Jewish Public Forum Archive

Established in 1999, the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL is a think tank that generates fresh thinking about the social, political and cultural trends affecting ethnic and religious identity and community building at a time of great change.  It is an unprecedented effort to broaden the conversation about the Jewish and American future by creating a network of leading figures in the worlds of academia, business, the arts and public policy, most of whom have not been involved in organized Jewish life. Here you will find articles published under the auspices of the Jewish Public Forum. 

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"The Future of Family and Tribe," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held January 28-29, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leading thinkers on gender, gay rights, adoption, reproductive law, bioethics, and aging. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar. To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here.

This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement.   For more information about the project, click here.

David Brotherton teaches sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has been at the fore in bringing together the leaders of street "gangs" with researchers, community leaders, educators, and criminal justice professionals to explore issues of common concern.  He has three books forthcoming from Columbia University Press -- The Street Politics of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, co-authored with Luis Barrios; Alternative Perspectives on Gangs and the Community, co-edited with Louis Kontos and Luis Barrios, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control and Empowerment in the New Millennium, co-edited with Michael Flynn. Brotherton participated in "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar. His contribution follows below.

"Family Values" and the Latin Queens

Over the past ten years I have been conducting ethnographic research with street gangs and street organizations.  The findings below, in particular my more recent work with the New York Latin Queens, illustrate the ways in which this might be true.  But whether we can mobilize these positive aspects of the gang/street organization phenomenon will depend on the degree to which we consider urban youth as solutions to social problems rather than identifying them as the problem itself.

 
Who Are the Latin Queens? 

The Queens were founded in 1991 by King Blood, aka Luis Felipe, the First President of the New York State Latin Kings from his prison cell in Attica State Penitentiary. Until that time, there had been no organized group for women who wanted to join the infamous prison-street gang, although it was evident that a number of women were drawn to the organization, primarily through boyfriends and husbands. From 1991-1996, the Queens expanded to approximately 60 members and called themselves the Naia Tribe. Towards the end of this period, the organization changed its name from the Almighty Latin Kings to the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation. After 1996, the Queens began to expand under the reform-minded new Inca, “King Tone” [an Inca is essentially the president of the organization], who amended the group’s constitution, allowing the Queens for the first time to make their own demands. By 1998, the Queens had grown to more than 200 members throughout New York State, split into female-only adult branches, each with their own leadership structure. In addition, a large number of younger women were active in the Pee Wee or youth section. In late 1998, the first woman was elected to the Supreme Team of the organization, the highest decision-making body in New York State.

What Kind of Woman Joins the Queens?  

Nearly all the Queens are from working class Puerto Rican and/or Dominican family backgrounds, ranging in age from 16 to 45 years old. They almost all attended segregated, low-tier city public schools with about half managing to graduate. A small percentage has experienced college, usually a community college where they learned technical skills. Many of them joined the group looking to affirm or resolve issues surrounding their cultural identity and end their quest for a symbolic family to replace the one that had failed them. Few grew up avoiding chaotic, crisis-filled, traumatic environments where drug abuse, violence, sexual abuse, neglect and abandonment were common. Often as youth they were forced to move out or run away from home, some as young as nine years old. In contrast to the arguments in most of the “expert” literature on gangs, i.e., that gangs reinforce and enable violent behavior in individuals, most of the subjects in my study found they could not escape the family-related cycle of violence until they encountered the Nation.
 
            The following field notes are from a Queens meeting in late 1997: 

Queen J. wants to be a social worker. Queen H. is going to be 21 years old on Friday.  She has been a Queen for four months and likes the Nation because it gives her knowledge of her history. Queen D. is in her forties, she has six kids and lives with Queen G. who is twenty-five years old.  Queen G. has no "babies," but wants to have one as soon as her King comes back from being "locked up" in Florida.  She talks about how members of the Nation will reach influential positions and how the Latino community has to get together to one day “reach the White House.” Queen M. has three kids with her King.  Their children are all Kings and Queens. Queen B. has kids with a King and wants to go back to high school eventually. Queen A. is twenty-one years old and comes from a family of  eleven brothers and sisters.  She wants to go to a technical college and  is saving by working two jobs. In the future, she wants to become a doctor.  She talks about her deceased father who is her hero --  a picture of his face is tattooed on her calf.  Her mother is a white “Spaniard.” Her mother’s family has always looked down on her because she is dark-skinned, just like her father. Queen F. is fifteen years old, a Pee-Wee.  She goes to G. W. High School and has been a proud Queen for four months.  She is not “totally Latina,” still she feels that she has been “brought to the light.” Queen M. is twenty- four years old and has two "babies." She went to college for two years, receiving an Associates degree in business and now works on Wall Street at the Stock Exchange.  She is not crowned yet and  is still on probation.  Her brother, who has been a King for two years, was the one who told her that the Nation was not a gang, which convinced her to join.  Queen M. emphasizes that the media do not portray the good things that the Nation does. Queen J. is a twenty year-old housewife with three kids.  She has been a Queen for four years.  At the time she joined, the Nation was not doing community work, even though it was already like “a big family.”  Queen S. is eighteen years old.  Her mother passed away eleven years ago.  She maintains that most of the Queens come from broken homes and that they find a new family here.

The Queens as a New Kind of Family? 

Many subjects reported that their true family life only began once they joined the Nation. Here they learned to trust and rely on men and women both older and their own age, for the first time in years. They spoke of the Nation not only as a surrogate family, but as a supplement to the family they already had. In a number of cases, therefore, the Nation functioned as a kind of weigh station, an unconditional social, emotional and economic support system that provided love, solidarity and agency to help respondents heal from deep social- psychological wounds that had devastated their self-esteem, increased their sense of fatalism, and confused their personal identity. When they were strong enough to face the world without anger, fear and resentment, the Nation would broker meetings with estranged kin, often parents, and aid in the process of reparation. 

Further, the Nation functioned as a kind of empowerment zone in which all the women were seeking increased autonomy and to be rid of restrictive ties on their sexuality. In addition to being free of abusive relationships and disrespectful men once and for all, they wanted the freedom to be “somebody” through continuing their education and eventually choosing a career beyond the options reserved for children of the barrio. The pro-family and pro-educational rhetoric of the Nation seemed to offer them the promise of their very American dreams and to  deliver them finally from their very American nightmares. In the following, an interviewer is asking a Queen about her pathway into the organization:  

          
            I: How did you learn about the Nation? 

Queen R:  The Nation?  I didn't really learn about it, the Nation saved my life...almost 12 years ago. I was married at the age of 12, OK?  And my husband was chosen for me, so it wasn't the right choice.  For 10 years I took abuse, beatings, insults and I had 4 kids.   One day on the beach, my husband came back because his mistress had left him. That's the only time I was ever happy, when he had a mistress because he wouldn't hit me.  He came by, he took an aluminum baseball bat, broke all my ribs, both my legs, my arm, and he was ready to strike on my head when a Latin King stepped in and said, "You hit her again and we're gonna give it to you to see how you like it." You know?  A while after that, my husband passed away.  He had a truck accident...I was a mass of nothing.  I don't even consider myself at that time a human, you know?   ‘Cos if you would speak a little loud to me, I was already ducking and covering myself ‘cos I thought you were gonna hit me.   You know?  They made me what I am today.  I could withstand everything and anything God dishes up to me.  That was when I came to my Nation.
 
 

What Do the Queens Tell Us About Present Day Family Structures and Their Future? 

The Queens were responding to an enormous social and institutional void that faces young and old alike in poor communities throughout the United States. This social organization sprung up in a post-welfare, post-industrial America.  They were responding to a time when the social safety net was being torn to shreds, and prisons were housing two million working-class adults and youth.   An increasingly prevalent free trade system meant that labor markets were inherently unstable, and the racial-ethnic divide, the “American dilemma,” was being recast in the differentiated housing markets and the re-segregated public schools across the nation. This is the context for such organizations to enter the lives of purposeful, frustrated, desperate women (and men) who want nothing more than to be wanted, believed in, nurtured, respected and supported.  

What is the future for such organizations? What can we learn from them? I will suggest the following: 

First, the organization at its height, i.e., during the years 1996-1999, offered an array of lessons to teachers, social workers, community leaders and politicians ostensibly concerned with strengthening our urban social fabric through empowering and reintegrating our alienated youth.  Public schools, for example, could learn how these groups build self-esteem among youth who are riddled with self-doubt and negative self-images. Social service agencies could study the ways such groups develop leadership skills, bonds of loyalty and organizational know-how. And, finally, there is a great deal to be learned from their all-encompassing notion of family, which works to reintegrate even the most alienated societal members, young or old.  

Unfortunately, despite the possibilities for such learning partnerships in the service of community empowerment, the bulk of the attention the group received, and will likely continue to receive, came from the security- correctional-industrial state in the name of social control, punishment and repression.

Second, contemporary power structures based on unequal and hierarchical social arrangements need scapegoats and internal enemies to rationalize their permanence. They do this through fostering moral panics that undermine enlightened policy discourses and promote the dominance of reactionary modes of thought. 

The blinders of race, class and gender keep us from seeing in reconstructed street families like the Queens not only the depths of socio-cultural resistance among the most marginalized sectors of society, but the spiritual creativity latent in the “throw aways,” “drop outs” and legions of excluded among us.   What would it mean to see these “mirror images” of ourselves for what they have to offer? 

Third, as long as we deny that economic and social justice are human rights to be enjoyed by all our citizens, the pathological families that spawned the Queens will be socially reproduced and thus the material bases for such organizations will continue to grow locally, nationally and internationally. Since gang members yearn to be political subjects rather than economic or sexual objects, their subterranean practices will continue unabated.  

This being the most likely scenario, we need to see look at the larger human lessons they offer through their multidimensional and contradictory nature, as agents engaged in processes of social change.  Otherwise their stories will simply be relegated to high cultural journals as “exotics” or to tabloids as “subversives.”

To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here.

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