Abstract
Stefano Bloch on Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics and The Marvelous Ones.
Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles
by Neil Gong
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles
by Randol Contreras
University of California Press, 2024
I was often homeless as a kid. My mother and I lived in motels when a friend or relative wouldn’t put us up. And we slept in our car, when we had one. Sometimes we spent the entire day in the paddle boats in the middle of Echo Park Lake, and then the entire night in a booth at a 24-hour diner, usually The Pantry in Downtown LA. “We have nowhere to live right now, but we aren’t street people,” my mom liked to point out, drawing what she considered a necessary distinction between ourselves and the real homeless people out on the block.
When I wasn’t homeless, I lived with gang members. When my stepfather was out of prison for some short period of time, he’d shed his gang affiliation and find a way to rent an apartment for us. Sometimes my older brother would take us in. “I’m not a gang banger. I’m a gangster,” he liked to point out, drawing what he considered to be a necessary distinction between himself and the guys out on the block.
Such seemingly small distinctions are rife in communities otherwise treated as monolithic by the media, police, and popular imagination alike. But scholars also wield a broad brush when seeking to paint an empathetic picture of marginalized groups. The “unhoused” becomes an academic euphemism for people who are simply in need of affordable rent, and “people involved in gangs” is how we are told to categorize and refer to young men “simply in search of a family.” While well meaning, such depictions are myopic and frustrating for those of us who have seen and lived amidst the nuance, contradictions, trauma, and uncomfortable realities of these groups.
Rehearsed academic framing and truisms manage to make invisible those who are no less part of the story of marginality. Sometimes those left out of the neat narratives are the ones who manage to survive and even thrive in the face of constant pressures of oppression but do so in ways that do not comport with ideologically appropriate expectations. So caught up doing theoretical and rhetorical acrobatics, sometimes it seems “ethnography” is a word used to describe critical circus performers rather than grounded researchers for whom the work can be emotionally painful and intellectually counterintuitive. Put simply, sometimes it seems like academic researchers don’t allow the people they are studying to get in the way of a predetermined political perspective.
In both Neil Gong’s Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles and Randol Contreras’s The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, the people being discussed actually bear resemblance to those I have personally known, loved, and sometimes feared and even hated. In both monographs, it is clear the scholars prioritize getting close to their subjects over crafting a palatable critical narrative for an academic audience. Devoid of the bad guy/good guy binary, these ethnographies tell the actual stories of drug addicted and mentally ill “street people” for Gong, and sick, aging gangsters, or veteranos, for Contreras.
As Gong’s research reveals, those directly embedded in the fight against homelessness hold views that do not follow a particular political or intellectual playbook. State mental health facilities, jails, shelters, encampments, and highend treatment centers are all part of the ecology and calculus when trying to cope with the problem of sidewalk sleeping. Similarly, those most directly affected by homelessness populate a spectrum of wealth and poverty, conservative and progressive perspectives, and a range of privilege and exposure to harm and vulnerability. Along with the causes of homelessness, long planned and lastditch solutions likewise run the gamut. As Gong shows, homelessness touches every aspect of society, from questions of good governance to methods of medical intervention. Homelessness becomes a lens through which to view the complex interplay of social, cultural, economic, and highly personal health-related modes of navigating contemporary society. As Gong (p.6) puts it, “this means paying attention to institutions and organizations, history, social inequality, and culture alongside individual biography and psychology, and tracking whether people’s actions change those surrounding contexts.”
Gong’s work depicts a homelessness that I have experienced in real life. One that is populated by people from different backgrounds, who hold a diversity of perspectives, and whose circumstances have the potential to inform new theoretical insights about cultures of care, resiliencies, and unmitigated marginalization. Getting closer to the problem of addiction, mental health crises, and the context that makes homelessness possible is about listening to and telling the stories of individuals, not simply counting, as Gong writes (p. 225), “the virtually anonymous deaths of individuals to make an analytical point.”
Like Gong, Contreras contextualizes his respondents’ experiences within broader socio-economic structures, simultaneously providing an agentic narrative that skirts gatekeepers and breeds empathy. Contreras’s focus on veteranos (older gang members) from Maravilla cliques in East LA reveals how the façade of machismo crumbles under the weight of age, addiction, social ostracization, economic vulnerability, and ultimately what he calls “necro-living.” Proudly territorial gang members who rejected the top-down social structure imposed by the Mexican Mafia become virtually incapacitated by the strains and demands of public life. Trading addiction for religiosity becomes the hallmark of aging gang members who manage to first survive the street violence and later the scourge of heroin addiction and morbidity. As Contreras shows, aging out of gangs is as complex and contextual as aging into them.
In addition to providing nuanced and empathetic ethnographies of life on the margins for difficult-to-access individuals and communities, both Gong and Contreras crucially conducted their research in Los Angeles. This setting matters. As a geographer, I appreciate how they center place as crucial to our understanding of treatment options and the vast disparity between low-income and wealthy drug users and those seeking psychotherapeutics for Gong, and the role of neighborhood identity and territoriality for members of Maravilla for Contreras. But, likewise, as any spatially minded sociologist will assert, agentic stories and community histories of place-taking and place-making are necessary data for our understanding of how social structures are organized and operate.
To be clear, even in my own discipline of geography, neither homeless people nor gang members have been adequately studied from an ethnographic approach in monograph form. This is due in part, perhaps, to our disciplinary tendency to objectively map vulnerable groups at one extreme and to theorize these groups into abstraction at the other. Scatter plots made by GIS empiricists and invectives implicating “racial capitalism” by critical scholars have become standins for nuanced studies of real-life places and the people who inhabit them. What Gong and Contreras manage to do is shed light on peoples’ experiences and realities, not resolve their very existence or ideologically operationalize their plight for purposes of easy consumption.
This is not to say, however, that their research is purely descriptive or devoid of crucial theory-building or questions of reflexivity. In both cases, the authors ultimately arrive at difficult policy prescriptions generated through scholarly analysis and participation rather than rushes to practical judgement based on “objectivity.” In a challenge to Mathew Desmond’s avoidance of the “I” in ethnographic research, Contreras (p. 23) contends that “once you enter the lives of participants—once you speak with them, stand with them, walk with them, drive with them, eat with them, drink with them, and share problems with them—you have impacted the research. Now you have a place on the corner, at the bar, in the gym, at the vending table, in the school, on the rooftop, and so forth. Ethnographers, whether they want to or not, become a part of the story. They should then be transparent about how they shaped or influenced situations.”
It is prescient that these two scholars should focus their ethnographic gaze on two groups facing renewed displacement and increased vulnerability. Los Angeles is already starting its early preparations for hosting the Super Bowl in 2026, the World Cup in 2027, and the Olympic Games in 2028. Even just one of these mega-events would justify a draconian purging of homeless bodies from city streets, but the sports trifecta coupled with a Supreme Court ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson will result in the wholesale disappearance of those who have become the symbol of a failing economic system, inept political leadership, and seemingly nonexistent social safety net. Combined with an increased reliance on nuisance codes used to banish suspected gang members from public view, which I have recently written on, LA will become a place where the type of work done by Gong and Contreras will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible due to questions of access, even as it remains crucially important.
By holding up a sociological lens to these place-based subcultures, Gong and Contreras manage to provide scholarly works that bring their readers into neglected, maligned, and sometimes unknown geographies of trauma. And they do so in a way that tells a story before it tells the reader the appropriate way to think about the people and plights being experienced within those spaces. Their books provide education though exposure, all while exhibiting excellence in exposition.