Author: Edward Orozco Flores and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

Title: Chicano Gang Members in Recovery: The Public Talk of Negotiating Chicano

MasculinitiesThis article is about former gang members. In this journal, there are two recovery programs that gang members could join, Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach. The authors were looking at these two programs and how they engage Chicano gang masculinity. A lot of the time when these gang members leave the gang live they feel like they’re not masculine. These programs help them realize what it means to be a man. Things like getting a job and providing for ones on family. The research question for this study is “How do ex-gang members deal with the idea of masculinity after they leave the gang?”. The type of data needed for this study was acts, behaviors, or events. This is the type of data we need because this type of data will tell us what these ex-gang members were doing at these programs. The data gathering method that was used was an Ethnography. One of the authors Edward Orozco spent 18 months 245 hours spent on Homeboy Industries and 195 hours in Victory Outreach. He observed the men’s interactions in these spaces. When the author was doing this some of the themes he found were addiction and recovery. He coded for hegemonic masculine constructions. At Victory Outreach, he heard a lot of them say “man of god” and for Homeboy Industries it was “family man. The type of data analysis used for this study is qualitative data. There was a lot of speech in the ethnography. This research was great the authors did a great job of explaining what their goal was and they executed it properly as well.