993 gang memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. as a case study, this article argues that gang memoirs use literary aesthetics to advance powerful counternarratives that challenge the institutionalized risk discourses that vilify gang members of color as threats to the nation who must be targeted, policed, and neutralized, habitually to the point of incarceration or death, in the name of security. Always Running constructs a tension between two competing motifs, one of stagnation and one of flight, to represent the burden placed on people of color who are subjected to the logic of containment in the security state and thereby stripped of their physical and psychic freedom. With the hindsight of personal experience, Rodriguez rejects gang membership as an effective strategy for resistance against the security state’s logic of containment on the grounds that this route forces participants into even greater levels of imprisonment by making them become slaves to a new oppressive system: the gang culture. As an alternative route to joining a gang, Always Running champions a spiritually transcendent sociality based on empathy and communication, thereby promoting a politics of resistance that functions to celebrate rather than denigrate Chicana/o life through community building.
Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Memoir · Militarization · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociality · Sociology · State (computer science) · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Modern American Literature Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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