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This chapter examines how recovering gang members described recovery from gangs, where they saw themselves in five years, and who they admired and tried to emulate. It contends that faith-based gang recovery took shape through reformulated notions of manhood. In faith-based recovery, recovering Chicano gang members contrasted masculine expressions: Chicano gang masculinity and reformed barrio masculinity. Whereas gang members rooted their sense of manhood in gang activities, such as drug use and gang violence, recovering gang members rooted their sense of manhood in domestic activities, such as being emotionally supportive husbands, fathers, and sons. The chapter draws upon interview data, and some participant observation, to present eight cases of recovering gang members coming from Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach. These case studies have different life stories, but they echo a similar theme—the wish to be redeemed for the pain that they had caused their own families.

This chapter extends the analysis of reformulated Chicano gang masculinity to body and bodily practices, filling a theoretical gap in the masculinities and crime literature. Recovery offers embodied practices that facilitate the construction of reformed barrio masculinity. In turn, as recovering gang members attempt to leave gang life, they learn how to embody reformed barrio masculinity in such a way that prevents transgressions into gang behavior. Both Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach made use of embodied practices that reformulated Chicano gang masculinity and facilitated gang recovery. Leaders in gang recovery urged members to grow their hair out, remove gang tattoos, and dress with form-fitting khakis. These malleable, physical markings of gang life are referred to as soft embodiment. Theologies of gang recovery facilitated practices that reshaped and redirected soft embodiment, but also redirected hard embodiment—the permanent, physical markings of gang life that can lead to gang behavior.

This chapter investigates how poverty, marginality, and gangs have been long-standing features of Los Angeles's Eastside barrios—an area where most of the Chicano gangs originate. It argues that Latino marginality, despite being a concern of early social reformers, persisted due to the racialized nature of public policies and political platforms. Early-twentieth-century social policies that emerged due to the Civil Rights Movement eased integration for Southern and Eastern European immigrants, but left Latinos deeply marginalized. The Movement flourished, but so did white resistance against it, centrally expressed through the rise of coded, antiminority suppression tactics aimed at blacks and Latinos. The chapter examines how the crime policy debates gave rise to notions of street criminals as lacking the ability to reform, and how this disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos through the wars on drugs, crime, and terrorism.