Abstract
In The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules: Latinos and African Americans in South Los Angeles, Cid Gregory Martinez discusses what happens in an urban neighborhood where “two separate worlds [African American and Latino] exist in one space” (p. 223), and both worlds have poor relations with formal governmental structures. Based on his fieldwork in South Los Angeles, he finds that Black and Latino residents develop what he calls “alternative governance” as a cooperative means to resolve and manage the everyday violence between these racially divided communities.
For his research, Martinez attended neighborhood council meetings, volunteered for the Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, and interviewed government officials. He also spent time volunteering with a local Catholic church, worked as a teacher at two charter high schools, and took up residence in the neighborhood. He details the structural context of the site by delineating the historical trajectory of distrust between residents and City Hall. For the Latino community, the failure of local government to help against crackdowns of federal citizenship policies undermined their trust in the LAPD. For Black residents, the over–surveillance of “would–be criminals” in the ghetto led to the Watts riots of 1965 and South Central Riots of 1992. Ultimately, this increasingly punitive role of law enforcement brought us to the present–day situation, where the government's legitimacy is undermined, thus limiting the State's ability to intervene in neighborhood violence.
In this context, Martinez shows that South Los Angeles residents had limited and ineffective access to for participation in the formal governance. The neighborhood councils, which ordinarily are the institutional bridge to the State, were run by volunteer members, predominantly middle class and elderly, who also tended to be homeowners and business representatives. Latinos were almost entirely absent from council involvement. In addressing violence, council members focused on land use ordinances as a strategy against areas of high crime and blight, but they did not target gangs or individuals directly. They tried to leverage city services in a circumspect and non–confrontational manner, hence fail to manage everyday violence effectively.
Martinez presents the neighborhood's Catholic churches as filling the gap where government institutions fail. Churches enact “alternative governance” to provide informal management of everyday violence for their vulnerable parishioners. Not only do these community–level institutions link people to actual material resources such as scholarships for youth and sanctuary for undocumented parishioners who are afraid of the police, churches promote narratives of “trust,” “forgiveness,” and “hope,” which Martinez sees as “street–wisdom” standing in contrast to the other code of the street: gang violence.
Finally, Martinez delineates the characteristics of “street justice” and the informal logics of peacekeeping where two distinct racial communities are spatially overlaid. Strategies to deal with violence range on a continuum from “no snitchin’,” which prevents residents with aiding state authorities in crime investigation, “avoidance,” racial groups co–existing in the same space yet socially segregating, “tolerance and negotiation,” and “retaliation” as alternative justice.
Overall, this book addresses the question of how communities deal with the extreme and omnipresent threat of gang–related violence. It evokes the work of other American cases, such as Venkatesh's (2000) portrayal of the Robert Taylor Homes’ residents working to maintain order against the threat of violence while simultaneously maintaining kinship or protective business ties to gang members. It also brings to mind international cases of neighborhoods affected by gang violence, such as Auyero and Berti (2015), who also look at the role of local government in interpersonal violence in a similarly dangerous neighborhood in Buenos Aires.
A methodologically ambitious undertaking, Martinez's study uses multiple qualitative methods of data collection such as participant observation, interviews, archival and content analysis, and straddles levels of analysis from face–to–face interactions to forms of governance. Though punctuated with pockets of descriptive prose that one expects from an ethnography, it is dense with theoretical framing and analysis, and largely presented in the language of social science. It would, therefore, be most legible to seasoned urban sociologists, criminologists, and race scholars, and might be a challenging read for general audiences.
The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules is a timely work of utmost relevance in today's political climate, touching on debates of national importance like immigration status and deportations, community policing, and urban and community planning. It explores such issues as the simultaneous absence of adequate state protection and too much surveillance in poor neighborhoods, the legitimate use of force, the functional role of gangs, and street politics. It also indirectly touches on questions of stratification and distinction, because this is a racialized context where there are not only one but two racial groups coexisting in the same space. The ideas in this book on violence and race relations should have wide reaching implications for work on social injustice and would be relevant to local community advocates and activists in larger social movements.