Where’s the Gig At?

Abstract

Young residents of East Los Angeles neighborhoods use their involvement in punk rock cultures to forge new social identities and new social relations. The essay introduces the concept of the “mission,” a term that barrio youths use to describe their efforts to forge an oppositional cognitive mapping of space. The mission serves as a node in a network of tactics that utilize seemingly obscure and forgotten places as key sites for community congregation and self-definition. Putatively private spaces in backyards and abandoned public areas like alleys and freeway underpassesin East Los Angeles get turned into public performance venues by young people who are cut off from other sites for creativity and congregation. City streets, public transit vehicles, and alleys become part of a complex process of cognitive mapping for young people who own no property of their own, whose movements are aggressively policed, and who must create unexpected uses for seemingly routine and functional places and spaces.