This book is sociologist Joan W. Moore's most recent work in a 17-year research project on adolescent Chicano gangs in Los Angeles. It is a sequel to her award-winning 1978 publication (with Bobert García, Carlos García, Luis Cerda, and Frank Valencia), Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles.
Returning to the same neighborhoods in which she did her initial fieldwork, Moore traces the history of two Chicano gangs through three generations of gang members, Of particular interest here is the change in the perception of gangs among the barrio community, from acceptance of them as young male social groups to categorization of them as deviant. The changed perception reflects changes in the opportunity structure that limit gang members' social mobility more now than in the past.
Moore notes that previous interpretations of gang formation saw gangs as the product of culturally distinct populations or, conversely, as the beginnings of organized crime. According to the former interpretation, gangs would disappear once the culturally distinct groups were assimilated, and therefore sliould not be regarded as a long-range problem. In the latter interpretation, gangs were breeding grounds for serious criminal activity and should certainly be regarded as problem-atic.
In this new book, however, Moore offers a different interpretation, She notes that the Chicano population has not assimilated and, moreover, is continuously renewed by fresh immigration from Mexico. Because other institutions of socialization (families and schools) have grown weaker or more marginal, gangs have become the institution and "street socialization” the norm for much Chicano youth. With decreasing economic opportunities, Moore sees a developing stratum of individuals who have very little chance of social mobility. Instead, they move through their lives seeking survival but finding only despair.
Moore also seeks to place the development of barrio-based Chicano gangs against the background of the Los Angeles Anglo community. A particular strength of this section of the book is Moore's tracing of the first "moral panic” of the 1940s, in which the police and the news media began to create stereotypes of gang members and to develop a mythology of gangs for the Anglo community's consumption. As the spring 1992 uprising showed, information about lower-income, minority communities in distress comes almost exclusively from the news media and the law enforcement agencies—and these groups have their own agendas, which seldom serve or realistically represent the minority communities. Works such as Moore's are important for counterbalancing those views.
Recovering and analyzing the history of women's roles in the gangs is an especially important goal for this book, since one-third of all gang members are female. Unfortunately, the data about female gang members are thin and the analysis unreflective of the scholarly sophistication of current gender research.
Moore's work successfully outlines the history of two Chicano gangs and situates them well in the wider political-economic environment of Los Angeles. Moore's analysis of the gangs’ changing roles and of their perception by the community is illuminating. Yet for a researcher who has included the voices of gang members so completely in her work that she coauthored Homeboys with several of them, the gang voices in Going Down to the Barrio are oddly fragmented and muted. That so much potential for expressing the reality of barrio gang life remains unrealized is the book's sole failure.
