The Gang as an American Enterprise / Edition 1

by Felix M. Padilla

Overview

The Diamonds are a Chicago Street gang whose members are second-generation Puerto Rican youths. For Felix Padilla, the young men who join the Diamonds have made a logical choice. The gang is an alternative and dependable route to emotional support, self-respect, material goods, and upward mobility. Although Padilla shares the same ethnic background as the gang members and also grew up in a Chicago barrio, gaining the trust of the Diamonds was not easy. Eventually, however, he was able to get close enough to the members to interview and observe them.

Padilla shows us his decision to join the Diamonds. From early childhood, boys develop positive images of the gang. They realize that the dominant culture promises mobility, but that their paths to that mobility are blocked. By joining a gang they can creatively oppose the dominant culture. Padilla does not paint a romanticized picture of the Diamonds. Some members come to understand that when they sell drugs, they benefit the gang's leaders and suppliers more than themselves. Further, they recognize that the gang is also subject to problems of domination and inequality. Padilla shows that though the Diamonds are sometimes violent, they are not psychopaths. While we need not approve of what they do, he urges us to understand it as a rational response to the doors these young men see closed around them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813518060
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	214
Sales rank:	1,044,032
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

FELIX M. PADILLA is an associate professor in the department of sociology and director of the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. In Search of a Gang to Study
Chapter 2. A Changing Neighborhood
Chapter 3. Turning: Becoming a Gang Member
Chapter 4. The Diamonds as a Business Enterprise
Chapter 5. Becoming a Street-level Dealer
Chapter 6. Future Aspirations and Limitations: The Catch-22 Consequence of Gang Participation
Conclusion
Reference List
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Padilla has dealt with gang drug dealing—one of the more sensationalized features of urban life—n a down-to-earth and realistic fashion. The reader begins to understand poor minority adolescents in a broad sociological context. This book is a significant contribution to urban ethnography."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee - Joan Moore

"Padilla has dealt with gang drug dealing—one of the more sensationalized features of urban life—n a down-to-earth and realistic fashion. The reader begins to understand poor minority adolescents in a broad sociological context. This book is a significant contribution to urban ethnography."

From the Publisher

Padilla ( Puerto Rican Chicago ) spent some 16 months with members of a Puerto Rican youth gang from Chicago, studying its social makeup and its functions as a ``countercultural structure.'' He finds that the Diamonds, the gang he studied, ``represent a very highly organized, hierarchically arranged business enterprise'' of a distinctly ethnic character that allows young Latinos who are excluded by more conventional social structures to find a sense of community and achievement. The author gives attention to the socioeconomic forces--including failure in school p. 40 and lack of job opportunities-- p. 53 that drive teens to join gangs and, eventually , to leave them. Ironically, Padilla finds that the rigid class structure of the gang ultimately turns it into another source of thwarted aspirations for most of the youths in it, another dead-end, low-paying job. Padilla writes with earnestness and concern; unfortunately, the book, while readily accessible to the average reader, is methodical and dry. However, the author never exploits or sensationalizes the kids he has written about, and for that reason alone, this is vastly preferable to other recent titles on this timely subject. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Job descriptions, management changes, staff development, disciplinary action, policies: Does this sound like a street gang? Yet Padilla, a DePaul professor, makes a good case that disenfranchised youth enter gangs to follow the American Dream. Monitoring a suburban Chicago gang involved in theft and cocaine dealing, he parallels its structure to businesses. The virtual disappearance of factory jobs in the past 20 years have left unskilled youth without options. To make what often does not exceed minimum wage, these ``gang-bangers'' endure beatings, police action (legitimate and crooked), and jail sentences. Gangs provide what school did not: identity, training, pride of work, and income. Padilla's somewhat dry academic style, rife with statistics, is offset by the colorful and profane interviews with the Diamonds. Most of them have become disillusioned and disappointed by age 20, because only a very few drug distributors are making the real money, while the street dealers are taking all the risks. This is the most thorough look at the operation of a violent street gang since Joan Moore's Going Down to the Barrio ( LJ 2/1/92). For public libraries.-- Anne Osborn, Youth Training Sch., Chino, Cal.

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