Gangs pf Minority and Marginalized Youths

Adding to such pull factors for junto membership, medicine abuse, and low self-esteem often resulting in suicide, was and continues to be the phenomena of urban flight, a process in which those members of marginalized cultures who do come through leave. Another phenomenon that leaves youth lacking positive role models or mentors is one that Rodriguez discusses in To See once more. The failure to develop a community of true eldership and mentoring leaves a community bereft of hearty influences to help children properly develop in ways that farm future success. Fear-mongering politicians continue to win election by increase law enforcement and resources for prisons, while enacting harsher laws that be aimed at inner-city minority populations. These policies are often instead of and at the expense of refurbishing educational and meshing opportunities in the areas most in need of them. As Rodriguez writes, " any(prenominal) society that does not take care of the material, spiritual, and education inevitably of its children has failed. A community out of balance crimps out upset people" (Perez 2004, 219). Such factors contribute to lack of youth development, mellow drop-out and suicide rates, high levels of work party membership and crime, and pervasive drug use among teens and children.

In Always Running, Rodriguez (1993) maintains:

Criminality in this republic is a class issue. Many of those warehoused in overcrowded prisons behind be p

roperly called ?criminal of want,' those who've been deprived of the elemental necessities of life and therefore forced into so-called criminal acts to go away (10).

Rodriguez was one such individual but managed to survive and turn his life into success. He did so through a pastiche of mixer institutions that helped act as push factors out of gang life and drug abuse.

Two of the most significant of these factors were his paternal support and his schooling. While he does discuss his mother's frustration with his fashion and her consigning him to the garage after a series of deviant incidents, she ne'er stopped admonishing him nigh getting his life together. His founding father took a more pro-active approach and insisted he attend a school near where he worked. The lack of such social institutions designed to help support youth development in many minority populations and urban cities is something Rodriguez questions in To See Again: Where are the loving family environments?; Where are the centers and the schools where young people can be creative, respected, and safe? (Gomez 2004, 218).

Rodriguez, L. J. (1993). Always Running: La Vida Loca: camp Days in L.A.. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Chente also provided Rodriguez with new insights about the workings of society and class oppression, ones that enabled him to become more question and more involved in solutions rather than dissolve into just one more part of the problem. While Ro
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