During class, we touched upon Vargas briefly and discussed the Latin kings and their interaction with the police and residents of the community. My question was not originally incorporated within the previous class discussion so I wanted to explore it and go into detail within this blog post. With the idea of “Kings own cops” being spread around throughout the community, is there any benefit in working with the Latin Kings or would that simply garner a form of legitimacy over the police? Is legitimacy viable if the police and the Latin kings base their foundation on the exploitation of the residents? (135-136)

As I formulated the questions, ideas of legitimacy continued to come to the forefront while I was reading the article by Vargas. While the Latin kings had codes they followed when they were in the wrong, they needed to establish their legitimacy. They often had to use fear tactics and exploit the residents so that they wouldn’t call the police, which hindered their activities throughout the neighborhood. Within the perspective of the residents, I found that legitimacy was only applicable towards the police and the Latin kings. Residents are almost in a state of limbo where they have no option or place to trust. If they resorted to letting the gang members roam around, violence or disturbances would continue. If they resorted towards the police, the gang would find out who that individual is and threaten them. It is essentially a catch 22 for the residents within the neighborhood with no escape except moving out.

Within our discussions in class, resistance identities became very interesting towards my thought process. Questions that continue to linger as I read this piece is the constructional makeup of a resistance identity. Gangs can embody many ideologies and provide many avenues for its members to thrive upon. There is definitely an individual resistance identity present but I wonder how this is amplified through gang membership along with its activities. Do these kinships ultimately garner a greater resistance identity with detrimental effects? How does the concept of membership to a gang play a role in that identity? As it definitely contributes to group identity, I feel as though gang membership holds a different weight which is where I see resistance identity intersecting.

What I am trying to additionally construct my thoughts around are the positive and negative effects that gangs may have for a community. Growing up around the talk of gangs and even having friends who associated their selves with gangs placed negative connotations on them. Interestingly enough, I did not feel the same way about the people individually. It became the ideology around what the gang represented that I grew to dislike but not the individual members that I knew and went to school with. They weren’t bad people but rather the association and labeling of their gang is what threw me off.

While the presence of these organizations that help mediate and control the violence of gangs are helpful, I questioned the legitimacy of gangs as a whole. If cooperation is desired, is that dealing with urban terrorists? If gangs are given more leeway, will there simply be more violence within the community? As I continue to address and think about these questions throughout the semester, I find it important to not reduce gangs to a group of people that want to hurt a community. There are motives and more to gangs and their memberships that is submerged from the surface that we must engage when discussing this.