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Chicano Gang Members at Risk: Containment, Flight, and an Alternative Vision of Sociality in Luis J. Rodriguez's Always Running

In the modern US security state, an inevitable consequence of what Ulrich Beck has termed the “risk society” (19), contemporary gang memoirs have become a potent voice of opposition to the criminalization and mass incarceration of African American and Chicana/o communities. Predominantly written by African American and Chicano authors, these gang memoirs chronicle the experiences of current or former gang members living in highly policed, gang-ridden urban areas of the United States, particularly Los Angeles. While African American and Chicano gang memoirs differ given the unique social histories of these two groups, they almost uniformly advance a similar critique about the structural violence and systemic racism that engenders the development and cultivation of gang life in urban settings in the United States. The first contemporary gang memoirs emerged on the US literary scene in 1993, a critical moment for US race relations. Just the year before, Los Angeles had erupted in violent riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, exposing the tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and people of color living in lowincome urban communities in South Central Los Angeles. Against the oppressiveness of the criminal justice system, gang memoirs offered a narrative space for African American and Chicano men to provide their testimony about the daily costs of living as targets in a police state. Mindful of the political context surrounding this genre’s origins, I contend that contemporary gang memoirs are engaged in a discursive battle with institutionalized risk discourses, which I define as rhetoric used by the state to justify the containment and policing of black and brown bodies in the name of national security. If institutions of power, such as the media and the government, rely on rhetoric to justify racist risk management practices, then personal narrative offers a valuable avenue for giving voice to anti-racist ideologies of resistance against such language. By critiquing the security state’s targeting of African