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This introductory chapter examines the recovery from gang life of former gang members who operated in Los Angeles—the epicenter of the American gang problem. It explores how the recovery is centrally organized by religion and gender, arguing that religious practices shape the discursive and embodied negotiations that reformulate Chicano gang masculinity and socially reintegrate men away from the street and into the household. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law enforcement agencies around the country have reacted aggressively by pursuing mass-arrest “suppression” tactics and promoted legislation aimed at deterring gang crime through intimidation. Amid the tide of increasingly punitive gang ordinances, support has simultaneously grown for community-based social programs that humanize gang members and attempt to meet their needs. The chapter briefly explores the various large gang intervention programs instituted by local groups and how they come into conflict with the reformist crime policies of law enforcement.

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 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 chapter explores different platforms for public speaking, such as group therapy or bible studies, and how they offer recovering gang members opportunities to experience reform from gang life, as well as to earn legitimacy for being reformed. The public talk of gang recovery invited situated performances that rearticulated Chicano masculinity. Recovering gang members used public talk to advance “redemption scripts” and construct reformed barrio masculinity, facilitating recovery from gang life and social reintegration. The chapter probes deeper into how this gendered redemption sequence operates as a discursive process. Gang recovery programs, through the spaces they provide for public talk, centrally negotiate masculinity and facilitate reform. Public talk in gang recovery reformulates Chicano gang masculinity into warm, nurturing expressions. During these sessions, the recovering gang members talk about their personal lives and encourage each other to talk about family and to feel empathy for family members.

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 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.