Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)

Abstract

This essay explores how the policing, incarceration, and deportation of Salvadoran immigrant youth are reshaping the parameters of urban experience between Los Angeles and San Salvador. It argues that these disciplinary governmental practices have transformed the geographies of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship between the once putatively separate cultural and political spheres of the United States and Central America. These efforts to reassert national sovereignty through zero-tolerance policing strategies as they combine with the growing intersection between criminal and immigration law, only, and most ironically, induce and reproduce transnational flows. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with deported youth and young adults, the essay focuses on the crucial place of the city and of the local police beat in the production of their emergent transnational subjectivities. The experiences of these immigrant youth indicate that the complex flows and the multiple geopolitical scales of analysis at work in Los Angeles's urban barrios now make it impossible to engage with the cultural politics of one side of this social field without simultaneously accounting for those at play on the other side in San Salvador. These politics of simultaneity demonstrate the analytical power that both transnational and urban studies stand to gain from a mutual engagement with each other, and call for transnational urban studies as a new domain for research.