This book examines gang violence in Honduras and shows how church organizations offer sanctuary to former gang members. According to the author, drug cartels have brought an unlimited supply of guns into urban Honduras, and a corrupt government has shrunk welfare programs for the young. The author reaffirms that “gangs provide an alternative set of supports that replace family and state institutions” (134), but the new point in his research is that “A call to sanctuary” (e.g., Pentecostal conversion) “allows many gang members temporarily to escape the violence of gang life by claiming privilege of protective space” (26).
Working as a participant-observer, Jon Wolseth studied what it means “to be young, urban, and poor” in Honduras. Joining a church group is one of the few ways that young people can withdraw from a gang without being killed by their own gang. Thus, joining a church group becomes a strategy for survival, entering a real as well as a metaphorically “safe” space in the neighborhood.
Chapter 1 introduces the culture of youth violence in Honduras, where sixty-two percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, and discusses the pervasive presence of guns in the culture. Chapter 2 presents the three main social organizations in this “landscape of fear”: the gang, the Catholic Church, and various evangelical churches.
Chapter 3 focuses on the relationships among gang members as evidenced by tattoos, graffiti, and carnal (the concept of blood brothers). The tattooing brands a gang member, “effectively sealing his exclusion from mainstream society” (61). Apodos, the giving of nicknames, is like a baptism confirming gang membership. The author carefully describes spaces sacred to gang members because of gang killings, and he also focuses on a bridge that was appropriated by both the gang and the church, providing literal as well as symbolic divisions and ties.
The Catholic Church is the focus of chapter 4, emphasizing the church’s moral narrative of forgiveness of individuals and attempting to serve the needs of youth through CEBs (community ecclesiastical bases). God is portrayed not as a distant, paternal figure to gang members, but as a model of respect, cooperation, and friendship, a friend they can turn to in prayer. Youth are encouraged to demonstrate their faith through community works.
Whereas the Catholic model is based on the relationship between the person and the community, the Pentecostal creed discussed in chapter 5 emphasizes the personal relationship between the individual and God. Salvation and adherence to an “austere moral life” is believed to improve one’s social and economic situation. “Conversion is a particular strategy for some young men that lifts them out of the violence of the everyday and reinscribes them into a new and protective social space [Lefebvre 1991] in the church,” the author states. Their Christian-like behavior protects them from gang violence: “We don’t mess with cristianos, man,” a gang member is quoted in Wolseth’s fieldnotes (123). Conversely, gangs will attack those who profess to be Christians but who exhibit un-Christianlike behavior.
Wolseth’s conclusion admits that the church strategies do not always succeed, and that individuals who have not been able to establish themselves solidly in a church group will be drawn back to the gangs and become thieves and murderers again. His book begins and ends with the tale of one such individual.
Wolseth has done some brave anthropological fieldwork in his study of ganglife in Honduras. His analysis thoughtfully draws upon the works of the latest studies on the subject; he has done his homework. His description of being led around the neighborhood by former gang members to places where gang members were killed and later memorialized with graffiti memorials is poignant and telling. His conclusions about the ways that church organizations mediate youth violence are well written, insightful, and significant.
Works Cited
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
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[Review length: 640 words • Review posted on March 12, 2012]