Growing up in a world of gangs

A sobering yet beautiful collection of photographs has captured gang culture and its devastating affect on the lives of young people in Central America and parts of the U.S.

Award-winning photojournalist Donna De Cesare has followed gang members and their families for more than 30 years - throughout the region's civil wars of the 1980s to the disrupted lives of children in refugee communities in the U.S. in the 1990s and then to postwar Central America in the 2000s - uncovering the impact of war and gang violence on youths.

Her work has has been featured in Aperture, Mother Jones, and other publications, but her most harrowing black and white images have been brought together for a new bilingual book, titled 'Unsettled: Children in a World of Gangs.'

Watts, Los Angeles, 1994. Three-year-old Esperanza named her pigeon after her wheelchair-bound teenage uncle. He was shot by a rival gang member in a drive-by shooting

Guatemala, Guatemala, 2002. A gang member who wishes to leave gang life tries to comfort his children, but he worries about the future because his tattoos make it difficult to find legitimate work

To accompany the book's release, her pictures are included in the exhibition 'WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Her work has also been displayed at Columbia University's journalism school gallery.

 

De Cesare explains that Central American nations have had the highest per capita homicide rates in the world in recent years, surpassing the per capita death toll even in war-torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

'Gang violence has been the dominant explanation for this tragic state of affairs,' she adds, asking the question, 'why has gang activity become endemic in the region?'

Westside, Los Angeles, 1994. Immigration agents for the Violent Gang Task Force target immigrant youth whom they suspect may be gang-involved for deportation

Fraijanes, Guatemala, 2009. A gang member in an isolation cage in the special block for prisoners who have been threatened by other inmates, at the maximum security prison Granja Penal de Pavón

Downtown, Los Angeles, 1994. Immigrants protest Proposition 187, a ballot initiative to deny education and healthcare to undocumented adults and children. It was ultimately defeated, but marked hardening attitudes towards immigrants and their children

Through her spectacular images, she points to a history of repression, violence, and trauma, in which gangs are as much a symptom as a cause of trauma.

And she shows how decades of war and violence — as well as the illegal drug trade — have allowed gangs to flourish.

However, her photographs also show another, more human, side to the gang members and their families.

This insight encourages the viewer to understand their hardships and take responsibility for the consequences of political and social actions that have allowed gangs to dictate Central American society for generations.

Koreatown, Los Angeles, 1994. Baby Bugsy throws his gang sign

San Salvador, El Salvador, 1993. Near the Modelo Market, local youth initiate a fifteen-year-old into their clique of the Mara Salvatrucha gang

Apopa, El Salvador, 1995. After Jose Bolaños, the original 'Shy Boy,' was murdered, his youngest brother, Edgar, tattooed a tombstone memorial on his back and began hanging out in gang crash pads

SOURCE-DAILYM