8 “La Virgen, She Watches over Us”

Abstract

This chapter examines adult–child interactions with a focus on how researchers can use a child-centered perspective to enter adolescent communities. This study, focused on Latino teen gang members in Phoenix, emphasizes that to understand young people's religious interpretations scholars must embrace teens' religious creativity, rather than measuring their understandings against an established norm. Cholos and cholas were not the “deviant” or unredeemable youth they were often portrayed as in the media. Gang members in South Phoenix invented religious rituals and symbols that were born out of dispossession and an intense yearning for love and acceptance. Ritualization of violence and desire was a “strategic way of acting.” Religious symbols had taken on new meaning in the barrio across generations—Christ and Mary were alive and walked with the men, women, and children who lived there.