Victor Rios has a vibrant reputation as America's leading ethnographer of Latino youth. His personal story?going from drug pusher (selling heroin on the streets as a teenager) to a hard worker at a mechanic shop within a matter of weeks?shows how he stands in the place of the Latino youths he studies. His story underscores the degree to which delinquent urban youths can become adaptable, fluid, amenable individuals, able to shift their views of the world as well as their actions. Rios rejects the old storyline that said ?gangs are bad and they do bad things because they are bad people." Kids on the street, he argues, can drift between different identities, indeed, they can shift seamlessly between responsible and deviant displays within a few hours' time. The key to understanding gang-associated youth lies in analysis of the way authority figures (teachers and police officers) interact with young people. The kids need caring adults who offer tangible resources. Story and characters are always front-and-center in Rios's narrative: Jorge, Mark, Wilson, and others, are boys we get to know as they negotiate day-to-day life on the streets and across institutional settings. We learn a great deal about ?Cholo subculture," the clothing and hairstyles, and the argot that are adopted by Latino youth in response to the forces that seek to marginalize or punish them. The crisis of a perceived epidemic of police brutality in our post-Ferguson era is a product of culture in Rios's view: contested symbols, negative interactions, and day-to-day encounters that freeze youth identities as gang-associated, and that freeze authority identities as negative shapers of youth attitudes and actions are the dynamic. Fear of young males of color leads to police misreading and dehumanizing of young black and Latino men. Rios raises our awareness of how this dynamic operates by studying his subjects whole: following young gang members into their schools, their homes, their community organizations, their detention facilities, and watching them interact with police, watching them grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets. Get killed. This book will be a landmark contribution to the social psychology of poverty and crime.
Industry Reviews
"Human Targets is a gripping, disturbing, and deeply moving ethnographic account of interpersonal street violence. Told from the author's heart, it is based on careful interviews and his own personal observation. Human Targets is a provocative yet subtle analysis of the relentless social forces that too often undermine and frustrate the everyday lives of a major segment of America's urban population. Extraordinary and important, this book is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the culture of the city today--it needs to reach a wide audience beyond the halls of the academy."-- "Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy"
"How do we move beyond the cycle of criminalization, violence, and mass incarceration that American society has been stuck in for the last several decades? Rios draws upon the perspectives of youth--the very ones most likely to be labelled, incarcerated, or killed--to provide insights to lead us out of our state of paralysis. Through his probing of their perspectives and experiences, Rios develops new and original ways of thinking about how to intervene, support, and alter outcomes for marginalized youth. Written in a style that is both rich in analysis yet still packed with an emotional fervor, Human Targets never allows us to forget that real lives are at stake even as it also provides hope that it is indeed possible to move beyond the dismal reality we find ourselves in."
--Pedro Noguera "Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA, and coauthor of Schooling for Resilience"
"Training his attention on social problems he himself experienced growing up--street violence, poverty, racism--Rios is an important and original voice. In this patient and insightful relational ethnography, Rios shows how gang-associated Latino youth, often written off as a 'lost generation, ' contain multitudes of identities and brim over with promise. But broken schools and justice systems far too often blunt these children's potential and contribute to casting them on the wrong path. Critically urgent and rendered in clear prose, Human Targets is a must-read book that asks more of us."-- "Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted"
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