The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War

摘要

Karen Umemoto addresses the complexity and multiple publics involved in one center of conflict in the violent Los Angeles of the 1990s. Although gang violence in the city certainly pre-dates that decade, gang warfare in the aftermath of the L.A. riots in 1992 seemed more exposed, more dramatic. To an already ailing city faced with rampant restructuring, gang violence hurt that much more. But even though I was personally sensitive to the harm gangs were causing (growing up in L.A. during the same period of time that Umemoto addresses in her book), I still loved and respected individual gang members who, as members of other social groups, happened to be my neighbors, classmates, childhood friends, and even my own brother. So when I heard reports on the nightly news of drive-by shootings, arrests made by the CRASH unit,~1 and the overall murder rate in communities such as mine, I questioned why there were never individual names or faces associated with these statistics. It is not that I wanted to romanticize these gangsters, or to justify their violent acts, but I knew the importance of humanizing them.