Human Targets

Victor Rios has a vibrant reputation as America’s leading ethnographer of Latino youth. His personal story--going from drug pusher (selling heroin on the streets as a teenager) to a hard worker at a mechanic shop within a matter of weeks--shows how he stands in the place of the Latino youths he studies. His story underscores the degree to which delinquent urban youths can become adaptable, fluid, amenable individuals, able to shift their views of the world as well as their actions. Rios rejects the old storyline that said "gangs are bad and they do bad things because they are bad people.” Kids on the street, he argues, can drift between different identities, indeed, they can shift seamlessly between responsible and deviant displays within a few hours’ time. The key to understanding gang-associated youth lies in analysis of the way authority figures (teachers and police officers) interact with young people. The kids need caring adults who offer tangible resources. Story and characters are always front-and-center in Rios’s narrative: Jorge, Mark, Wilson, and others, are boys we get to know as they negotiate day-to-day life on the streets and across institutional settings. We learn a great deal about "Cholo subculture,” the clothing and hairstyles, and the argot that are adopted by Latino youth in response to the forces that seek to marginalize or punish them. The crisis of a perceived epidemic of police brutality in our post-Ferguson era is a product of culture in Rios’s view: contested symbols, negative interactions, and day-to-day encounters that freeze youth identities as gang-associated, and that freeze authority identities as negative shapers of youth attitudes and actions are the dynamic. Fear of young males of color leads to police misreading and dehumanizing of young black and Latino men. Rios raises our awareness of how this dynamic operates by studying his subjects whole: following young gang members into their schools, their homes, their community organizations, their detention facilities, and watching them interact with police, watching them grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets. Get killed. This book will be a landmark contribution to the social psychology of poverty and crime.