Chicano youth gangs and crime: the creation of a moral panic

Abstract

The relationship between Chicano gangs, crime, the police, and the Chicano community is complex. Neither the ‘problem’ of youth gangs nor the specialized police units created to cope with this problem arises in a social vacuum. Rather, both emerge from a particular historical structuring of social, economic, and political relations. This paper investigates how and why a ‘moral panic’ arose concerning Chicano youth gangs in Phoenix in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A variety of qualitative and quantitative data from media reports, interviews, and juvenile court records are used to assess whether it was the actual behavior of Chicano youths or the social imagery surrounding them that formed the basis for the ‘gang problem’ in Phoenix. I suggest that the image of gangs, and especially of Chicano gangs, as violent converged with that of Mexicans and Chicanos as ‘different’ to create the threat of disorder. In addition, it was in the interests of the police department to discover the ‘gang problem’ and build an even greater sense of threat so as to acquire federal funding of a specialized unit.