Homeboys Forever: The Lifetime Consequences of Gang Membership, Avelardo Valdez, 2026, University of Chicago Press
They are the lost tribe of Mexican Americans and their structural oppression is largely invisible in a society where competition for justice among victims of systemic racism has meant that some groups gain greater prominence than others.
As Avelardo Valdez points out in this moving study ofyouths highly susceptible to the vicissitudes of urban street life, they comprise a social group that continues to be overlooked in the broader quest for minority rights within the US.
He has focused on marginalised young Mexican American men lured by the irresistible pull of gang membership in San Antonio, Texas, whose lives are spent immersed in a subculture of violence and drugs and whose “stories and struggles continue to go untold”.
This book is based on 20 years of research that began after gang affiliation in the Mexican American community of Westside San Antonio exploded in the 1990s.
It documents their disregarded life stories, spanning from childhood to young adulthood as they become enmeshed, for good or ill, in gang lifestyles by virtue of their ethnic background, only occasionally escaping its clutches.
As a result, a key question underlying this ethnographic snapshot of a forgotten cohort rises to the surface with troubling implications for liberal America about the extent to which the Latino men at the heart of this book are getting left behind during a period of widespread national attention to ethnic and racial disparities.
It is a theme that many will recognise which is thrown into relief precisely because some sections of the Latino and Mexican American communities have been successful and have mostly overcome structural disadvantages in contemporary America.
The author writes: “The bitter reality is that the Mexican American community may be in a state of ‘illusion of inclusion’, both socially and politically, and that the advances of a small proportion of Mexican Americans conceal the reality that much of the Mexican-origin population in the US has been unable to achieve significant levels of social or economic upward mobility.
“A large segment of this population continues to be locked into communities characterised by economic, class, and racial isolation despite the rhetoric of governmental and other institutions about reduced disparities.”
A sociologist at the University of Southern California, Valdez shows how contextual and institutional constraints exclude many of the young men he is looking at from opportunities that US society supposedly guarantees all its citizens.
The author explores this notion by reference, among other works, to the 1932 trilogy crafted by US author James Farrell about the life of the fictive Studs Lonigan, the son of Irish immigrants living in Chicago during the Great Depression.
As Valdez points out, Farrell encapsulated Studs’ experience as “an increasing apparent contradiction between the hopes of the American dream and how human destinies unravelled in actual life.”
In the case of Mexican Americans, this exclusion dictates survival strategies that to many of us do not seem logical but to them are obvious “in a bleak social world, as they engage in social processes that evolve and drift them toward increasingly detrimental consequences (e.g., violence, substance use, addiction, criminal justice involvement, etc.)”
Taking a “life course” approach to tracing the trajectories followed by these young men—difficulties in childhood, adolescent delinquency and gang involvement, followed by a life of crime—the author runs with this concept of “drift” to explain how their lives culminate in a constant struggle in adulthood to engage in conventional society.
He begins by recounting their experience as children growing up in impoverished, mostly single-parent households headed by women.
He then shows how their affiliations with street gangs begin; their childhood and adolescent experiences with institutions of social control such as law enforcement; and the subsequent loss of economic opportunities and revolving door of criminality and incarceration.
This book is not only one of the first to document the long-term physical and mental health conditions that result from the chronic stress caused by such lifestyles, it also highlights an economic, political, and sociocultural context that prevents this population’s upward mobility.
Valdez argues that these young men are the unintended victims of the US deindustrialisation process and economic transformation that degraded the already precarious stability of their communities.
They lack the education, experience, or skills necessary for the well-salaried jobs that emerged as a result of economic transformation and hence are a surplus labour force pushed to the lower margins of the economy.
While Valdez does not situate his argument in class theory, in Marxist parlance his subjects would comprise the classic lumpenproletariat, a marginalised underclass in capitalist societies excluded from the traditional workforce, in this case through a racist hierarchy.
While Marx and Lenin were dismissive of the lumpenproletariat, whom they regarded as a dangerous and unthinking lower stratum of society, other thinkers such as Mao Zedong believed they could become a revolutionary force with the correct guidance.
Closer to home and with some resonance, the black American Marxist Huey Newton believed the lumpenproletariat of US society had the most revolutionary potential, with Eldridge Cleaver writing: “Essentially, what Huey did was to provide the ideology and the methodology for organizing the Black Urban Lumpenproletariat. Armed with this ideological perspective and method, Huey transformed the Black Lumpenproletariat from the forgotten people at the bottom of society into the vanguard of the proletariat.”
Homeboys Forever represents an impassioned plea to readers to question who is at fault when young men become involved in gangs and criminal behaviour, which reflect systemic inequities that lead to a lifetime of tragic consequences.
It chimes with the Marxist argument that the behaviour of certain social groups, even those that populate the margins outside the formal parameters of class struggle between labour and capital, is nonetheless shaped by dominant economic forces.
Just as all law in capitalist society aims ultimately to protect and enhance the interests of the ruling class, and hence reflects their ideology, gangs exist solely in the form of a nexus with the interests of the state and capital, reflecting both their corruption and competition.
The Marxist criminologist William Chambliss even demonstrated this, showing how criminal syndicates frequently form symbiotic relationships with the state apparatus by using bribery and corruption to secure political and police protection.
This means that capitalism is in essence “criminogenic”—it produces crime—and the state’s legal framework exists to contain the potential for disorder, criminal or otherwise, generated by economic exploitation.
In this context, gangs are as much an ideological tool of states used to generate moral panic as they are real, existent social structures: they are valuable instruments of division to weaken the working class while being a justification for social control that can be easily scapegoated, thereby allowing the state to enhance its repressive powers.
Hence Homeboys Forever is also a reminder that in Trump’s America—one in which the far-right president has used uncompromisingly racist language to describe Mexicans—the barriers to the mobility of minority groups are structural aspects of a racially monopolised form of capitalism, and in the absence of radical solutions will remain so.
Valdez writes: “This hidden population of Mexican Americans has often been vilified, ignored, and forgotten by a society that celebrates the success of the few at the expense of the majority.
“It is a story of a Mexican American people living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, hoping to escape this reality but remaining embedded in a life of chronic urban poverty, social isolation, and structural inequality.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America, United States