Coming from México ‘for a Better Life Here’: Street Gangs, American Violence, and the Spatialized Contours and Historical Continuity of Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Chicago’s broader notorious reputation of gang and gun violence dominates popular discursive conversations about the city’s safety and stability. Through a critical structural perspective, this article explores the constitutive historical continuity and spatialized contours of racial capitalism in the facilitation of structured violence and organized death in city neighborhoods. These dynamics are most relevant where individualized and pathological narratives of interpersonal gang-based gun violence are rampant. The focus is on the context of Mexican Chicago, particularly the transnational site of Little Village. Using hyper-local examples on the environment, education, and labor-based economic markets, I showcase how this diasporic Mexican community is an instructive site highlighting the ongoing presence of colonially constituted structures of expropriation, dispossession, exploitation, and displacement endemic to the United States empire and its resultant violence. I suggest that gang-based gun violence is tied to broader death-making machinery, leading us to robust alternative conceptual frames and reactions when socio-politically engineered ‘crime’ and violence take place across urban city neighborhood spaces. I conclude with a paired abolitionist perspective and implications for critical sociology and the study of gangs specifically.