Overview

When he visited in 2011, sociologist Adam Baird wondered what the Bloods and Crips were doing in Southside Belize City. He soon discovered that migrant Belizean members of colors gangs from South Central Los Angeles were deported there in the 1980s. Once established “back home,” membership in the Bloods and Crips was seen as an aspirational pathway to manhood for the urban underclass. From South Central to Southside charts the genesis and evolution of a transnational gang culture. Baird provides firsthand interviews with gang members and “narco” families and explains the surprising source of Belize City’s severe violence and skyrocketing homicide rates. He identifies gang violence in the U.S. and Belize as stemming from populations blighted by historical, brutal inequality and marginalization. Analyzing the gendered dynamics as young men and women face the temptations, risks, and dangers of gang life, Baird shines a light on “chronic vulnerability"" in Belize City.

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9781439923337

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Reviews

"“From South Central to Southside is a hugely important book offering a fine-grained and engagingly written study of the Bloods and Crips in Belize, a country generally overlooked by gang studies. In it, Adam Baird does something few gang researchers manage to do—he weaves together a proper political economy of violence that links structural factors like the enduring legacies of colonialism and slavery, transnational migration, and oligarchic politics with the everyday experience of poverty, gendered brutality, and police repression. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand gang dynamics in Belize andeverywhere.”—Dennis Rodgers, Research Professor in Anthropology and Sociology and Director of the European Research Council’s GANGS project at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland “Baird’s examination of the complex web of factors shaping gang culture in Belize is groundbreaking. By integrating ethnographic research with a deep dive into colonial history, Baird provides us with a rich understanding of the foundations for Belizean gangs, as well as the spikes of violence that often surround them. But what sets his analysis apart is his exploration of ‘transnational masculinity’ and its widespread implications for both Belize and the region writ large. From South Central to Southside helps us better place gangs in the larger context of the corrosive, hypermasculine behavior that accompanies gang activity, making it required reading for anyone trying to tackle this difficult problem.”—Steven Dudley, cofounder of InSight Crime, and author of MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang ""I find myself thinking repeatedly about Adam Baird’s book months after having read it, pained by the vulnerability of the Belizeans he presents and the global colonial and ongoing imperial and neoliberal political economic forces he picks apart. He forces us to confront both the local and the global political economic forces implicating all of us.""–From the foreword by Philippe Bourgois, author of Righteous Dopefiend"

Author Information

Adam Baird is a Researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He is the coeditor of Paz, paso a paso: Una mirada a los conflictos colombianos desde los estudios de paz.

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