Threat, Latinx Racialization, and Grassroots Leadership: Understanding Mobilization in Southern California’s Anti-Gang Injunction Movement

Abstract

Under what conditions do Latinx communities mobilize in response to threats of repressive policing? This article addresses this question by comparing three cases of community organizing against civil gang injunctions. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, 20 semi-structured interviews, and analysis of news reports, my findings reveal that mobilization was achieved in low-income Latinx neighborhoods located within affluent White cities, where organizers drew upon strong ties to community insiders to combine analyses of the threat of citywide gang injunctions with critiques of White racism and political power. Conversely, mobilization did not occur when this strategy was used to organize a low-income Latinx neighborhood within a primarily working-class, Latinx city, where organizers confronted a more narrowly targeted gang injunction and had weaker ties to community insiders. I argue this lack of mobilization in the latter campaign cannot only be attributed to the insufficient threat posed by the gang injunction. Rather, local racial and ethnic dynamics, where Chicanx organizers struggled to develop grassroots leadership among community insiders, build solidarity with first-generation Latinx immigrants and link threats of repressive policing to anti-Latinx racism impeded mobilization. These findings highlight how popular mobilization against perceived threats of repressive policing is not race-neutral but instead depends upon racial and ethnic contexts where organizers can effectively link the issue to White racism.