Little Village as a Community

Robert Vargas’s “Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in Chicago Barrio” examines how a history of urban political neglect of integratory efforts of the rising minority and immigrant population produced the fractured community of Little Village. The political gerrymandering of jurisdictional boundaries of the neighborhood’s east side led to an underresourced climate with insufficient avenues for social and economic mobility available. Job opportunities were scarce, and quality of life was significantly lower in these impoverished areas when compared to the neighboring counties. The lack of inclusive efforts into the greater Chicago infrastructure, in conjunction with rising poverty rates led to the resurgence of gangs. Over time, they grew in power and established social control over the area through violence. The rise of gangs generated a cyclical battle between local, underresourced, law enforcement and the powerful gangs leading to the exacerbation of the communities’ problems. With access to the communications network that bridges residents and police, the gangs were able to emulate formal social control over the city. They established a police-like role and created pseudo-formal laws by actively punishing citizens when they violated it. Law enforcement agencies surrendered their authority by punishing citizens who called for low-impact emergencies as they believed that it was a waste of time considering the limited resources they had.

It is conflicting to see how people in Little Village are forced to act against their own community in order to maximize positive outcomes for themselves. If police are also willing to punish citizens through “street justice,” it makes you wonder if anyone is left in the area that still cares about improving the community. The state of Little Village has pushed its people towards a political indifference in regard to the interests of the community as a whole. Due to the gang’s rising threat, the residents have got no other choice left but to replace community values for the values of the criminal subculture that controls them.

Little Village reminded me of reading about rooming houses discussed in Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum because of how the people of Little Village disassociated themselves from their area and neighbors. Distrust plagued relationships between residents, leading to the loss of their identification with the greater community. The rapidly changing and ever demanding urban climate pushes residents into a state of anomie and normlessness. In this scenario, the residential areas are not bound together by common interest as every familial unit is forced to think for themselves in order to avoid conflict with the local gangs.

Little Village serves as a classic example of conflict theory, where, structural, top-down, oppression of the lower classes manifests in resentment and leads to violence. The creation of the gangs reveal how the community was prompted to create informal outlets for social control. The question I provided prompts the discussion of how power dynamics have changed and reshaped the values the community practices. Discussion revealed the importance of recognizing how political disenfranchising and neglect produces social conflict as well as examined how social strain was reproduced through the actions of the residents at the micro-level.