"Gangs Gone Wild": Low-Budget Gang Documentaries and the Aesthetics of Exploitation

Abstract

“Gangs Gone Wild”:Low-Budget Gang Documentaries and the Aesthetics of Exploitation Colin Gunckel (bio) From the front page of the 30 October 2005 edition of the Los Angeles Times a shirtless Salvadoran man glares menacingly. Displaying multiple tattoos, he appears to challenge readers with the directness of his gaze and the hostility of his posture. Strikingly composed in richly textured black-and-white documentary photography, this image is one of several accompanying an investigative article entitled "Gang Uses Deportation to Its Advantage to Flourish in U.S." (Lopez, Connell, and Kraul). Coinciding with a flurry of recent press coverage on the Salvadoran gang La Mara Salvatrucha, the article exemplifies the manner in which the media have consistently positioned the group as a crucial discursive nexus linking terrorism, criminality, and transnational migration flows, feeding into concurrent and often overlapping debates on these issues. Thus, in addition to emphasizing the illegal entry of hardened criminals into the United States, the article characterizes the gang as "an international network" comprised of "[n]ewly organized cells" (Lopez, Connell, and Kraul A1), a vocabulary borrowed from discourses on terrorism that, not coincidentally, echo the U.S. government's more recent efforts to confront La Mara Salvatrucha under the auspices of Homeland Security. Within the last two years, feature stories by Newsweek, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and NPR's All Things Considered have adopted a rhetoric similar to that of the Los Angeles Times piece, simultaneously drawing from what Steve Macek has identified as a "discourse of savagery" by which the media vilify urban youth of color and deploying metaphors of contagion and penetration that have accompanied print coverage of immigration from Latin America (37–69; see also Santa Ana). Thus Ana Arana in Foreign Affairs warns that "the gangs are spreading, spilling into Mexico and beyond," and that "[o]nce ensconced, the gangs grow quickly," language that frames these gangs as malevolent and parasitic forces of nature (98). While often examining (at least superficially) the structural factors that have contributed to the formation of Central American gangs, these pieces all emphasize their infiltration of the United States and the likelihood of an impending crime wave, often delivering grisly details in a sensationalistic tone. A Newsweek article, for instance, describes an attack in which a victim was "repeatedly stabbed and her head nearly severed," also relating an incident in which "members armed with machetes hacked away at a member of the South Side Locos, slicing off some fingers and leaving others dangling by a shred of skin" (Campos-Flores 22). While the text of these articles stokes fears about an international criminal conspiracy fueled by immigration, most of them also prominently feature photographs of heavily tattooed gang members throwing signs, holding firearms, or glaring defiantly at the photographer. In the case of the Los Angeles Times article, such images constitute a central element of the four-page report and its ostensible thesis. Deploying an aesthetic consistent with the image on the front page, seven photos dominate the article layout and present dramatically composed portraits mapping various points along a transnational circuit of gang activity: drug use, illicit cell phone conversations, arrest, and imprisonment. Similarly, a photo essay in the 5 July 2006 issue of Time features a series of eight images that progress from shots of Mara Salvatrucha members displaying their tattoos to photos of a police raid and an imprisoned gang member, a narrative trajectory that emphasizes closure through law enforcement. The text that accompanies the photographs further stresses the notion of an invasion and seems intended to provoke anxiety: "A violent gang follows immigrant communities out of urban centers and into small towns across America" ("The Gangs of El Salvador"). As Lainie Reisman has pointed out, this kind of sensationalistic media coverage, "often displaying [End Page 37] images of tattooed young men being arrested or bloody shots of injured victims and corpses," has "contributed to a culture of fear that encourages government suppression, with little public support for a more balanced approach" (150). This also facilitates "the use of widely publicized gang threat as a tool for political campaigning," with La Mara Salvatrucha referenced in debates on both urban crime and...