Clicas: Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film

Latina/o/x gangs are continually villainized within conservative political rhetoric as harbingers of violence and crime. They are read as threats to the US nation-state that necessitate a stronger crackdown on immigration from Latin America. In Clicas, Frank García adds nuance to this rhetoric by claiming violence's utility as a (de)colonial praxis. García is an assistant professor of English and affiliate of the Department of Africana Studies and program in American studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Given that gangs are assumed to be sites of homophobic and misogynistic violence, his study offers a needed rebuttal through an examination of literature and film that centers on female and gay male Latina/o/x gang members. While these violences do occur, García highlights how membership in gangs can generate agency for these subaltern subjects.Clicas’ focus on female and gay cultural texts departs from the dominance that social science methodologies have held in critical gang studies, as well as the field's tendency to focus on straight male gang members. While not the first humanistic study of Latina/o/x gang culture, one of García's major interventions to the field lies in his examination of violence as a (de)colonial project. He draws from decolonial theory to argue that the female and gay gang members studied enact gang culture as a (de)colonial praxis, which “helps them challenge how the abstract and material effects of interlocking structures of inequality are affecting them” (p. 2). Gang membership offers a way of combatting coloniality, particularly for its female and gay members whose subaltern status is produced through the coloniality of gender. However, García's choice to parenthesize the “(de)” acknowledges that the gang members he examines are not fully decolonial. These gang members’ abilities to resist coloniality “rests upon the perpetuation of trauma, violence, and maltreatment of other multiply marginalized persons” (p. 2). While readers may wonder why (de)colonial does not appear in the book's title, it does appear in four of its chapter titles. This theoretical intervention generates nuance within the oppressive/resistant dichotomy that violence is often figured within, wherein violence either oppresses or offers agency to the subaltern subject. Clicas models how subaltern subjects can be both resistant to and complicit in the violent upkeeping of coloniality.As the book's introduction, Chapter 1 lays out García's primary interventions, including theorizing the (de)colonial. This chapter also clarifies that his focus is not gangs wherein women/gay people are the majority. Rather, the book shines light on female and gay members participating in gang culture that mandates masculinity and heterosexuality. These gang members circumvent such systems while also remaining complicit in the violences of coloniality. Chapter 2 centers on Ana Castillo's My Father Was a Toltec, exploring how men's participation in gang culture impacts the women in their lives. It contends that Castillo's father paved the path to gang life for his daughter, allowing her to use it as a (de)colonial site from which to combat the coloniality of gender. This (de)coloniality is reliant on the extortion of her mother, demonstrating that the daughter's resistance is made possible through patriarchal oppression. Chapter 3 examines Yxta Maya Murray's Locas. The novel's gang members perform female masculinity for social and material gain, a performance that hinges on the violent abuse of other working-class Latinas. Thus, female masculinity becomes toxified via the coloniality that incentivizes violence against women.Chapter 4 is concerned with gay male gang members in the film Homeboy. Gangs offer them subcultural citizenship and a means of combatting the homophobia they experience under the modern gender/sexual system. This is a conditional belonging that is reliant on the performance of hypermasculinity and expectation of gang violence. Through an analysis of the film On the Downlow, Chapter 5 reckons with gay gang members who fail in their violence and hypermasculine performance. García contends that failure can offer a vision of queer utopia outside of coloniality's violences. Reading Javier Zamora's Unaccompanied, the afterword nuances the gang member/immigrant dichotomy that is often utilized within Latina/o/x literature to separate “bad” immigrants (i.e., gang members) from “good” ones who deserve asylum or citizenship.García's study offers an important example of how to write about Latina/o/x gang violence that recognizes both the violences enacted upon and by gang members. Clicas would be of interest to scholars working in Latina/o/x studies, particularly those who examine issues of gender and sexuality, and would be an interesting addition to an upper division undergraduate or graduate class.