The marvelous ones: Drugs, gang violence, and resistance in East Los Angeles

Randol Contreras has extensive experience conducting research on men who engage in violence as they seek to construct meaningful lives in contexts of structural inequalities, concentrated disadvantage, classism, and racism. His second book, The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, demonstrates the empathetic, complex, and forceful research that can be produced on this topic when a researcher has this depth of experience and prioritizes reflexivity over bravado. There is now an overwhelming body of scholarship on gangs and gang members, largely focused on men in their late teens and early-to-mid-twenties. Contreras's book is innovative in its focus on veteranos or O.G.s, men who keep ties to their streets but have “passed the torch onto the youngsters” (5). The Marvelous Ones follows the lives of veteranos who grew up in a sector of East Los Angeles known as Maravilla and joined gangs. The book traces how marginalization; structural, interpersonal, and gendered violence; and choices made by men with limited resources result in later years defined by physical and mental health issues, addiction, and homelessness but also resistance. The Marvelous Ones should be essential reading for students and scholars of gangs, violence, masculinity, and qualitative methods, which is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and a final thought. Many actors show up throughout the chapters, but the book largely focuses on the lives of Chico, Emilio, Giant, and Marcos. These main actors grew up in and became members of Maravilla gangs that were differentiated by the street names where the gangs were founded. Contreras's work builds on previous scholarship by Philippe Bourgois, Elijah Anderson, and R.W. Connell but takes a different approach to understanding not only why men join gangs but also continue to draw upon violent tactics later in life. A thread connecting all the chapters is Contreras's focus on the men's search to matter, which he defines as both feeling needed and heard and feeling like a provider of joy and stability. These men seek to matter through different phases of their lives: as children and adolescents, gang members and inmates, as church goers, as husbands and fathers, and, for some, as Trump supporters. The book follows these men through periods of extreme violence and more quotidian moments of devastation—for example, Contreras includes a painful vignette of Emilio looking “pitiful” as he limps around searching for his cane after losing a physical fight against a friend he deeply respects—as well as moments of triumph and joy like finding a community within the church and speaking to college classrooms. By focusing on older men, whom criminologists would refer to as having aged out of criminal life, Contreras shows how the past continues to shape their lives and choices. For example, the men struggle to let go of the violent masculinity that was the basis for their identities earlier in life. They struggle with addictions they picked up as adolescents. Even the church's pull cannot be understood without taking into account this past. For Contreras, religion, specifically Evangelicalism, is a meaningful practice because it replaces the emotional highs the veteranos experienced as gang members. The Marvelous Ones should be required reading in methods classes as an exemplar of how to write about people surviving in contexts of poverty and violence, a topic that has received much attention in recent years among ethnographers. In each chapter Contreras demonstrates tremendous respect, caring, and concern for his participants while also presenting the men as complex social actors. Rather than labeling these men as violent, the author writes about them as doing violence or violence doers. He also pays attention to variation among the men he studied. Instead of focusing only on shared characteristics to explain why these men became gang members—the overarching concern of much research in criminology—Contreras explores the various paths that led to their participation. There are of course commonalities—all attempted to prevail against poverty and multiple marginality through autonomy—but the book demonstrates the importance of following the different mechanisms that make gang membership appealing. I appreciated that Contreras did not block off his methodological discussion as a separate section in the introduction. Instead, this discussion is interwoven with the first chapter; he also returns to methodological considerations throughout the book. He is one of few ethnographers to write about failures in the field and avenues that were closed off to him by gatekeepers. He admits to feeling fear and discusses the tactics he used in the field to feel safer. Moreover, he deeply engages with his own identities, self-presentation, and how he was perceived by his participants. This discussion helps us to understand how embodiment shaped his interactions and access, but also demonstrates that reflecting on the researcher's body in the field produces illuminating data and crucial insights into the social worlds we study. For example, Contreras was often perceived to be Black by research participants, especially before making modifications to his appearance. Participants' reaction to his perceived Blackness and their later attempts to assure others that Contreras was not Black provided crucial insights into how anti-Black racism operated in this context. The Marvelous Ones also provides insight into veterano racism towards other Latinos and immigrants. Contreras finds that most of the Maravillas adopted a Latino threat narrative, a white nativist discourse that constructs immigrants as the greatest threat to the country. As Contreras writes, “they became Mexican sub-oppressors through their identification as Americans” (202). Adopting this discourse allowed them to distance themselves from Mexican immigrants buy positioning themselves as Mexican Americans. Some of the Maravillas even became adamant Trump supporters. Here again Contreras provides a window onto a timely phenomenon: support for Republicans and Donald Trump within Latino communities. It is hard to criticize the book for what it is lacking, given the immense ground already covered. However, while Contreras is careful to not conflate men's stories of their past with what actually happened, in some places I was interested in further interrogation. For example, Chico explains his initial interest in trying heroin as pure curiosity. Certainly there were other factors that contributed to his using a drug that had destroyed the lives of others around him. I would also have liked to see Contreras present a more forceful critique of criminological theories, specifically those that discuss aging out of crime and life-course theory. Finally, I would have liked more clarity on the men's participation in gangs. There are multiple actors in the book. When combined with Contreras's deep description and detail it can be hard to keep up with the men's pasts, who belonged to which gangs, and how long the men were active members (this is particularly important given that previous research shows how common it is for members to drop in and out of gang participation over the life course). Still, these are minor issues in a book that expertly accomplishes the task Contreras sets out for himself: to “dig deep into how Maravilla pride came from extraordinary pain and harm.”