Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o/x Gang Culture

In academic and cultural discourses, gang culture has long centered around the actions of either violent aggressors or passive victims. Frank García's Clicas: Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film disrupts this dualism by highlighting identities that are too often at the margins of gang studies: women and gay gang members. Through a rich reading of gang culture in literature and film, García theorizes how and why women and gay gang members enact conflicting performances of gender and sexuality “even if it means reproducing a toxicity that harms other multiply marginalized persons” (160). Through the course of five chapters, García provides a thought-provoking interrogation of how Latina/o/x gang members in the US contribute to resisting, surviving, and shaping systemic structures of oppression and power.Chapter 1 establishes two of Clicas's central methodological frameworks: (de)coloniality and coloniality of gender. (De)coloniality describes how gang members “circumvent the legacy and aftereffects of colonialism . . . upon the perpetuation of trauma, violence, and maltreatment of other multiply marginalized persons” (2). In particular, García considers how women and gay gang members appropriate heterosexual and patriarchal hypermasculinity to resist, reinvent, and rearticulate gang culture as a practice that can afford them “psychic and material resistance” (4). García expands Maria Lugones's theory of coloniality of gender to read “masculinity on a spectrum and as a cultural performance” paradoxically refused and appropriated by women and gay gang members (4). In doing so, Clicas negates masculinity and femininity as a dichotomy, as well as the colonized/colonizer dichotomy.Chapter 2 focuses on Ana Castillo's collection of autobiographical poems, My Father Was a Toltec (1995). Through tracing the historical and cultural significance of male gang aesthetics, García underscores how the Toltec father's visually stark attire “signals counterhegemonic ideologies” against the nation-state, making him a powerful presence in the public sphere (54). However, “the domestic and official-economic labor of his wife and daughter” fund the Toltec father's fashion and therefore his subaltern hypermasculinity (66). While the daughter likes to wear her father's symbolic clothing, emboldening her own participation in violence, the wife throws it away. García argues that while this “might indicate resistance and a denunciation of her husband's alienation of her . . . the mother's refusal to defend her daughter from domestic exploitation” perpetuates the patriarchal conditions that oppress Latinas (57). García then convincingly reads the daughter and mother as both resistant and passive to patriarchal and colonial structures.While the second chapter examines male gang aesthetics, chapter 3 centralizes Chola aesthetics. Through a reading of Lucia, a character in Yxta Maya Murra's novel Locas (1997), García thoughtfully considers how young Latina women adopt performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity to refuse the lack of agency imposed by machismo culture and the nation-state. As Lucia rises through the ranks of the patriarchal gang, the Lobos, her fashion style evolves. García notes Lucia's appearance at the beginning of the novel as conventionally feminine, allowing her to use her sexuality to subdue patriarchal control over the gang's knowledge, power, and material possessions. Once Lucia has garnered power, she begins donning more hypermasculine attire, resisting colonial and patriarchial conventions of womanhood. García emphasizes that while Lucia's play with gender allows her to circumvent machismo culture, it also enables her to act violently towards other multiply marginalized women, signaling her actions as (de)colonial.Chapter 4 is the section that most privileges the voices of actual former and current gang members. Studying Dino Dinco's documentary film Homeboy (2012), García theorizes how and why gay gang members participate in and survive heterosexual, homophobic gangs. García employs José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification to argue that gay gang members “rearticulate [gang culture] into a signifier for violent hypermasculinity” because it allows rejected gay men access to family structures, empowering “them to resist the violent homophobia and hate crimes they encounter outside their gangs” (140). Phillip Garcia, a documentary interviewee, states that gangs are like “a close-knit family . . . a bunch of outsiders” (138). By participating in this hypermasculine and patriarchal community, gay gang members contribute to and resist the coloniality of gender's labeling of gay men as “fragile, weak, feminine, and subordinate” (44).Chapter 5 engages, once again, with Muñoz and other prominent queer studies scholars Jack Halberstam and Lee Edelman. Through analyzing Tadeo García's drama film On the Downlow (2004), García argues that gay gang members “do not co-opt and/or succeed in gangs and their barrios, but instead fail in them” (160). García theorizes this failure as a generative practice that allows gay Latino men escape from the ontological constraints of heteronormativity's regulatory logics. (163). For Muñoz, the “politics of failure are about doing something else,” and García applies this to scenes in which the film's two main characters imagine lives beyond their communities, offering a vision of queer futurity.The intention of García's work is most explicitly articulated in the book's afterword. García argues that the work does “not aim to excuse this mistreatment of other multiply marginalized people” but seeks to understand the “intersectional systematic impetuses” that make for these conditions (186). By weaving together different narratives situated in gang culture, García challenges the current political climate's demonizing rhetoric towards Latina/o/x gang members. This is especially pertinent when interrogating the immigrant/gang member binary, which García also takes up in the afterword. Clicas offers a critical interrogation of the contradictions, resilience, and agency of those who navigate gang culture and Latinidad in the broader sociopolitical landscape of the US.