Dino’s Story: The Challenges of Co-writing the Life History of a Brazilian Gangster

This article reflects on my attempt to co-write the life history of Dino, a former member of two gangs in São Paulo, Brazil. While introducing constraints, co-writing prolonged my ethnographic fieldwork, and enhanced reflexivity by allowing access to the rewritings and translations that Dino elaborated, which led to a better understanding of what telling his story meant to him and what he thought was important about it, thereby revealing important elements of his gangster identity, but also of racial dynamics of gangs. These led to our fictionalizing his story, which-in contrast to much research on gangs in Latin America that is often characterized by a fundamental inequality between researchers and their interlocutors-allowed for a fairer and more transparent ethnographic "pact" between Dino and myself. This allowed us to both preserve our ethical senses of self and to maintain our relationship, and improved the life history that we crafted together.