In May 1994 I took ten Latina youth from Oakland to the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) to see the screening of Allison Anders’Mi Vida Loca. They were excited about this film because it was about girls in gangs—the first-ever such feature-length film! Moreover, their excitement was stirred because a university professor, Rosa Linda Fregoso, had talked about it at a conference they attended. The public was finally interested in girls and gangs, finally talking, showing and writing about the life these girls knew intimately. Before the film began, a festival official announced that Anders and some...

Debates about the emergence of an urban underclass examine poverty under new relations of production, evaluating the transnational nature of corporate capital and the technological shift that has impacted upon the working class in the United States (Wilson 1987; Katz 1993; J. Moore and Pinderhughes 1993). One of the most salient arguments in this debate interrogates the differential wage structure that produces a racialized income and opportunity gap between White communities and communities of color—that is, race matters. Such endeavors to account for the communities that have been devastated by the shift are eminently needed. However, evaluating the modes...

In the summer of 1993 I moved to Oakland to conduct an audience reception study of media representations of Chicano youth, focusing particularly on gang genre films that have constructed images of deviancy among youth of color. The research featured interviews with Chicana teenagers, tracking their reception of films likeBoyz N the Hood, American Me, andBound by Honor. Timing was crucial. Hearing that Allison Anders’Mi Vida Loca, a film about teenage Chicana gang members in Los Angeles, would be released that summer, I planned to take a group of girls to view the film and, straightaway, interview...

Considering the use of film as a tool of field research, Margaret Mead in “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words” (1974) enumerates the various objections that would be raised by anthropologists about film usage. While the objections regarding training and aesthetic qualities and cost have become less of a consideration, the major problem that Mead outlines is still under debate—the relationship between the ethnologist, the filmmaker or team, and the subjects being filmed. Recognizing the subjective factors of interpretation, that a filmmaker imposes his/her view of culture and people, Mead sets out a list of “safeguards” for the...

In Vered Amit-Talai’s examination of teenage girls’ friendships (1995), she argues that the characterization of adolescence as a stage of transition and impermanence has anesthetized critical studies of adolescent peer relations. Inasmuch as time is a constituent characteristic in the construction of adolescence, peer relations become a footnote to social and cultural organization, discussed only as a problem of socialization. If the intensity and importance of teen peer relations are understood, they are analyzed through the essentially transitional feature of adolescence. Amit-Talai observes that such characterizations disassociate adolescent friendships from other social roles. Comprehended as contingent and impermanent in the...

New ethnographic practices have emerged from social movements for decolonization, the intensification of American imperialism, and the growth of civil rights struggles in the United States. The impact of social movements nationally and internationally upon academic practices was met by calls for a more committed anthropology. The attempt to use classical forms of ethnography for new research programs raised conceptual issues—problematizing the relation of power to knowledge and the institutionalization of knowledge. According to Renato Rosaldo inCulture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis(1989), theory building in classical ethnography focused on ritual, featuring a structural-functionalist approach which...

An experience following my fieldwork reconfirmed the open-ended and productive nature of the girls’ cross-talk in diverse public arenas. In conclusion, I present the last site where the girls and I participated in a public meeting. My elaboration is not to suggest that this site is the ideal public sphere but to emphasize the variety of dialogues needed with youth. In effect, we need one, two, many public spheres where acknowledging difference as the essential element of democracy allows for a greater variety of subject positions to become articulated and elaborated. Limiting interpretation and analysis, I believe, permits a continuing...

The dilemmas of representation have directed this project in order to represent and depict the young women of Oakland in spaces other than the clandestine geographies of the streets and clubhouses. The challenge for ethnography is to allot authority to the voices of the people one works with and to interpret and analyze their words and actions without taking their agency, that is, usurp their authority. My concern has been to acknowledge their voices as authorities of their lives. My project has brought their words from the field to a broader public sphere.

Still, a perplexing issue arises—the power...