Randol Contreras. The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024.
By Dianne Violeta Mausfeld
East Los Angeles is an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County with a population that is over 95 percent Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Mexican immigrants settled in this area at the beginning of the early twentieth century because it was a place where they could find affordable housing, practice their culture, speak Spanish, and open businesses to cater to their community–in comparison to other parts of L.A. where they were discriminated against, excluded from public life, and forbidden to rent or buy houses. By the 1960s, East L.A. had become “the nation’s largest barrio” with an estimated population of over a million.[1] “East Los”, as locals call it, is a historically poor, working-class, and economically cut-off part of Greater Los Angeles, associated with Chicano gang culture and lowrider culture. At the same time, it was an epicenter of the Chicano Movement, anti-war demonstrations, and student revolts in the 1970s. It is also a vibrant center of Chicano art and music and home to famous murals. Films like Boulevard Nights (1979) introduced East Los Angeles to a larger audience, including the lack of perspectives youth face in this part of town, showcasing lowrider and gang culture as primary fixing points. The Whittier Boulevard sign at the intersection of Whittier Boulevard and Arizona Avenue is the neighborhood’s flagship. Chicano rock bands such as Los Lobos and Thee Midniters and Chicano rappers like Kid Frost have paid homage to Whittier Boulevard in their music and featured the iconic sign on album covers. Randol Contreras’ The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles also includes the arc on the book cover, along with old-timer cars and Chicano gangsters, to set the tone for the book’s main themes.
Chicano gang culture in East Los Angeles goes back over a hundred years; prominent examples are the White Fence and Maravilla gangs. Different Maravilla subsets emerged in East L.A. as early as the 1920s, named after the streets they were founded on, like El Hoyo-Maravilla and Arizona-Maravilla. “Maravilla” is Spanish for “marvelous” or “wonderful,” and “is a local term for East LA.”[2] The Maravillas, or “Marvelous Ones,” had rivalries amongst each other, as Chicano gangs in Los Angeles typically do, but united to revolt against the dominant prison gang Mexican Mafia, also known as La Eme, that formed in 1957 and exerts its power over Southern California gangs not only inside the prison system, but also out on the streets of L.A.[3] Refusing to obey La Eme’s rules and pay taxes (i.e., a percentage of their profits in the drug trade) resulted in a so-called “greenlight” on the Maravilla’s members. Greenlight “means that all Southern California barrios [gangs] must assault resistors on sight. In return, La Eme provides structure and protection in jail and prison.”[4] Contreras’ The Marvelous Ones focuses on (ex-)members of the Maravilla gang who experienced the greenlight and the period of extreme violence that followed (1994–2006). It is an intimate portrait of aging gang members in East L.A. contextualized within spatial urban policies of neglect and the history of street and prison gang politics in Southern California. Rather than highlighting the socioeconomic macro-structures or following lawsuits and convictions as other gang scholars have done, Contreras draws a very personal account of the involved gang members.[5] Contreras’ ethnographic account focuses on his own experiences with and observations of several gang members he accompanied for many years. He follows their different life stories through prison sentences, drug addiction, homelessness, and struggles with leaving the gang life behind by turning to the Pentecostal church.
Divided into three parts, The Marvelous Ones weaves together urban history, gang politics, and personal life stories of gang members, pursuing three main research questions: “1. How do history and social structure shape who people become? 2. How do people make meaning of what they do? 3. What are the consequences, good or bad, of being who they are and doing what they do?”[6] Part I, “Becoming Greenlighters,” explores the history of East L.A. (chapter 1), introduces the pillars of gang culture that framed the lives of his research participants (chapter 2), and establishes the refusal of the Maravillas to obey the hierarchical structure of the Mexican Mafia as a turning point in the gang members’ lives (chapter 3). Part II, “Mattering in the World,” looks at the Maravillas’ lives after they have left behind the gang life: from finding refuge at church (chapter 4), to being pulled back into the street life and giving in to their heroin addiction (chapter 5), and their (sometimes ambiguous) political convictions (chapter 6). Part III, “Dealing with Change,” sheds light on personal challenges and life histories that include growing old, fatherhood, illness, the continuous struggle with addiction, and how they were impacted by COVID-19 (chapters 7 and 8).
The book gives a good overview of the history of East Los Angeles and the gang culture in Southern California, but it stays on the surface of events and is not an in-depth historical study. Contreras is very transparent about how it is difficult to “incorporate history into ethnography.”[7] Nevertheless, he successfully combines historical events, especially the period from the 1960s to the 1990s during which the Mexican Mafia established and consolidated its power, with personal accounts from gang members who lived through the ramifications of the “greenlight” and the general challenges of aging in the gang world and becoming veteranos. Contreras is an ethnographer, and this is where his strength lies. He was clearly able to gain his participants’ trust and represented very personal and deeply moving situations of their lives as aging gang members. “The Maravillas do not stand outside of history,” Contreras writes in the introduction, “rather, they reinforce political and cultural narratives about certain people and places. They matter to our times.”[8]
While Contreras’ study focuses on a very specific community within the larger context of Southern California gang networks, he manages to carve out both the specificities of the Maravillas and their status in the gang world as they resisted the hierarchy established by the Mexican Mafia, as well as characteristics that can be found in other gang-related communities in Southern California. The self-esteem and desire to “matter in the world”[9] is closely linked to the Maravillas’ defiant attitude opposite La Eme, but the individual cases of heroin addiction, illness, family crises, and religion as a way to leave the street life behind hauntingly exhibit the larger structures of poverty, urban neglect, and racial profiling that frames them. Contreras describes the desire “to matter” as “an intrinsic human need regardless of social position and location.”[10] Many of the Maravillas were longtime heroin addicts and had been marginalized their whole lives due to their ethnicity, social status, and place of socialization: the streets of East Los Angeles and California State Prisons, Juvenile Correctional Facilities, and County Jails. The Maravillas found meaning in the fight against La Eme as they “created violent masculinities on the streets, in jail, and in prison. And they had the greenlight to show that they mattered in the gang world.”[11]
Part II explores the different paths the Maravillas Contreras worked with took after the greenlight was ended. Chapter 4, for example, shows how Christian Pentecostalism helped some gang members to find purpose, when prison and gang life became a thing of the past for them, but also to help them stay clean. “Spirituality, then, became a way for them to interpret the world – the drug world, the gang world, and the divine recovery that now defined them.”[12] Contreras describes how religion helped the research participants transform their lives, as well as setbacks that exemplify the difficulty of leaving behind internalized codes of behavior that were learned in the neighborhood and in prison.
Chapter 5 focuses on Trumpists and anti-Trumpists clashing in East L.A. and expands on the reverse logic of Christian love that does not extend to (illegal) immigrants and people with different political views—the desire to “make East L.A. Chicano again” takes precedence. The fear of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries overshadowing East Los Angeles’ “Chicano identity”—expressed by speaking mostly English, listening to lowrider oldies (R&B), and showing respect to the veteranos (older gang members)—justified supporting a white, right-wing extremist like Trump, who vilified illegal immigrants. Another explanatory approach Contreras suggests is the desire to be accepted by whites as a Chicano with a criminal past who had been marginalized his whole life, concluding that: “In all, a sense of loss and low status drove some Maravillas to champion Trump.”[13]
The final chapter, “Mattering No More,” closes up the book with the death of one of Contreras’ research participants, chronicling the end of an aging gang member’s life with a history of addiction when his heroin use and failure as a parent had alienated him from friends and family. Contreras’ very personal final thoughts express his regret that these courageous men, who prided themselves on their violent and masculine behavior, in prison and out on the streets, were eventually forgotten and ceased to matter in their community—even as experienced and notorious veteranos in the gang context.
Contreras emphatically describes the challenges of researching gang culture while highlighting his own positionality as an Afro-Dominican from the Bronx, New York, who encountered obstacles linked to his ethnicity and outsider status in Southern California. I read Conteras’ work as someone who also conducted fieldwork in the Mexican American community of Greater Los Angeles, although I did not focus solely on East Los Angeles. I can corroborate many of the issues he raised, however, from a very different angle: he encountered racism and suspicion as an Afro-Latino from New York and managed to fit in by speaking Spanish and shaving off his afro; my presence in the field as a white female researcher from Germany was impossible to conceal and occasionally also met with suspicion. Contreras studied a very specific gang subset within the larger Southern Californian gang world, persistently working his way into the community and earning their trust, losing research participants along the way. My case study of Chicano rap, a musical subculture that is deeply intertwined with gang culture, did not only focus on the gang aspect as I foregrounded the music. Still, several situations Contreras describes—such as being suspected to be a cop, general trust issues, the hyper-masculine mentality, and the normalcy of violence, drug abuse, and gang culture in their neighborhoods—were very familiar to me and reminded me of my own fieldwork. I have the utmost respect for Contreras’ courageous work as I know that East L.A. is not an easy place to conduct research as an outsider, and he really immersed himself in the lives of his research participants.
Due to the ethnographic approach, the book is heavy on dialogues, situational descriptions of gatherings and conversations, and personal encounters between the ethnographer and his research participants. This is mostly readable. However, since there is no register of the protagonists (who were anonymized), the reader occasionally gets lost in the personal stories. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that the growing friendships with the participants make Contreras want to help them out of their misery—an impossible task for any researcher. Ethnographers use themselves as a tool to gather information and conduct research, which always bears the risk of becoming overly involved, especially when the ethnographic work is carried out over several years and close personal relationships are naturally established. Contreras has occasionally supported his research participants with money, included them in his academic life and invited them to speak in front of students, and cultivated friendships over many years, all of which must have been very rewarding as well as psychologically exhausting.
Having a bit of previous knowledge about L.A. gang culture and the Mexican American community in East L.A. certainly helps when reading The Marvelous Ones, but it is not required. Contreras has brought light to a seldom-covered topic in the literature about the Mexican Mafia from the perspective of the few gang sets who resisted their domination. What is more, his ethnographic perspective is very close to the community, focusing on the human side of the gang members instead of solely describing the socioeconomic factors that put them on the path to gangs, crime, and drug addiction. The book will be of interest to readers interested in East L.A., Mexican American street gang culture, and Southern California prison gang politics that impact the lives of Maravilla gang members beyond their active years.
Dianne Violeta Mausfeld is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for InterAmerican Studies at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and an associated researcher at the Department for Iberian and Latin American History at the University of Bern, where she completed her PhD in 2022. Her dissertation explores the history of Chicano rap in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. Violeta has published her research findings in Popular Music History (2019), on the audio-visual platform Norient (2020), and in the series Song and Popular Culture (2021, Waxmann). She also co-edited the volume Remixing the Hip-Hop Narrative: Between Local Expressions and Global Connections (2024, transcript).
Featured Image (at top): View down Indiana Street, including the famous bunya pine tree “El Pino” in the distance. Photograph by Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, 2019.
[1] Eric Avila, “East Side Stories: Freeways and Their Portraits in Chicano Los Angeles,” Landscape Journal 26 (1), 2007, 86.
[2] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 2.
[3] Tony Rafael. The Mexican Mafia. New York/London: Encounter Books, 2007, 273, 280.
[4] Contreras, The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, 6–7.
[5] See for example Rafael, The Mexican Mafia, and Tom Diaz. No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
[6] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 3.
[7] Conteras, Marvelous Ones, 29.
[8] Conteras, Marvelous Ones, 6.
[9] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 7.
[10] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 5.
[11] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 102.
[12] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 106.
[13] Contreras, Marvelous Ones, 231.
