Introduction
The homicide rate in Latin America and Caribbean is the highest in the world. Geographically, this violence concentrates in the poor barrios of the region's cities, whilst demographically it coalesces with remarkable consistency around the male youth population. Urban violence in the region is rooted in legacies of internecine political conflict; of dictatorships, insurgencies and the civil wars in the late twentieth century. This political violence transitioned into a range of social and criminal violence during the 1980s and 1990s, and, unthinkably, death rates in some countries even began to outstrip those of wartime periods. This spurred academic conceptualisations of post-dictatorship violence, violent democracies, and even slum wars of the twenty-first century.Footnote 1
Youth gangs found at the urban margins in Latin America's cities are paradigmatic of this violence and have been understood as socially generated, dystopian epiphenomena of structural systems of exclusion embedded in the political economy of the city.Footnote 2 Although we should caution against romanticising gangs as emancipatory projects, they have also been perceived as collective social movements.Footnote 3 Neither gangs nor violence show signs of abating in the region, propelling the ‘gang issue’ up the political pecking order, where it features heavily in populist rhetoric and sensationalist media reports. Strikingly, gang-related crime and violence have been presented as a ‘threat to democracy’, some even calling gang members ‘terrorists’.Footnote 4
Whilst conditions of socio-economic exclusion have long been associated with the emergence of gangs, gang formation itself cannot be ascribed to a single nor determinant factor,Footnote 5 but rather to a range of correlational, if not clearly identified, causal factors such as organised crime, drug trafficking, the proliferation of firearms, weak governance and rapid urbanisation. The formation of gangs is predicated upon processes of entry and membership. Some contend that the strongest correlates of membership occur at a subjective level, including exposure to domestic and community violence, delinquency and drugs.Footnote 6 However, prescriptive accounts of gang membership and formation should be appraised with circumspection as they can emerge in a variety of ways and circumstances.
This points to the complexities associated with gang research and the ‘ganging process’, that is, the process of becoming a gang member. Challenges include transiency of membership, the fluidity of gang–community engagement, a range of interlocution with organised crime and political patronage, and, in the case of Colombia, the galvanising dynamics of the broader armed conflict. This combines to make gang definitions particularly slippery where ‘clear-cut categorisation’ is all but impossible.Footnote 7 As such, we might better speak of an incongruous gamut of gangs where a confluence of factors contributes to their emergence.
Despite these caveats, studies show that there is significant demographic uniformity to gang membership across the region: gangs are overwhelmingly made up of poor young men.Footnote 8 Even a cursory inspection shows that the poor-male-youth profile remains robust outside of Latin America. Whilst we should recognise that masculinities are not the sole determinant of gang membership, it is clear that processes of male socialisation in contexts of exclusion are central to understanding why gangs persist. This brings us to the central interrogation of this article: what is the role of masculinities in the reproduction of gang membership in the poor barrios of Medellín?
Despite the male domination of gang numbers, empirically grounded research into ‘gang masculinities’ in the region is very rare, bar a few notable exceptions, which argue that boys and young men often end up in gangs as they negotiate contexts of exclusion in search of masculine respect.Footnote 9 Beyond Latin America, the sociological concepts of ‘street habitus’ and ‘street capital’ have been used to explain the gang's connectedness to the urban margins.Footnote 10 Following Dennis Rodgers and Jennifer Hazen's suggestion that gang research often exists as a sub-discipline that rarely relates to other fields of study,Footnote 11 the first contribution of this article is to combine a masculinities lens with sociological understandings of practice, proposing material and symbolic ‘masculine capital’ as a tool to elucidate the ‘practical logic’ behind male youths’ decisions to join, hence reproduce, gangs.Footnote 12 Masculine capital is derived from Pierre Bourdieu's notion of capital, one of the ‘thinking tools’ – along with habitus and field – from his book Esquisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique,Footnote 13 and is used to understand the reproduction of the gang as a gendered social practice.
The habitus is a set of subjective tendencies, generative schemes or ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’.Footnote 14 It is a dispositional theory of action and practice, where interiorised patterns are constructed from the social world to influence an individual's behaviour.Footnote 15 Habitus operates predominantly beneath our consciousness, a form of ‘cultural unconscious’ that disposes the subject towards externalised behaviours that reproduce the social world.Footnote 16 This reproductive generation of practices between subject and society establishes the ‘dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality’.Footnote 17
‘Masculine habitus’, then, disposes boys and youths to undergo transitions to a gendered adulthood that reflects their forefathers.Footnote 18 To forge a pathway to manhood, boys and youths pursue culturally valued material and symbolic signifiers of manliness though their behaviour, actions and practices. These signifiers can be understood as masculine capital, the accumulation of which is the observable expression of masculine identity, the outcome of masculine habitus. This process is couched within a performative field of production, a metaphor for the domains which we occupy and negotiate in our social lives.Footnote 19 Moreover, the timing of ‘exchanges’ of gangland capital is not irrelevant; turning to Bourdieu once more, masculinity is performed ‘stylistically’ and strategically in real time to enhance its effect;Footnote 20 this will be discussed later when analysing the semiotics of gang displays.
Taking into account the inevitability of multiple and varied masculinities, and that the reproduction of practice is imperfect, this framework does not aim to reduce all boys to the functional pursuit of capital with the singular aim of achieving an ideal gang persona. Rather, the gang domain, the street and the community should be understood as an elaborate field of identity formation, which boys and youths negotiate to secure their credentials as men when coming of age. However, bearing in mind this complexity, it was clear from the narratives of the young gang members interviewed during my fieldwork that they perceived and appreciated gangs as ‘salient structures in the field of production’ of masculine identity when they were growing up.Footnote 21
Masculine habitus influences young men to seek out pathways to normatively ‘successful’ male identities, so they will consider the tools at hand to secure that capital. When the legal accumulation of masculine capital is hampered by exclusion and poverty, the street gang becomes an attractive tool to achieve manhood, as it is a capital-laden site. Hence, there is a ‘practical logic’Footnote 22 to the ganging process, which perpetuates gang structures in the comunas populares, the poor neighbourhoods, of Medellín.
This article also contributes original empirical data with gang members, which is scarce in itself. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2006 and 2012 in Medellín's poor north-eastern corner, during fieldwork with a community-based organisation that focused on social work, community organisation and gender- and youth-focused violence-reduction campaigns, often with the financial support of the international community. I interviewed many residents about gang activity, and as I gained knowledge about the community over time and made sound friendships within the organisation, that knowledge became my safety-net in terms of avoiding danger, and those friends became my gatekeepers to gang members themselves. This gatekeeping worked precisely because of the tightly woven community networks linked to the high population density of the comunas populares, so colleagues were able to arrange meetings with gang members they actually knew, or when we bumped into them on the streets. We even cold-called them at their houses if they lived with parents known to my colleagues. This process was challenging and not without risk to the researched, researcher and gatekeeper.Footnote 23 During this period, life-history interviews were conducted with 40 male gang members with an average age of 23 years, including gang leaders or duros, sicario youth assassins, and carrito child gang members.Footnote 24
In this article I will describe the research setting, Medellín's gangland mosaic, then analyse the role of barrio masculinities in the ganging process, which is sub-divided into five sections: layering barrio masculinities, male socialisation and the gang, the ganging process and exclusion, becoming a duro, and gang displays and the semiotics of masculinity; the conclusions follow.
Medellín's Gangland Mosaic: A War between the Poor
Medellín is Colombia's second city. Nestled in the foothills of the Andes, it comprises two and half million people living in sixteen comunas, or precincts. The poor neighbourhoods, comunas populares, described by one local as ‘hyper-populated mazes’,Footnote 25 stretch precariously up the slopes and house over half of the city's population. Even though progress has been made by recent mayors Sergio Fajardo, Alonso Salazar and Haníbal Gaviria, Medellín still has the most unequal income distribution of any city in the country.Footnote 26 Crime and violence began to emerge in the comunas populares as early as the 1950s, captured by the working-class poet Helí Ramírez Gómez, who narrated the experiences of galladas, gangs of poor young men, ‘many of whom were capable of killing’.Footnote 27 A sea change took place in the 1980s with the rise of cocaine and the professionalisation of drug trafficking organisations including the infamous Medellín Cartel led by the prototype drug baron Pablo Escobar. Hundreds of millions of dollars began to flood into the city, which became an integral cog of the regional economy.Footnote 28 Whilst the public gaze was, and still is, drawn towards sensational accounts of cartel activity, the penetration of drugs into poor neighbourhoods was profound and transformative, as Mauricio, a former gang leader, recounted:
What happened to us in the [poor] neighbourhood of Aranjuez during the 80s and 90s was really tough. It was the time of Pablo Escobar. Kids began to work for the cartel as sicarios at a really young age, say 12 or 13. A kid of that age would have a car or a good motorbike. At one point there was a kid who was only 18 that had a Mercedes Benz convertible. You would see money in incredible quantities. The neighbourhood was overflowing with cash. It was unbelievable.Footnote 29
Historically, gangs in Medellín have comprised local men: brothers, sons, cousins, uncles, fathers and nephews, and therefore linked organically to a territory and its inhabitants. Following the drugs boom, an invigorated gangland mosaic emerged, with each gang defending their patch from incursions by rival gangs. Retail drugs sales galvanised local youth gangs as incomes and gun proliferation soared, leading to increasingly lethal struggles over territory; this reflected similar experiences of community drug penetration in cities such as Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 30 Youth gangs progressively became more structured and institutional; one such was the notorious La Terraza gang, which forged linkages to organised crime as their discourse increasingly revolved around ‘security services’ or ‘citizen protection’ to justify vacunas – literally vaccinations – the extortion of residents, small businesses and bus drivers.Footnote 31
In the 1980s and 1990s left-wing militias sponsored by guerrillas from Colombia's national conflict sought to take over the city from the comunas populares. This led to a perfect storm of armed violence amongst street gangs, militias, police and army, and the Medellín Cartel.Footnote 32 Homicide rates from that period peaked at a record 381 per 100,000 in 1991.Footnote 33 The intensity of such violence is hard for the outsider to grasp. Elderly community leader Doña Rosalba from the hard-hit Comuna 1 precinct in the north-east of the city talked resignedly about finding dead bodies in the gully outside her home every Sunday morning.Footnote 34 Armando, a gang member, and Miguel, a social worker, recalled the infamy of some gang leaders who entered into folklore, and discussed Henry's mutilation in notably sanguine terms, illustrating the banality of quotidian violence:
Armando: Henry was a bloke here from the Candelaria [neighbourhood]. He was a really bad, bad, bad man. That bloke was a demon, nothin’ good left inside. He'd turn up and ‘because I don't like you…’ – tan-tan-tan-tan [onomatopoeia for shooting someone].
Miguel: Yeah, like that bloke Mario doing a stretch in jail for 120 years, and that other one called Morena-cara, and Terry. What murderous sons of bitches.
Armando: In the end, they took Henry up the hill and chopped him into little pieces.
Miguel: Yeah, well, of course they did.Footnote 35
Across two decades between the 1980s and 2000s approximately 40,000 young people were victims of homicide; of these 93 per cent were male, becoming known as the ‘lost generation’.Footnote 36 The majority of these came from the comunas populares, prompting one gang member to reflect ‘it was a war between the poor, we were like the Palestinians’.Footnote 37 Over this period numerous academic concepts emerged in an attempt to explain the ‘necro-’ and ‘narco-geographies’Footnote 38 of booming youth violence, which gained widespread cultural traction through a morbid and sensationalist fascination with sicarios, via both fictional and non-fictional accounts of street life and death.Footnote 39
The early 2000s heralded the rolling out into the city of state-led counter-insurgency strategies, with the deployment of paramilitary ‘blocks’, principally the Bloque Cacique Nutibarra and later the Bloque Metro, to expel left-wing militias from the city. This precipitated the ‘war for Medellin’ that reached a spectacular tipping point in 2002 during ‘Operación Orión’, when Black Hawk helicopter gun-ships bombarded the militia-controlled Comuna 13, which was then seized by the paramilitaries.Footnote 40 Crucially, paramilitary groups led the pacification of Medellín's ganglands through plata o plomo (‘silver or lead’), by successfully coercing, murdering or displacing non-compliant gangs and militia groups.Footnote 41 One gang member, Notes, said, ‘After 2003 the paramilitaries arrived and the whole world began to work with them because they paid the gangs to run territory for them … they arrived handing out money and guns, opportunities.’Footnote 42
Over the years, locals have become jaded by living in the shadow of a continuum of illegal armed groups, and consider young men like Notes as urban mercenaries who side with whichever group comes to power in their area. A gang member on the pay-roll of the paramilitaries concurred: ‘All armed groups around here are just mafia. One armed group or another will eventually take over, it makes no difference if they are militias or paramilitaries.’Footnote 43
Medellín was effectively pacified as gang members fell into line under the paramilitaries. This underworld alliance lead to a dramatic 81 per cent drop-off in the homicide rate in 2003, bottoming out at a 20-year low of 34 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007.Footnote 44 Many were quick to jump on the bandwagon and hail Medellín's miracle transformation, but in reality comuna popular residents remained hostage to pervasive systems of fear, which they referred to as the calma tensa (‘tense calm’). Although gang turf-wars had subsided, the threat of violence by armed groups for anyone who stepped out of line remained. This was relayed to me in chilling terms as ‘total social control’ by his ‘organisation’ during an interview with Fabio Acevedo Orlando Monsalve, a.k.a. Don F., a founding member of the paramilitary Bloque Cacique Nutibarra and a senior figure in Medellín's underworld at the time.Footnote 45
In July 2003, the then President Álvaro Uribe Vélez pushed for the nationwide disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of paramilitary groups after the agreement of Santa Fe de Ralito. Given the nature of Medellín's takeover, at the demobilisation ceremony in November 2003 many ‘paramilitaries’ were, unsurprisingly, actually gang members who had been re-labelled. The process was taken advantage of as a smokescreen to cover up on-going organised crime and drug trafficking, whilst the low homicide rate was used as leverage with the municipal government with the understanding that if the paramilitaries and associated gang members supressed neighbourhood violence, the state would not go after them.Footnote 46 Whilst violence reduction was broadly welcomed by the local population and applauded by the international community, the political economy of organised crime and drug-trafficking in the city remained fundamentally undisturbed. By 2009 reconfigurations in the criminal underworld began to fracture the gang–paramilitary alliance, leading to increased bloodshed amongst gangs, who once again began to defend their patches.
Undoubtedly the arc of Colombia's political violence has exacerbated street-level conflict in Medellín, where grey alliances between gangs, paramilitaries and the state are textured with criminal and political dynamics. Although the city has not returned to the peak violence of the early 1990s, generalised insecurity and the continuation of gang control in Medellín's poorest comunas still define day-to-day life.
Barrio Masculinities and the Ganging Process
Layering Barrio Masculinities
Manliness has been theorised as a relational construct in opposition to femininity, as a ‘defensive effort’ against unmanliness and a fear of all that emasculates, which, as Judith Butler suggests, is a constant process of performing and becoming.Footnote 47 Raewyn Connell coined the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, the dominant and dominating forms of male identity in society.Footnote 48 In Latin America hegemonic male attributes are widespread as an ideological stand sanctified by others, culturally rooted in gender inequalities and patriarchy, that cut across class divisions, encompassing the attributes of social status, material wealth, sexual prowess, and often a predilection for violence.Footnote 49 However, we should caution against conclusive notions of a single, pan-regional hegemonic masculinity or machismo. Nor is hegemonic masculinity necessarily positioned in straightforward opposition to feminine submissiveness or marianismo, as gender identities and relations are characterised by ontological inconsistency, given the complex interplay between social structures and identity formation.Footnote 50 These identities are multifaceted and situationally mutable;Footnote 51 men are not permanently committed to one pattern of masculinity, rather they draw upon a repertoire of performance to negotiate the gendered world from one space and moment to the next. In Mexico and Central America a man may perpetrate street violence, but caringly look after his children in private or public.Footnote 52 Literature on sicarios and gang members in Medellín highlights the diversity of this repertoire, whereby certain practices are adopted for one reality and cast aside for another, reflecting their protean masculine personas.Footnote 53 For example, whilst there is no neat dichotomy between domestic and social masculinity, some sicarios and gang members I interviewed were caring fathers, sons or brothers at home, but had also raped and murdered on the streets.
Micro-level practices of barrio masculinity can be confounding and contradictory, leading to methodological and teleological tensions in the study of men and masculinities.Footnote 54 It is important not to idly reproduce male stereotypes, impose narratives or, as Jaime do Amparo-Alves warns, ‘make’ masculinity from the outside.Footnote 55 Therefore, this paper sets out to examine the behaviours culturally coded as masculine that are associated with gang membership, whilst at the same time striving to be unambiguous in the critique of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy. As Kimberly Theidon noted when researching demobilising combatants in Colombia:
militarised masculinity [is a] fusion of certain practices and images of maleness with the use of weapons, the exercise of violence, and the performance of an aggressive and frequently misogynist masculinity. While I do not deny the diversity that exists within the group of former combatants with whom I work, neither can I deny the hegemonic masculinity these men have in common.Footnote 56
The tension between the diversities and hegemonies of masculinity adds complexity to gang membership. Masculine habitus and men's use of agency is situationally specific, depending on timing, location, occasion, etc., which frames the strategies boys and men use to negotiate the gendered terrains of their everyday lives. Furthermore, whilst ‘barrio masculinity’ implies local nuance, it does not exist in isolation from, but rather is interconnected with, broader gender norms in Colombian society. Therefore, the gang emerges as a conduit for social relations, a gendered way for disenfranchised young people to inhabit the city and negotiate everyday realities, which is why the junctures between youth, class and masculinity can cast light on gang activity.
Male Socialisation and the Gang
Researchers have rightly focused on processes of socialisation and the way young people search for meaning and identity to understand gang life. In contexts of exclusion, the polymorphous threats of marginality have led gangs to be understood as cohesive and potent symbols of localism, value-laden spaces and discursive frames of cultural reproduction.Footnote 57 The view that socialisation processes are central to gang formation is also empirically supported, but whilst some argue that this arises from ‘a culmination of interrelated structural and process factors’, it is far from a straightforward process.Footnote 58 This was reflected in my own research. Of the 40 gang members interviewed, some displayed agency when joining the gang, albeit with divergent motivations; at times they were driven by ambition, and at others by desperation connected to poverty, exclusion or family dysfunction. Conversely, some appeared to drift into gangs through peer groups or were swept along by the sheer tide of violence in their vicinity: ‘[I've] encountered death many times. Just by living in this neighbourhood you're part of the war’, said one.Footnote 59 Although this often made it difficult for them to articulate why they had joined the gang, it was clear that socialisation was central to the process. Youths such as Carritas frequently talked about ‘getting involved’ in aspirational terms, an opportunity to be part of something, to be somebody, when the duros ‘let you join up’:
Carritas: I'm gonna tell you the truth. Lots of us didn't get involved [with gangs] because of necessity nor nothin’ like that, but because of friendships, because if you've got friends who are involved in that stuff then you're gonna get involved too. You wanna be doing what they're doing. And if your mates are in there, then you can speak to the boss [or duro] more easily and he'll let you join up.Footnote 60
Of the 40 gang members interviewed, 35 referred explicitly to the importance of growing up with childhood friends, family or street contacts, and entering the gang incrementally, where ‘the energy of the other person begins to stick to you’,Footnote 61 as opposed to a single-step process from outsider to insider. The gang's spatial dominion of their turf was key in determining the membership catchment area, as very few youths joined a gang outside of their local community. This reinforces the notion of the organic gang, where socialisation within the geographical parameters of a gang's turf is integral to the continuum of its membership, constituted through life-long friends, contemporaries and families in the host neighbourhood. This was relayed by youths who told childhood stories of hanging out, parchándose, with peers connected to the gang. These interpersonal relationships were a necessary interface or precursor to affiliation, whereby adolescents became gang members by being ‘socialized to the streets’.Footnote 62 In one instance, Mechudo followed his older brother, El Loco, into the gang, as did his cousin El Mono:
Author: Why did you choose to hang out with that crowd [the gang]?
El Mono: Ahhh, a cousin of mine [El Loco] used to hang out with the bad lads [the gang] around here. Because those guys would hang out and be nice to me and say ‘come over here, have a bit of money, it's all good, kid’ … So I was growing up and I would always see them. I didn't think about joining them, but when I needed help in life they were the support, I felt really supported by them. And so I began to get totally mixed up in all that stuff. I saw my mates with their guns and I wanted one as well.Footnote 63
Author: Tell me about your youth and how you got involved with the gang
Mechudo: Ah, that all began because of my friendships back when I was a little kid. Since I was about 12 I've been mixed up with this. It all began with my mates and what was going on round here, the drugs an’ all that, you know. Nah, like I was sayin’, it's all about who your mates are and that's how you get involved. There were loads of dead bodies round here. I saw everything, hard drugs, lots of violence, lots of rape, a bunch of dead people. My mates grew up with all that and got mixed up with the war at that time. Most are dead, only a few are around nowadays.
Author: So why did you join?
Mechudo: Why did I join? Because of my friendships, and I liked it, I liked it. The money, the work they give you and all that stuff. Benefits for your kids, your parents an’ all that. I've got a kid. I like this shit … well so far. Me and my mates have always been doing the rounds [gang activities]. Whatever it took we always got stuck in, us same lads from the neighbourhood.Footnote 64
In terms of these processes of homosocialisation, Vanessa Panfil and Dana Peterson ask a pertinent question: ‘To what extent are gangs gendered masculine, not just made up primarily of male members?’Footnote 65 Youth gangs in Medellín are male dominated, but it is important not to make assumptions; rather, we should explore the connections between the ganging process and the construction and experience of masculinity. Certainly, they are spaces of male socialisation, vivid homosocial and heterosexual enactment,Footnote 66 and sites of hegemonic performance. For example, socialising and bonding over drinks and nights out with parceros (mates), and the mutual support between gang members facilitated group cohesion, a process familiar to other gangland contexts in the region.Footnote 67 This cohesion then transitioned fluidly into collective violence or ‘wars’ with rivals when the gang felt threatened, galvanising camaraderie and male bonding within the group, which further gendered the gang masculine, as El Mono explained:
When us lot hung out on this corner there were loads of us, but we were well behaved. We just liked to dance and drink a few shots of liquor, but then the lads one block up said they were going to kill us …
Author: But if you were good kids why did they want to kill you?
El Mono: Because when they came down here giving us some shit we went after them. If they have a go at one of us, then that means they've got to deal with all of us.
Author: Like camaraderie?
El Mono: Yeah, when one kicked off we all kicked off.Footnote 68
Tightknit bonds between youths enhanced by the camaraderie of ‘warfare’ provided them with a strong collective character. Gang names such as Los del Hoyo (The Ones from the Pit) or La Terraza (The Terrace) identified them in opposition to rivals, connecting them to a territory where gang life played out. Although the territory might only be a few blocks, this spatial dominion made the gang a site of subjective empowerment and cohesion, a source of symbols and narratives which insulated its young members against the pernicious effect of exclusion and emasculation, by providing them identity and meaning.
The heteronormative and hegemonic masculine traits of the gang acted as a formidable barrier to subordinate masculinities and non-conforming identities. Homosexuality, femininity and women were largely excluded ‘because of the chauvinist [gang] culture, men won't let them in’.Footnote 69 It was telling that across the seven-year span of the fieldwork I did not encounter one (openly) gay male, nor a woman in a position of leadership in the gang; leaders were always duros, never duras. However, one ‘retired’ gang member did talk about an infamous female gang leader from the 1980s who was más mala, even ‘badder’, than the men.Footnote 70 I am mindful not to make a de facto claim that openly gay gang members in Medellín do not or cannot exist; rather, that such an individual figure would be a maverick (and brave) figure. Nor do I wish to reproduce facile interpretations of women in gangs that reduce them to ‘support’ activities, sexual partners, or strip them of agentic capacity,Footnote 71 and further note that anthropologist Pilar Riaño-Alcalá did encounter a number of violent women in Medellín's comunas populares (although they were not specifically gang members).Footnote 72 Yet it was clear from those I spoke to that leading the gang and using violence was overwhelmingly ‘men's work’, in the hegemonic sense of the term. When youths recalled histories of gang warfare women were often central characters, but the killing itself was exclusively carried out by men, indicating that violence was a symbolic male enactment, reflecting the camaraderie and gendered identity of the gang mentioned above. We should be wary of type-casting and ought to seek to tease out the complexity of women's roles and agency in the ganging process, whilst at the same time remaining critical of the hegemonic masculinity that predominantly characterises these spaces. Unfortunately, empirical research on women's interactions with gangs and on ‘girl gangs’ in Latin America evinces a notable lacuna in the literature.Footnote 73
The Ganging Process and Exclusion
Much has been written about the linkages between collective male violence, exclusion and racial prejudice. Previously such violence has been framed as rebellious behaviour, an expression of protest masculinity,Footnote 74 or perhaps most fittingly as ‘reaction formations’Footnote 75 to structural constraints that corrode productive passages to adulthood. Here, socioeconomic deprivation and stigmatisation generate collective feelings of inadequacy and ‘masculine fragmentation’Footnote 76 amongst young men expected to achieve normatively productive identities. Such approaches have been reaffirmed by a raft of contemporary scholars who cite ‘rebellious class heroes’ across Europe, inner city men ‘in search of respect’ in New York or Los Angeles, and coloured youths transforming themselves into ‘bad motherfuckers’ to invert a sense of powerlessness in Cape Town.Footnote 77 Similarly, in Chicago and Los Angeles, Black and Latin gangs have been understood as meaningful collectives for their membership in the face of societal racism,Footnote 78 deriding notions that gangs are necessarily at odds with social cohesion, which is corroborated by the ‘tightknit bonds’ and ‘collective character’ of gangs in Medellín discussed previously.
Accordingly, gang membership and associated violent, risky and criminal activities are mechanisms used by disadvantaged young men as an esteem-building process and alternate pathway to male adulthood. The conspicuous wealth of ‘gangsta glamour’ confers status, recognition and even social mobility upon its participants, which stands out vibrantly against a backdrop of deprivation.Footnote 79 This implies a degree of ‘social logic’ to the ganging process.Footnote 80 Young men negotiate formidable contexts in search of desired outcomes, and when doing so the gang often appears a positive opportunity, as Pepe, a young man who worked at a community-based organisation in Medellín, explained:
It's easier to join gangs because there's economic motivation. I think that when a boy has difficulties at home [they] run out of ideas and think ‘what am I going to do?’ An opportunity [to join a gang] seems like a good one in that situation, the first way out, their first option.Footnote 81
In Medellín's comunas populares the perpetual lack of quality education and of formal work and inert class mobility reflect the dystopian tropes of James Vigil's ‘multiple marginalization’ and Manuel Castells's ‘fourth world’.Footnote 82 In these pared-back settings dignity, understood by Steffen Jensen as the remaining refuge of the poor, is continually threatened.Footnote 83 This is apparent in the daily struggle, termed rebusque in the local lexicon, of poor urban dwellers: part resourcefulness to make ends meet, part savvy to negotiate everyday insecurity.Footnote 84 To be a respected man in these settings is closely associated with hegemonic masculinities: ‘being strong, bringing home money, being a protector, having power, being respected, being a womaniser, a chauvinist, macho, rudo (brash)’.Footnote 85 Therefore, a man's rebusque also implies the contestation of emasculation, a way of protecting his dignity, his remaining refuge.
I always asked gang members the question ‘Why did you join the gang?’ What stood out from their responses was the pragmatic use of the gang in aspirational terms as a reputational and asset-accumulating project. The prospect of being poor and unemployed often evoked a deep fear of being looked down upon by the community, as one gang member said:
You've got to be able to support the family, your kid an’ all that. You need to have a job in a business or something like that, so the community doesn't see you like a tramp, an undesirable who does nothin’, that's shit. It would be cool to have a good job.Footnote 86
This was further demonstrated by Sayayo, a young man in his mid-twenties and gang member since the age of 14. He had risen through the ranks to command a drugs corner and from the proceeds rented his own apartment, describing himself as well-off:
Kids round here admire gang members because they drive about in luxurious cars with pretty girls. You can't go to university, get a degree, buy a car or a house an’ all that. You don't have no opportunities to get that shit honestly. You gotta think how you can get it? If not you're going to be poor your whole life, your whole life a poor man … [trails off in reflection]Footnote 87
The gang served a dual purpose; whilst it was instrumentalised by young men to contest a lack of dignity and emasculation, it was also an outlet for youthful ambition, a way of being a successful adult male. This was summed up by a former gang member, who asked: ‘Look, Adam, is it more dignified to rob or to beg?’Footnote 88 For their protagonists, gangs are places where disenfranchised young men can ‘subversively recodify’ self-perceptions of subordination.Footnote 89 Joining the gang should be understood not as deviant but, rather, as part of young men's struggle or rebusque, and a logical use of agency in what Salvador Cruz Sierra calls the ‘dispute’ for male recognition in settings of exclusion that restrict legal ‘masculinisation opportunities’.Footnote 90
The logic of gang membership in contexts of urban exclusion is corroborated by their ubiquity in Medellín's comunas populares, and, indeed, in the margins of cities across the region. As opposed to deviant youth behaviour, gangs in Medellín ought to be understood as acts of resistance by young people to a political economy that generates socio-economic marginalisation, and also as a repository of experiences and symbols that give meaning to local masculinities, providing a narrative of the city's history of violence. If gangs are gendered symptoms of structural restraints, to draw on Loïc Wacquant and James Holsten, they are a male ‘collective identity machine’, and a masculine ‘insurgent citizenship’.Footnote 91 Gangs are not born of anomic community disorganisation; they are socially generated by-products of urban inequity. Nevertheless, whilst we should be critical of the conditions that give rise to gangs, we should also be wary of idealising them as an emancipatory project, given their impact in terms of violence and crime upon populations living in the poorest neighbourhoods, and their capacity to reproduce and entrench local hegemonic masculine identities, which will now be discussed.
Becoming a duro: ‘You Create Fear when You Do Things Right’
Medellín suffers from ‘chronic violence’, Jenny Pearce's three-dimensional concept of enduring violence, at a high intensity, in a given location.Footnote 92 Gang legacies and their embedding within communities lead them to become ontologically significant, even ontological assets,Footnote 93 in defining barrio masculinity as standard-bearers of male success. Duros are both feared and respected; this affords them considerable community authority in the far-flung corners of Medellín, where state influence is sparse. The most established duros are sometimes referred to as caciques, pre-Columbian chiefs, as in the refrain ‘¿Quién caciquea por acá?’ (‘Who runs the show round here?’), or even alcaldes menores, local mayors. In addition, some activities of gangs, such as spectacular uses of violence, are often embellished through word of mouth within the community, entering into folklore and contributing to the aura around duros and their potency as symbols of barrio masculinity.Footnote 94 It was telling that almost all of the locals I spoke to could name them readily. Furthermore, the lived experience of barrio masculinity is distilled by the reduced spatial mobility of many young boys whose world is often limited to a few barrios. Consequently, duros have become an aspirational focal point for a number of young men, as Aristizábal observed:
I've always looked at [the duros] with respect and admiration in certain ways, but they also have some bad points.
Author: Where does that respect towards the duros come from?
Aristizábal: … I respect them because Medellín has always had its history of respect for certain people.
Author: But it's strange that people respect these figures, but that they also fear them. Do you think that's true?
Aristizábal: You create that fear yourself when you do things right. I believe that each one of us makes our own destiny.Footnote 95
In these settings, masculine habitus, which shapes male ambition, combines powerfully with rebusque as gendered push and pull factors for gang affiliation,Footnote 96 whereby many struggling yet aspirational youths seek to emulate the local duro. This was laid bare by one young man:
Imagine [for a boy] at home there's not enough food, no loving relationships and lots of violence, and the whole time they see the duro in the neighbourhood who has got a motorbike, designer shoes, girls, expensive clothes, all that sort of stuff. But he's also got respect, recognition, power. So of course the young kids round here say, ‘Fuck me, this is the ticket!’Footnote 97
Key to understanding gang masculinities is the role of violence, necessary for territorial control to secure drugs sales, racketeering and extortion, what Marie-Louise Glebbeek and Kees Koonings call the ‘micro-monopolies’ of the street.Footnote 98 Controlling territory requires the use of violence against rival gang interests, whilst extortion depends upon the systematic intimidation of the local population. The externalisation of violence is reflected within the internal machinations of the gang, as one 12-year-old carrito explained; the duro reaches his position of gang leadership by ‘becoming the más malo’, the ‘baddest’, capable of publicly displayed and often spectacular violence.Footnote 99 This means eschewing any traces of femininity or non-hegemonic masculinity such as being a loquita (literally a hysterical little girl; here a ‘pussy’ or hanger-on). But a duro is more than just a thug; he must be dextrous enough to avoid arrest and assassination, and demonstrate good management of gang finances by keeping the money rolling in for the troops. Havana talked garishly about what ‘badness’ could entail:
Author: Whom did you admire growing up as a kid?
Havana: I admired the brother of my girlfriend a lot, Manfre [a duro], rest in peace. He was a hard bastard. One Tuesday morning in ’88, ’89 or ’90, a lad passed by, some arsehole, and says [something bad]. So we started throwing stones at him because we didn't have guns back then. One of them made him crash off his bike, and Manfre went over and jumped on his chest and he passed out. There were road workers there with picks and spades, and all sorts. And Manfre did the unexpected, in the middle of the day in front of everyone. He grabbed a drill and he put it though the heart of the kid and then here [points between the eyes] through his head. Destroyed …Footnote 100
Becoming gang member requires learning and displaying ‘badness’, a necessary rite of passage central to the ganging process. Badness is the ‘strategic essentialisation’Footnote 101 of certain hegemonic masculine performances within the gang, particularly those associated with violence. In other words, it is not a static ‘hyper’ or ‘exaggerated’ masculine identity;Footnote 102 rather it is deployed strategically and in a timely fashion, for example by showing the necessary courage during turf wars. It is an acquired set of hegemonic symbols, discourses and actions, added to each youth's masculine repertoire as they ‘become’ a gang member, eventually operating at an intuitive level, a Bourdieuian ‘cultural unconscious’, as they inhabit gendered gangland realities fluidly from moment to moment. The strategically successful become the más malos, the baddest, the duros, and those left wanting are threatened by the humiliation of being feminised as loquitas at the other end of the gang's gender spectrum.
Like soldiering, the capacity for violence is a rite of passage into the gang and a definitive assertion of male adulthood. Notes said, ‘Holding a gun for the first time means putting on the long trousers’, and Rasta explained poetically:
Picking up a gun is like sitting on the highest throne, it's like … this world is mine, everything around here belongs to me. I'm the ringmaster at the circus, and everyone works for me.Footnote 103
Semiotically, the gun is perhaps the most palpable symbol of hegemonic male power. It has an aesthetic, even libidinal quality, reflecting the emotion, seduction and ‘power of commodity desire’.Footnote 104 As José said, ‘I had an incredible .57 Magnum, so you can imagine a boy seeing these guns – “oooh!” [they gasp in awe].’Footnote 105 Mechudo added, ‘Women like men with guns, the shooters, because it gives you power, so boys look up to you and say, “Wow! I wanna be just like you.”’Footnote 106 The relational notion that militarism exacerbates hegemonic masculinity in Colombia is not new, nor is the role that violence plays in compounding gender orthodoxies, although occasionally this is disputed.Footnote 107 When applied to gangs in the comunas populares, the imagery of violence and the cultural production of gang infamy are potent. Over time, gang displays have become signifiers of success for many disenfranchised young boys, which can be seen clearly when they are out partying at weekends.
Gang Displays and the Semiotics of Masculinity in La Salle (Medellín)
Roger Lancaster noted in Managua that ‘by adolescence boys enter a competitive arena where signs of masculinity are actively struggled for by wresting them away from other boys around them’.Footnote 108 Likewise, the comunas populares of Medellín can be understood as a Bourdieuian field where adolescents vie for masculine capital and corresponding status and identity. Of course, there is no standard form of masculinity; not all young men aspire to hegemonic identities, gang life, nor vie for the same masculine capital.Footnote 109 If they did, the gang would be even more popular, given its relative position of capital strength in poor neighbourhoods. However, masculine capital acquired through the gang is dependent upon performance and timely public displays to have meaning. Capital is at once material, including motorbikes, trainers (sneakers), money and guns, and symbolic of male success, by generating respect, status and sexual access to women, amongst other ‘benefits’.
Observing capital in the field is a semiotic process befitting the ethnographer, and, in Bourdieuian terms, where habitus becomes visible. La Salle is a typical main street in a poor neighbourhood up in the hills overlooking Medellín. During the day, it bustles with life: mini-markets, bakers, butchers, and motorbike mechanics. At weekends it transforms into a notorious gangland party strip, as Negra, a former girlfriend of a gang member, said: ‘You'll only find junkies and gangsters there. There are no law-abiding people, not one.’Footnote 110 From around 10 p.m. the bars start to blare out the competing strains of vallenato, porra and reggaeton music; salsa is considered a little old-fashioned. Gang members begin to pull up and park their motorbikes in long rows outside bars, sometimes with a moza or grilla, a lover or weekend girlfriend, on the back. Occasionally a duro will arrive in a 4 × 4 camioneta SUV. The men sit looking out onto the street drinking girafas, tall tubes containing litres of beer with a small serving tap at the bottom, aguardiente liquor or on occasion the more prestigious Chivas Regal whisky. The gangs’ interactions with girls and women were most publicly visible through mozas ‘displayed’ during raucous partying in places like La Salle. It was unnerving to see girls as young as 12 years of age, made up and dressed in short skirts, parading past the tables of men outside the bars. Negra called this their ‘biological moment’, when they had reached puberty and were old enough ‘to go out and party’, although most appeared to be in their late teens and early twenties. La Salle is decadent, and the girls would gradually accompany men at the tables and join them in drinking, then dancing and drug taking inside the bars, which could ensue well into the next day, reflecting experiences of el vácil gangland nights out observed by Julia Dickson-Gomez and colleagues in El Salvador.Footnote 111
The successful man in La Salle is one who owns a fast Pulsar motorcycle, wears expensive trainers and jeans, and has the capacity to attract girls, as one young man who was not in a gang lamented:
There aren't any heroes [for young people], just unfortunate imaginaries of what the ‘good life’ is. It's about owning things; young men need to show off. Life is about partying, good clothes, having a motorbike. The role models that kids around here look up to are the ones who have taken up offers from gangs and today they live well, so that is presented as an excellent option for them.Footnote 112
La Salle was where gang members came to flaunt capital, loudly and ostentatiously, as the semiotics of masculinity played out situationally, not statically, amidst structural conditions of exclusion. Bourdieu argued that ‘timing and choice of occasion’ of exchanging gifts gives them social meaning; ‘it is all a question of style, [where] almost all important exchanges have their own particular moments’.Footnote 113 Partying in La Salle was a ritualisation of interactions whose ‘timing and occasion’ were socially efficient at promoting the gang's masculinity, membership benefits and ‘success’, precisely because these were ‘seen from outside’Footnote 114 by the on-looking public. Gang members seeking these rewards must in turn follow the rules of the game by exchanging or ‘giving back’ to the duro and the gang collective at strategic moments, for example by displaying the ‘badness’ and violence necessary to secure extortion monies from scared locals, or by ‘going to war’ against rival gangs when called upon (at great risk to themselves) to defend the gang's territorial interests.
Promoting or defending the gang's interests represented an exchange of ‘services for capital’, an informal contract or gangland quid pro quo that members had to grasp at some level: ‘if the system is to work, the agents must not be entirely unaware of the truth of their exchanges’.Footnote 115 Any individual unwilling to comply with these exchanges is likely to be marginalised and eventually expelled, because ‘until he has given in return, the receiver … sees his capital diminished from day to day’.Footnote 116 This is exemplified by the gangs’ treatment of loquitas, the hangers-on who seek to acquire the benefits of gang membership but are unwilling to ‘give in return’. They are feminised and ridiculed for their lack of ‘badness’, in juxtaposition to the duros, and are eventually excluded, thus consolidating the gender order of the gang.
Of course, gang displays in La Salle did not captivate nor appeal to all young people in the neighbourhood, and the relationship between capital and identity is complex,Footnote 117 but the consistency with which gang members referred to some type of masculine capital displayed by the gang as a pull-factor for joining was striking. The vivacity of these displays was paramount in strengthening the gang's ontological reach in terms of male identity formation, reflecting what one gang member's girlfriend referred to as el power of the gang.Footnote 118 In other words, gangs gain ground in defining what successful manhood is relative to other male identities in the community, which, as Veronica Zubillaga has similarly noted in Caracas, augments motivations for gang affiliation.Footnote 119 It is also important to understand el power in terms of its impact on boys and youths, given the age at which they join gangs, which across this study was an average of 15 years. These were impressionable youngsters stepping out into the world at a time when masculine habitus, the latent desires for manhood, push to the surface. This is a period in a young person's life when drinking and partying with friends, riding a motorbike, or having sex or money in your pocket for the first time were novel, therefore particularly meaningful experiences:
Havana: Like I said, we live in a city with lots of partying so you need nice things, nice earrings, a motorbike … So at that time I was famous as ‘the lad from La Terraza’ [gang]. And the trainers I had! Back then you could get trainers for $15,000 pesos [US$5]; I wore ones that cost over $300,000 pesos [US$100]. So I robbed to buy my trainers, my clothes, for a good woman.
Author: For your self-esteem?
Havana: Those things made me feel good. In that period La Terraza was famous and that inflates your ego. In the end there's nothing like La Terraza. And then we got the girls, on our motorbikes with pussy on the back, as the saying goes.Footnote 120
The symbolism of attracting young women was extremely powerful as an affirmation of hegemonic masculine success. As Salvador Cruz Sierra aptly notes from Mexico's gang culture, ‘entre más mujeres tienes eres más chingón’: ‘the more women you have, the more badass you are’.Footnote 121 It was clear from gang members’ narratives that sexual access to coveted young women was, in part, another form of masculine capital they aspired to. Therefore, displaying mozas in settings such as La Salle strengthened both the individual and gang performances as sites of hetero-normative male success. Of course, relationships between gang members and mozas are complex; young women's agency in seeking such relationships plays out alongside their vulnerability and frequent sexual victimisation,Footnote 122 issues which I have discussed at length elsewhere.Footnote 123
Unsurprisingly then, sexual access to women was a staple discussion point raised by gang members during interviews. They often claimed that attracting women required ‘making a name’ for themselves, and that joining the gang was a sure-fire way of doing so, as Jarrón said: ‘The baddest gang member is the one who gets the best girl, has the best motorbike, you just get carried away with it all.’Footnote 124 Similarly, Aristizábal explained:
Yeah, well, [I joined the gang] for a lot of reasons. I was looking for easy money, for luxuries, women … women today are only interested in material things, being with a duro to feel like they're with someone with power. Gang members go for the young girls who want to go to parties.Footnote 125
Mechudo led a small gang of teenagers that ran a lucrative drugs vending point on the edge of his neighbourhood located high up on the north-eastern hillside of the city. I asked him what legal job offer would tempt him to leave the gang, that would give him a similar type of social status, to allow me to understand el power of the gang from a different angle:
Ahhh, yeah, a job, yeah. I'd like to work but there's nothin’ to do, bro. I wish there was work. Round here it's tough. In Medellín it's really hard to find a job, I wish there was something to do, like I say it's tough, it's tough, I haven't got a job.
Author: [For you to leave the gang] what sort of job would it take?
Mechudo: A stable job and to get ahead, a good, good job that pays you some dough. You need to have a job in a company or something like that … Err, like working in a bank downtown. One of those jobs. [I like] how they wear a suit, how they are polite and treat people well. I'd like to work in a bank, not just for the money but for the status it gives you, working in a decent job at a good company.Footnote 126
It transpired, as we talked, that the job of equivalent standing to his position in the gang ‘for the status it gives you’ would be that of a bank manager in the city. It was a clear parallel indication of the standing and esteem that gang life afforded him. This was confirmed one evening as we looked out over the lights of the city below, with customers rolling up regularly to buy drugs. Mechudo had aguardiente in one hand, a joint in the other, and money and cocaine in his pocket. He was el power personified; as he said, ‘From up here we're just like the bourgeoisie.’Footnote 127
Conclusions
In Medellín's comunas populares, the masculinities of gang life are a repository of meaning that narrate the city's history of violence. Where masculine habitus underlies youths’ urge to be productive and locally valued men, exclusion and poverty collude to block legal and dignified pathways to manhood. Consequently, as disenfranchised male youths use rebusque, the daily struggle to survive, there is practical logic to joining the gang which stands out not just as a mechanism for survival, but as a path to demonstrable success, as a capital-rich site for male identity formation.
Gang members rarely said they joined ‘to be violent’, bar the occasional case of revenge; rather, the use of violence was developed after affiliation. Survival and progress within the gang required becoming ‘bad’, the learning and performance of which was added to the gendered repertoire of each youth's behaviour. Gang members were not permanently committed to ‘badness’ all of the time; rather it was used strategically when and where required. This range allowed duros to kill and to also be loving fathers on the same day.
The meaning of displays of masculine capital and badness was enhanced by timing and occasion. The gang was a space of camaraderie and bonding. Combined with the capital accumulation and conspicuous displays of their riches in places like La Salle, this gave the gang el power to become ontologically significant for local meanings of masculinity, particularly for boys and male youths coming of age, at a juncture in their lives when they begin to seek out productive pathways to adulthood. As such, the gang was socially cohesive for its membership, insulating young men against their very real fears of emasculation. This was highlighted by the gang's capacity to transform these young men from feeling like ‘a tramp, an undesirable, a poor man your whole life’ into the ‘bourgeoisie’.Footnote 128 When gang members ‘went to war’, they were defending not just their territory and economic interests, they were defending the group's collective identity, their esteem, social status and manliness, which ultimately protected them from the multiple threats of exclusion and associated emasculation.
There were implicit, unwritten rules to gang life; even the 12-year-old carrito interviewed above could understand the Bourdieuian exchanges of ‘masculine capital for gang services’, where being cunning, ‘bad’ and not behaving like a loquita would secure continued privileges of membership that lit up places like La Salle. The promotion of ‘badness’ shaped the gender order of the gang, from the most admired, violent and capital-laden duros, the más malos, at one end of the spectrum, to the feminised, capital-less loquitas at the other. Becoming the más malo underpinned the gender dimensions and violence of the ganging process in Medellín, driving the social and cultural reproduction of the gang itself. These are powerful forces indeed. Lamentably, when discussing these issues with community leaders over the years, it appears that neither el power of the gang nor duro symbolism is on the wane.
