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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 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 argues that the corrections system in California targets black and brown men of color, such that one in six Latinos will be incarcerated at some time in his life. The preservation of such inequality hinders the religious mainstreaming of Catholic and even Protestant Latinos into a triple melting pot and ultimately results in the development of uniquely Chicano faith-based organizations. The chapter looks at two sites—Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal-evangelical church; and Homeboy Industries, a nondenominational nonprofit—in examining how theologies, religious practices, and the context of gang exit converge to establish Chicano-themed, faith-based communities into which existing gang members can integrate. Recovery from gang life occurs by entry into both sheltered and integrative faith-based groups.

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.