Latino Gangs

“Society thinks we are monsters.” Mr. Antunez said at the beginning of the article Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law. The following paper is going to take a close look at several aspects of Latino gangs and their effects on culture. The taboos and deviant acts that are committed by both groups. Actions the dominant culture has done to enforce the rules of society and, more closely, ways that the dominant culture has been deviant. The material and nonmaterial items in both cultures, and how has one nation’s culture influenced another. What might a sociologist hypothesis be and what type of research would they use. To start off with, let’s look at the two cultures that are in conflict. The main cultures is made up of two

An example of this would be the previously mentioned statement Mr. Delgadillo gave. Another action that could be both is how the Honduran government would have police officers patrolling in plain cloths and then ambushing and killing gang members. However some measures would not be deviant actions. An example of this would be Honduras and El Salvador reviving old counterinsurgency plans along with zero-tolerance laws. Another example would be Los Angeles police expanding the enforcement of anti gang policies and bringing special gang unites back. Back to Honduras, President Maduro called in the country 's’ military to help the police force fight against the gangs. He also changed Article 332, with massive public support, to make it illegal to belong to a street gang. It’s called illicit association, and breaking this law can send boys and young men to jail. In Central America gang tattoos are as influential as having or not having criminal

Material and nonmaterial items are hard to put in one category because the object can be a physical manifestation of that culture, and it can also have a nonmaterial meaning behind it. An example of this would be tattoos. Having a gang tattoo is a physical symbol that means someone belongs to an individual gang, has killed someone, and/or how many years they’ve spent in jail. However, there are some items that are more material than nonmaterial include: needles used to make or remove tattoos, the book Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence, photos, factory and home-made guns and machetes, and schools. The items that are more nonmaterial and/or have a nonmaterial meaning include: hand gestures fellow gang members use to greet each other, flimsy caskets sent to families of dead gang members, the dominant culture having an ‘immigration hammer’, the idea that gang members are more useful to the country 's dead than alive, gang members calling each other by their ‘street names’, and the view that gangs are ‘domestic terrorists’. All items are both material and nonmaterial, however all are more of one than the