Antropologia

Urban Violence and Street Gangs Author(s): James Diego Vigil Reviewed work(s): Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 225-242 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064828 . Accessed: 18/12/2012 13:26
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003. 32:225-42 doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093426 2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved Copyright ?

Urban

Violence

and StreetGangs

School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-7080;
email: vigil@uci.edu

JamesDiego Vigil

Key Words theories

urban studies, integrated and holistic frameworks, gang formation

What causes urban street gang violence, and how can we better under Abstract stand the forces that shape this type of adolescent and youth behavior? For close to a century,social researchers have takenmany different paths in attempting to unravel this complex question, especially in the context of large-scale immigrant adaptation to the city. In recent decades these researchers have relied primarily on data gathered from survey quantitative approaches. This review traces some of these developments and outlines how frameworks of analysis have become more integrated andmultidi mensional, as ethnographic strategies have come into vogue again. For the last couple of decades, either a subculture of violence (i.e., the values and norms of the street gang embrace aggressive, violent behavior) or a routine activities (i.e., hanging around high crime areas with highly delinquent people) explanation dominated the discussion. To broaden and deepen the picture, many otherfactors need to be considered, such as ecological, socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociopsychological, particularly in light of the immigrant experience. A multiple marginality framework lends itself to a holistic strategy that examines linkages within the various factors and the actions and
interactions among them and notes the cumulative nature of urban street gang violence.

Questionsthat are addressed in this more integrated framework are:Where did they settle? What jobs did they fill? How and why did their social practices and cultural values undergo transformations? When and in what ways did the social environment affect them? Finally, with whom did they interact? In sum, in highlighting the key
themes and features of what constitutes urban street gang violence, this reviewsug

gests that the qualitative style that relies on holistic information adds important details to traditional quantitative data. Urban gang violence has been examined from various sociological and psycholog ical perspectives (Covey et al. 1992, Decker 1996). Though the violence includes an array of crimes (Zimring 1998), it is the gang conflicts that concern us here: the turf and drug wars andbattles over resources and the drivebys and "counting coup" escapades. Prior to the 1970s, gang violence was still popularly associated with and East, and gang incidents white ethnic enclaves in the cities of theMidwest were typically brawls involving fists, sticks, and knives. Today, gangs are made up largely of darker-hued ethnic groups, especially African Americans and Latino Americans, and...