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When Chicago police ignored distress calls about domestic abuse and burglaries at the Robert Taylor Homes public-housing project, a group of residents decided to create their own law and order--through a community forum where crime victims could confront the perpetrators. They got help from local social-service organizations and community centers, but also enlisted an unlikely band of peacemakers: neighborhood street gangs. The Saints, the Street Lords, and the Condors (all fictional names) helped find the suspects, who were then brought to "trial" before community leaders and residents. Judgments were usually a fine or the return of stolen property, says urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, a junior fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows. But often the gangs took it upon themselves to beat up a domestic abuser or even punish gang members who acted irresponsibly.
"Residents both fear and loathe street gangs, but they also rely on them as resources," says Venkatesh, who has published his ethnographic research in the American Journal of Sociology and Signs. Most sociological studies on gangs have focused on their internal characteristics--their organization, codes, symbols, styles--but few have viewed them in a larger context. "What are some of the positive functions street gangs play, which residents can't get from another resource--such as escort services, or loans from gang leaders because they can't get a loan from another credit source?" Venkatesh asks. "When it comes to the urban poor, we've assumed that communities are fundamentally disorganized, but how are they meeting their basic needs?" Increasingly, they do so by turning to the local street gang.
As a University of Chicago graduate student conducting a field survey of the urban poor, Venkatesh was, as he puts it, "mildly accosted" and held by a group of suspicious youths "who didn't know who I was or why I was entering the community." When he explained the quantitative survey, with its choice of predetermined responses, his interrogators said, "'You're not going to get the information you want by asking these kinds of questions.' They proceeded to give their own very precise sociology of what it meant to be a black youth in Chicago--and that really piqued my curiosity," Venkatesh recalls.
After his release the following day, he embarked on a four-year ethnographic observation of street gangs within their community. "They wanted me to understand the community aspect of what they were doing, because they were interested in becoming philanthropic actors," he says. "I was interested in the very same practices, but for entirely different reasons." Venkatesh believes that his identity as a poor, Indian-born graduate student also helped, by removing him from both the black/white racial politics that polarize Chicago and the lower-class/middle-class politics that sometimes complicate relationships between gangs and African-American researchers.
The big-city street gang, formerly a "social nuisance" hanging out on street corners and committing random acts of violence, was transformed by Reaganomic discourse and crack cocaine in the 1980s, Venkatesh says; gangs began to "corporatize." When "crack came on the scene, it gave individuals in inner cities a chance to participate in economic activities at an unprecedented level," he explains. Whereas powdered cocaine was sold in large quantities, making it cost-prohibitive for the poor, the even more addictive crack was distributed in $5 and $10 bags easily sold on the street, and its "short, very intense high means the buyer is continually looking for more."
The street gangs, already organized and involved in underground economies, were well-placed to capitalize on the emerging crack market and became deeply involved in drug distribution. "The gangs started taking up the ideology of yuppies and buppies [black urban professionals]," Venkatesh argues, patterning themselves after corporations and franchises. Meanwhile, public-housing residents, suffering from recession and Reagan-era cutbacks in social services, "started turning to the Saints and the Condors instead of the YMCA to sponsor a baseball league," he says. The street gangs, in turn, began to funnel their new money back into the community--starting local businesses, entering the political arena, even attempting to buy and improve abandoned property.
In other words, street gangs in the United States are not a social aberration, but "a very American phenomenon," Venkatesh claims. "These are American youths shaped by the same sorts of aspirations that many youths have at that age. Conspicuous consumption is central to their daily lives. They're interested in being mobile. They're very conscious of wanting to be fathers and providers and heads of families. Although gang members feel excluded from American society and act in ways that are violent and counterproductive, they also think of themselves as citizens and want to be citizens."
Venkatesh worries that his research will be viewed as an overly romantic portrait of inner-city communities. "I'm not advocating that street gangs serve as a foundation for our social policies," he says. "But there are some very real contradictions that we should try to grapple with--such as the gang serving in a positive role." He hopes his work will contribute to a more community-related perspective on urban juvenile delinquency and teenage pregnancy, among other problems. "We now have a punishment-based model of social policy," he observes, but "taking away the street gang is not going to take away the problems we've identified. We need to understand how the gang fits in within the broader community. Otherwise, the conditions remain in place for another gang to emerge."
~ Harbour Fraser Hodder