From Gangs to the Academy: Scholars Emerge by Reaching Back through Critical Ethnography.

FOUR FOOT EIGHT, FLASHING EYES, RED NAILS, AND SKIMPY CLOTHES WITH A COCKY air, she exuded defiance and demanded space. She hung with the Latinos in the class, but loosely so. Primed for a fight, her curiosity got the better of her as she ventured into my office after class one day at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wanted to know howl knew what I did about the issues being discussed in class, issues she had never heard discussed in an Education course before. She wanted to share, as I had done, something about her life. Arriving in this country at age 12 after five of her brothers had died in an apartment fire back in Mexico, she struggled to gain some respect. They had called her "killer" as she set about to prove to her peers within Los Angeles gang culture that despite, or perhaps because of, her mixed heritage (African and Mexican), she should be accepted. School had been a battlefield. She was now at university, in my class. He was declared illiterate at age 14. Leaving home half way through middle school to save himself from his alcoholic, drug-addicted parents, he hooked up with an older cousin, living tenaciously on the edges of urban culture while working full time and trying to stay in school. According to him, "gangs were just apart of the scenery." His family belonged to gangs; he was born into it. La familia crossed international borders, making the profit margin a temptation even to someone who was trying to stay out of the flow. He ended up in prison, where he learned to read for the first time and received his GED. Five years later, he is at university, in my class. These are only two stories; there are many, many more. Urban youth gang involvement as a factor in college achievement is a neglected area of educational research. Gang culture is no longer something that is left in the streets. It has permeated life in California to such a degree that a large proportion of urban youth are affected, whether by choice or by circumstances. Given the prevalence of gang affiliation among our youth, it should come as no surprise that some of these young people are not only successful high school students, but are also moving into prestigious universities and colleges. The work reported here documents the process of students self-identifying as gang members, the author's interviews with them, and their induction into an ethnographic research project whereby they interviewed other gang members and people who had been affected by, or associated with, gangs. The purposes of the work were threefold: (1) to enable college students, who perceived themselves as marginalized due to their gang affiliation, to make the linkage between their past and present; (2) to deconstruct the assumptions around gang affiliation and the reasons for gang membership; and (3) to explore the role and image of academics in gang life. This article is not about the research findings based on the interviews conducted by the students, but rather about the use of ethnographic research as pedagogy for engagement and retention. In the following pages, I will explain how the project was formed, how the research was conducted, and describe the nature of the transformative process for both informants and studen ts. Context While teaching an undergraduate education course, "Race, Culture, and Class," I realized that I had at least seven gang members in the class. These were the ones who owned up to it; as we came to find out, there were more who had been radically affected by gangs: losing a brother, a father, a friend, a lover. The disclosures originally came through early class writing assignments and private conversations with me. Later, more open discussions evolved in response to class readings and lectures on the larger context of urban education. Around the second week of the quarter, students had to select a research topic that interested them from a range of current issues that were found to be most pressing in urban schools. …