Gangs

GANGS

I'm doing a report on gangs. I need to start off by saying that a lot of

the stuff I'm about to say, I think is bull shit. I think this because I

am in a gang and do, or did drugs. I also have to disagree with some of,

no actually a lot of the stuff I am about to say.

Before I babble on about gangs I have to say one thing. Not all

gangs are based around Latino's and or African-American's. Nor are all the

gangs from Los Angeles area, but the Barrio is in East Los Angeles.

There are many different gangs around. Some consist of

African-Americans, Latinos, Skinheads, Caucasians, and Asians. Some are

mixed. A lot of the gangs I've heard about and are friends with, mainly

consist of colored-folk. In my gang for instance, we have five Caucasians,

the rest of us are either black, latino, or dark like me. However, we do

not have any asians in our gang. And no, we are not racist towards

hispanics.

There's a gang that is called The Satanic Cult, which is into some

pretty weird rituals. They consisted of animal and human sacrifices and

people with brown hair were forbidden and non-caucasians.

There are many different gangs. Now there's one I am familiar

with, the Necronomicon, who jumped me and my homeboy (who's Latino) just

because we weren't white.

Another one would belong to the punks. Which I do not have a

problem with. The only two punk gangs I know of, do not call themselves

"Gangs" but they call themselves a crew. They call themselves CFH,

(Cowboys From Hell) and the other one is the Martians.

A lot of the gang members come from broken homes, or something is

wrong. So the kids end up in gangs doing drugs, drinking, smoking,

committing crimes, and getting into violence. Some of us consider our gang

"family." Some of the gangs actually do have real families in them.

There's the problem of joining gangs. I got jumped into my gang.

But that's one of the most common ways. The other ways are to have sex

with someone who's already in it. Or you can get walked in. Some other

ways which are sick and twisted that I've heard of are; the leader holds a

knife to the newcomers throat. If the leader thinks the newcomer is lying

he can slit his or her throat. There's others that involve rituals and

sacrifices.

Teenage gang members are linked to conventional barrio life is

obvious. In fact, much of the members' time is spent with the "family", at

school, under the eyes of neighbors who are decidedly "square," and,

sometimes, with conventional friends or dates. This linkage is usually

overlooked in researchers' preoccupation with the life of the gang during

the hours that it bands together.

We can understand only a little bit of this interaction from what

the gang members have to say about their square contacts. Retrospective

data like this may reflect romanticism about the old days, ruefulness at

missed opportunities to reintegrate with the conventional world, or self

righteousness at having "gotten out in time." But what evidence we have

indicates that the cliques of the 1950s were more closely integrated with

the conventional barrio structures and norms. The cliques of the 1970s

appear more remote, and faced more disapproval and more efforts at control.

It is one of the strongest police and newspaper myths about these

gangs that membership is "inherited," that is, passed on from father to

son. But such cases are rare among either men or woman. It is true that

about half of the gang members had some relative in some gang (44 percent

of the men and 59 percent of the women). It is true that young members

were significantly more likely than older ones to have a relative. It is

true that a fraction (less than 20 percent) of the gang members came from

what seem to be "gang families"-with three or more relatives in a gang in

either neighborhood. Rather than "inheritance" being the norm, most

relatives were brothers and cousins and uncles rather than parents.

No matter what particular social network led the member to the

gang, one thing is clear: the gangs' initiation procedures became far more

ritualized. By the time the younger cliques were active, most of the boys

and girls were "jumped" into the gang, in an initiation rite in which the

recruit is tested for his/her ability to stand up