Overview

Space of Detention is a powerful ethnographic account and spatial analysis of the “transnational gang crisis” between the United States and El Salvador. Elana Zilberg seeks to understand how this phenomenon became an issue of central concern for national and regional security, and how La Mara Salvatrucha, a gang founded by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, came to symbolize the “gang crime–terrorism continuum.” She follows Salvadoran immigrants raised in Los Angeles, who identify as-or are alleged to be-gang members and who are deported back to El Salvador after their incarceration in the United States. Analyzing zero-tolerance gang-abatement strategies in both countries, Zilberg shows that these measures help to produce the very transnational violence and undocumented migration that they are intended to suppress. She argues that the contemporary fixation with Latino immigrant and Salvadoran street gangs, while in part a product of media hype, must also be understood in relation to the longer history of U.S. involvement in Central America, the processes of neoliberalism and globalization, and the intersection of immigration, criminal, and antiterrorist law. These forces combine to produce what Zilberg terms “neoliberal securityscapes.”

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Reviews

This incredibly compelling ethnography bristles with insights into matters such as the integrated landscapes of San Salvador and Los Angeles, the nature of the 'community' on whose behalf post-riot Los Angeles was rebuilt, and the ways that anti-gang strategies paradoxically produce and reproduce gangs. Elana Zilberg's discussion of how policing strategies feed into and take on the characteristics of gangs is superb. Space of Detention is a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of security, space, and movement, and it is fascinating reading, based on years of complicated and original ethnographic research. Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Nation of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States This is a visceral, powerful read that will be a revelation for anyone who lives in Los Angeles against a constant background of gang violence. Shifting her focus between media images and vivid materials developed from sustained, recursive fieldwork, over a turbulent period in the recent history of American empire, Elana Zilberg achieves both the most intelligent and the most charged application of Benjamin's method of dialectical images in the annals of contemporary ethnography. George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

This incredibly compelling ethnography bristles with insights into matters such as the integrated landscapes of San Salvador and Los Angeles, the nature of the 'community' on whose behalf post-riot Los Angeles was rebuilt, and the ways that anti-gang strategies paradoxically produce and reproduce gangs. Elana Zilberg's discussion of how policing strategies feed into and take on the characteristics of gangs is superb. Space of Detention is a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of security, space, and movement, and it is fascinating reading, based on years of complicated and original ethnographic research. --Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Nation of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States

This incredibly compelling ethnography bristles with insights into matters such as the integrated landscapes of San Salvador and Los Angeles, the nature of the 'community' on whose behalf post-riot Los Angeles was rebuilt, and the ways that anti-gang strategies paradoxically produce and reproduce gangs. Elana Zilberg's discussion of how policing strategies feed into and take on the characteristics of gangs is superb. Space of Detention is a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of security, space, and movement, and it is fascinating reading, based on years of complicated and original ethnographic research. Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Nation of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States This is a visceral, powerful read that will be a revelation for anyone who lives in Los Angeles against a constant background of gang violence. Shifting her focus between media images and vivid materials developed from sustained, recursive fieldwork, over a turbulent period in the recent history of American empire, Elana Zilberg achieves both the most intelligent and the most charged application of Benjamin's method of dialectical images in the annals of contemporary ethnography. George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary For those acquainted with what governing elites in Washington, DC and the US mainstream media frame as highly threatening transnational criminal organizations, La Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang will likely be familiar... In Space of Dentention, anthropologist Elana Zilberg powerfully and effectively unpacks such representations and, as the subtitle of her book suggests, illuminates their production. - Journal of American Studies, February 2013 Zilberg endeavors to uncover realities normally obscured, and to situate anti-gang discourse and policies within a broader framework than hegemonic discourse allows. Steve Herbert, heoretical Criminology Zilberg's audiences have waited a long time for this book, and it will not disappoint. Even as it refuses to be the expose on gangs that some may expect, it offers a powerful and original account of interlocking global processes of capitalism and criminalization. Ellen Moodie, Anthropological Quarterly Ambitious in scope and scale, Space of Detention is a perceptive and beautifully written volume that will appeal to graduate students and researchers in the fields of Latin American studies, critical criminology, and anthropology, as well as urban and cultural studies. Grounded in rich ethnographic detail, the study not only serves as a reminder that accurate gang assessments are indispensable for effective gang policies but also persuasively exposes the social, migration, and justice consequences of repressive policing. - Sonja Wolf, Current Anthropology Zilberg's ethnographic research is impressive and clearly demonstrates the harmful influence of policing tactics on gang peace activists and deported youth... Her research provides stories that bring to life her argument about how deportation and policing policies create transnational connections between gang members and increase the violence that police are supposedly aiming to stop. - Christine M. Lamberson, H-California, H-Net Reviews Space of Detention is particularly salient in its effort to account for the transnationalization of these gangs through what I would call an ethnographic history of the present. It combines a dense and in-depth description of the spaces and territorialities both inhabited and challenged by the mobility of gang members, with a critical perspective on the political history shared by the United States and El Salvador. - Gema Santamaria, Migration Studies An important read for those who are looking for a more sophisticated understanding of how the neoliberal securityscapes have contributed to the national gang crises in both the United States and El Salvador. - Michael Allison, The Latin Americanist Zilberg is able to offer a rich analysis of the intersections of Cold War militarism, transnational migration, urban restructuring, criminalization, and postconflict governmental reform in a predominantly 'sending country'. - Lauren Martin, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Elana Zilberg's book contributes to emerging scholarship making the important connections between the war on gangs, the war on drugs, and the war on terror as a continuation of US empire... This book provides important empirical evidence to tracing the origins of post-9/11 anti-terror legislation, acts, and attitudes while providing the reader a point from which to analyze the militarization of public space today. Overall, the book is a wise choice for graduate and undergraduate courses and scholars concerned with security states and subject formation. - Cristobal Valencia, Journal of Anthopological Research

Author Information

Elana Zilberg is Associate Professor of Communication and Associate Director of the Center for Global California Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

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