“Hood” Soldiers: Unraveling Los Angeles’ Chicano Gang Narrative in the 1990s

Abstract

In the late eighties and early nineties, Los Angeles County’s news media covered a phenomenon that was seemingly underreported beforehand: Chicano gang violence in the City of Angels’ low-income Latino neighborhoods. Given the news’ stereotyping of young Chicano males as inherently violent people, this thesis seeks to illuminate perspectives regarding Chicano gangsters. This paper’s research motive lies in the conflicting ways in which the L.A. Times, the county’s most prolific paper, and La Opinión, the county’s most prolific Latino paper, grappled with Chicano gang villainy. On one side, the L.A. Times stereotyped Chicano males as inherently violent, whereas Chicano gangsters were distinguished by the performance of this violence. On the other side, La Opinión attempted to reduce the perceived level of violence of these gang members by constructing the gang problem as transracial or by comparing them to gangs of other races. Through a close reading of several articles in the L.A.Times and La Opinión, and by interviewing Chicano gang members who were active in the nineties, this thesis argues that these competing narratives conflated gang violence with villainy by excluding Chicano gang members’ view of themselves as neighborhood protectors.