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This chapter examines gang life and drug economy in Los Angeles in the context of racism and racial attitudes. It tells the story of how Latino street gangs with connections to the Mexican Mafia became Southern California's leading perpetrators of hate crime by focusing on the murder of fourteen-year-old Cheryl Green in the Harbor Gateway on December 15, 2006. It follows the trail of gang violence all the way to the prisons to document the rise of the “Latino gang hate-criminals” who were instructed to kill African Americans. It shows that such orders were linked to major changes in the drug economy, real estate prices, and immigration, among other factors. It suggests that the crime and violence associated with Latino gangs can be traced all the way back to the 1970s, when Mexican immigrants began to find housing in predominately black areas. The chapter concludes by discussing some positive developments in Southern California, including the sentencing of Cheryl Green's killers, the decline in Latino-on-black violence, and the opening of the Cheryl Green Community Center in the Harbor Gateway.

This concluding chapter revisits the text's argument—that faith-based masculine negotiations facilitate recovery from gang life—and examines its implications. While critical criminologists and sociologists have recognized the efforts, Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach show only seeds of resistance. The chapter urges a conceptualization of recovery from gang life as a process of turning inward to cope with racism. It reiterates the key findings in this volume: that, despite of gang pasts, Latino recovering gang members seek to cut ties with gang life, build relationships with family members, and land well-paying, formal employment. Recovery is set amid a context of very modest socioeconomic and geographic mobility, which is thwarted by the exclusionary currents of late modernity. As a result, recovery from gang life is not rapid or linear, leading recovering gang members to experience the push and pull of gang life and conventional life.

This chapter builds upon the body of literature on segmented assimilation and religion by examining how two urban American ministries facilitated immigrant-origin Latino recovery from gangs in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite declining middle-class work opportunities, religion provided gang members the social support and resources necessary to leave gang life behind. Two contrasting models of social reintegration sheltered recovering gang members from gang life, and encouraged them to achieve conventional markers of success, such as employment, home ownership, and marriage. The first ministry, Victory Outreach, facilitated gang recovery by creating rigid social boundaries between the church and the broader local community. Homeboy Industries on the other hand facilitated gang recovery by maintaining and rearticulating porous boundaries between itself and the community. In examining the two faith-based approaches to gang recovery, the chapter also builds on Omar McRoberts' Streets of Glory (2003) and his 2002 Urban Institute report.

This chapter examines adult–child interactions with a focus on how researchers can use a child-centered perspective to enter adolescent communities. This study, focused on Latino teen gang members in Phoenix, emphasizes that to understand young people's religious interpretations scholars must embrace teens' religious creativity, rather than measuring their understandings against an established norm. Cholos and cholas were not the “deviant” or unredeemable youth they were often portrayed as in the media. Gang members in South Phoenix invented religious rituals and symbols that were born out of dispossession and an intense yearning for love and acceptance. Ritualization of violence and desire was a “strategic way of acting.” Religious symbols had taken on new meaning in the barrio across generations—Christ and Mary were alive and walked with the men, women, and children who lived there.