Search results for ""author felix m. padilla""
Rutgers University Press The Gang as an American Enterprise
The Diamonds are a Chicago Street gang whose members are second-generation Puerto Rican youths. For Felix Padilla, the young men who join the Diamonds have made a logical choice. The gang is an alternative and dependable route to emotional support, self-respect, material goods, and upward mobility. Although Padilla shares the same ethnic background as the gang members and also grew up in a Chicago barrio, gaining the trust of the Diamonds was not easy. Eventually, however, he was able to get close enough to the members to interview and observe them. Padilla shows us his decision to join the Diamonds. From early childhood, boys develop positive images of the gang. They realize that the dominant culture promises mobility, but that their paths to that mobility are blocked. By joining a gang they can creatively oppose the dominant culture. Padilla does not paint a romanticized picture of the Diamonds. Some members come to understand that when they sell drugs, they benefit the gang's leaders and suppliers more than themselves. Further, they recognize that the gang is also subject to problems of domination and inequality. Padilla shows that though the Diamonds are sometimes violent, they are not psychopaths. While we need not approve of what they do, he urges us to understand it as a rational response to the doors these young men see closed around them.
£26.09
Taylor & Francis Ltd The Struggle of Latino/Latina University Students: In Search of a Liberating Education
Based on a three-year ethnographic study of a class on the sociology of Latino/a society, this book tells the story of how the students navigated academic life in a predominantly white university to construct their own education. Padilla weaves together journal entries, his own experiences in education, cultural analysis, and theory to create a rich narrative.
£39.99
