Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America's Suburbs - Softcover

Garland, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568586159 ISBN 13: 9781568586151

Publisher: Bold Type Books, 2010

Synopsis

For the past five years, journalist Sarah Garland has followed the lives of current and former gang members living in Hempstead on the border of Garden City, Long Island. Affiliated with Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street, their troubling personal stories expose the cruel realities of segregation, racial income gaps, and poverty that lie hidden behind suburban white picket fences.

As Garland travels from Los Angeles to El Salvador and back to the East Coast, she reveals a disturbing cycle of poverty in which families, fleeing from troubled Central American cities, move into America's suburban backyards, only to find the pattern of violence repeating itself. Brilliantly reported and sensitively told, Gangs in Garden City draws back the veil on a hidden, troubling world.

About this title

About the Author:

Sarah Garland has reported on crime and immigration for the New York Times, Marie Claire, New York Magazine, and the Village Voice. Originally from Kentucky, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From The Washington Post:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Justin Moyer Don't believe the fun-loving depictions of gang warfare in "West Side Story" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It" -- thug life ain't all jazz hands and high kicks. Newsweek staffer and first-time author Sarah Garland offers a softshoe-free view of real-life Scarfaces in "Gangs in Garden City," a comprehensive history of the transition of Nassau County, N.Y., from idyllic Long Island retreat to posse-plagued demilitarized zone. In muscular, Hemingway-esque prose, Garland weaves an economic and social history of Latino gangs in suburbia around unrelentingly bleak personal narratives of gang members, including one Salvadoran war refugee whose isolation drove him to the notorious Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13) crew: "If he could trust anyone to watch his back and not to betray him, it was these men. . . . They had been cannon fodder, and they had survived." Though immigration hawks and jingoists demonize gang members, MS-13, like the Mafia and innumerable other ethnic gangs that predate the modern metropolis, is fed by America's patchwork immigration policy, poor urban planning, need for cheap labor and race hatred as much as it is by flawed individuals. Gangs are not inevitable.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bold Type Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1568586159
• ISBN 13: 9781568586151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320