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Gang Leader For A Day Summary

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Reflective Paper on Gang Leader For A Day When comparing male and female you will notice they are in fact extremely similar. Both genders share a common trait: powerful. However this is not how society always views it. Unfortunately, the reason we have grown to believe that this is not true is unknown. In this paper I will discuss how Gang Leader For a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh displays the male and the female role in American’s urban poor. America’s poor community, especially within the projects in large cities, is growing rapidly. Obstacles including poor heath outcomes, high crime rates, failing schools, and fewer job opportunities makes it much harder for an individual to escape poverty. Oscar Lewis argues that a “culture of poverty” exist among Americas urban poor. This …show more content…

After reading Venkatesh’s experience I can conclude that living in poverty is almost an impossible situation to escape. Often members of a gang become each others family and they are all one another has. Chapter 8 proves this when Dorothy explained the purpose of “the Stay-Together Gang.” These select few families were determined to live near one another after being relocated to another neighborhood. They thought staying near one another was their best chance of survival (264). It is also common within projects that the only work you can find is selling drugs which would mean you don't have a choice but to do illegal activities. Another common activity within American’s urban poor is prostitution. Often a women will have no money to supply her children with food and will have no other choice then have to earn money through sex. For example Coco, who was 16 years old, was sleeping with the local store owner in exchange for diapers and other necessities for her baby (93). This book enlightened me to many situations that I was not aware of and opened my eyes to situations going on throughout

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8. Chp 5 Sudhir tells JT that he is frustrated with Ms. Bailey. Sudhir has to learn to be patient and taught by JT and Ms. Bailey. Why are these important lessons for someone doing ethnographic research to learn and practice? Give and explain several reasons?

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In “The Outsiders” by S.E Hinton, we are introduced to a wide range of characters whose actions and personalities are widely affected by the environment in which they grew up in. This is a very pervasive theme in the book, as the main element of the story is the rivalry between the street gangs “The Socs” (short for Socials), and “The Greasers' ' In Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Socs are depicted as a gang of well-off rich kids who aren’t afraid to show it off, and the Greasers are the polar opposite of this, most of the Greaers grew up impoverished, without one or both of their parents, or grew up in abusive households. This dynamic and disparancy between the individuals of the gangs leads to some interesting interactions between the characters.

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The novel, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky is about how he traveled the United States meeting the poor. The stories he introduces in novel are articles among data-driven studies and critical investigations of government programs. Abramsky has composed an impressive book that both defines and advocates. He reaches across a varied range of concerns, involving education, housing and criminal justice, in a wide-ranging view of poverty 's sections. In considering results, it 's essential to understand how the different problems of poor families intermingle in mutual reinforcement.

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Bridge 1 Gangsters Without Borders by T.W. Ward is an ethnography about the El Salvadorian gang Mara Salvatrucha. Ward chose to focus the majority of his research on the male members in order to earn their trust. With that in mind, I am presuming that the views of women portrayed in this ethnography are fundamentally the thoughts of its male members. Nonetheless, early on in my reading on this ethnography, I identified the role gender plays not only for the ethnographer but also for the gang members. The gender roles for these gang members mimic those of most societies, although some of the roles appear contradictory.

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The Book Gang Leader for a Day critically addresses many of the main issues and concerns we face now. Also in the book we find that Sudhir Venkatesh has drawn upon some quantitative method and so also touch greatly upon ethics and some issues and concerns that affect us deeply. In the book Sudhir points out that gangs and the poor communities’ problems are not just rooted in the neighborhood, its more of a wider concept of ideology. There are many external factors, such as the public's response, their opinion of them, and the poor’s need to survive, there are many things that affect a person’s way of life. The quantitative approach addresses in the book was education and how important it is to get an education.

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Philippe Bourgois is a Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (CV). In the late 1980s he spent time as a participant observer in the neighbourhood of East Harlem, also known as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem. Here he collected data on its underground society, focussing on the drug trade. In this Ethnography Bourgois criticises the application of various social theories, such as ‘the culture of poverty’, in regards to the people of Spanish Harlem. He also sheds light on the culture of violence, the gender roles played by those in the drug trade and how capitalism and the ‘American dream’ affects the street economy.

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The hood is by all accounts ethically rotted, as it needs good examples to be duplicated by the adolescents and because the economy only supports a minute fraction of individuals in the hood. With the movement of the architects of enlistments to regulate; leaving the young people unproductive within the inner city, to comparing the working class and the lower class males to the males are involved in insubordinate acts. Another variable is disappointment and frustration that drives the youth to adapt to the streets. The families of the slums were portrayed to be conventional with great qualities, while the street families barred themselves from the more noteworthy society. Apart from the two sorts of families being particular they enormously relate and interact in the city, the schools, and other public places (Anderson

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In America, a teenager can be easily drawn into witnessing a family member being stabbed to death, trafficked into drug/gang cults, or receive severe damages to his/her physical body. Commonly, these kinds of circumstances call the responsible leaders in our community to action, but in the forgotten part of America, they continue uninterrupted. During the late 1980’s, the United States ranked as a developed nation with a competitive capitalist economy and better living standards for the higher social class. Their promises to defend critical human rights remained unrivaled around the globe; yet the United States still possessed areas with lower class people compressed into high rise projects and who struggled to overcome poverty, violence, and prejudice. The lower class people were often given very little to no resources or the

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