Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
order to appropriately divide them. Juvenile Probation makes files on youth while they are at JDF that document their suspected affiliations (which may or may not be accurate) and send these to any facility youth may transfer to after their release, including SJEA.
However, as these files are passed to different institutions, the gang labels generated by how youth are categorized simultaneously follow them into new spaces. When Joey was sent to JDF for drug charges, they housed him alongside Bulldog gang members, despite the fact that he had no history of gang involvement. This assignment set into motion a criminal label that has persistently shadowed him ever since:
| JOEY: | [In JDF] I told them I didn’t bang, because on one side they had the nortes and the Sureños, and [on] the left side were the dogs. So I guess there was an opening and they put me there and it stuck. |
| AUTHOR: | You ever feel like you’ve been labeled? |
| J: | Yeah, I do! Cuz I was reading a sheet and it said I affiliate with Bulldogs. Fuck, they’re labeling me as a gang banger! Just cuz I hang on the east side, like I hang out with Bulldogs doesn’t mean I bang! [It] just means I get along better with the Bulldogs! |
| A: | When did you see that you were labeled? |
| J: | When I got out of my fuckin [appointment for drug treatment]! It said uhhh, “He doesn’t bang but does affiliate with Bulldogs occasionally.” Like what the fuck! That’s fucked up! Now I’m labeled as a Bulldog and I don’t even bang! So [now] people call out “So wassup dog? You a mutt or what?” Fuck! Are you serious? I don’t even bang and now you wanna disrespect? Yeah, starting a fight for no reason! |
When Joey was housed with the Bulldogs in JDF, he befriended one of the other boys housed with him, and continued to socialize with him at SJEA. Joey “gets along better with the Bulldogs” in large part because this is who he was housed with in JDF and who he came to develop friendships with. But this housing assignment, which he had no control over, is recorded in his file as a gang affiliation, framing him in subsequent settings as criminal and exposing him to confrontations from other youth.
At SJEA staff members note any affiliations already recorded in students’ probation files, but also make their own assessments in student orientation sessions, either confirming or updating the file. Each Thursday, new students transferring into the school come in for an orientation session, usually within a week of their release from juvenile hall. Here they meet with various counselors and school staff members, who explain things they need to know about the school like the dress code, daily schedule, and what is expected of them as students. These staff members also attempt to determine new students’ gang affiliations from police reports and juvenile probation files, as well as questions about what other students they know at the school. These orientation sessions provided the school staff with an opportunity to categorize new students into the criminalized affiliations they recognized. For example, one week a school counselor recaps one of these orientation meetings to me shortly after finishing: “We have six new Bulldogs, and we have one who affiliates with Bulldogs, but he hasn’t been labeled yet. I asked him who he knows here and he said ‘Oh I know him and him.’ So I said ‘OK, so you affiliate with Bulldogs’ and he said ‘No, I’m not in no gang! I just talk to those guys!’ but I told him ‘OK, but that’s still affiliating.’”
Much like the racialized housing assignments in Wasco, youth are categorized as they enter juvenile facilities so that they can be separated. After determining students’ affiliations the staff then direct them one side or the other of the divided blacktop, structuring a physical split between students. Students resultantly experienced the identity categories ascribed in this process through the division of youth into separate spaces, particularly visible when students came outside for lunch and recess breaks. During these breaks, SJEA students were contained to a small portion of the school’s asphalt parking lot—two rows of parking spots for about a dozen cars with a lane between them. Bracketing one end of this long and narrow space were a set of unused basketball hoops and a ping-pong table, and on the other a small trailer serving as a snack bar that sold chips and cups of instant ramen during lunch. Between them, twenty picnic tables were spread out across the blacktop, divided by a thirty-foot gap that split the entire space into two sides. Probation officers, security guards, and teacher’s aides would form a tight perimeter around this space that students were not permitted to venture beyond.
At the lunch tables, youth sat with their friends (who they usually already knew from their communities) and others they felt were most like themselves. However, at SJEA students’ peer networks were often interpreted as ties to neighborhood gangs, and consequently sections of the blacktop were seen by both students and staff as designated for different gang-associated groups, with rival groups positioned at opposite ends. Students dismissed for lunch would exit the school’s side door to the blacktop and first see the “Bulldog tables” clustered to their left, although most of the students sitting here were Latina/o kids from Fresno’s Eastside who didn’t gangbang. In the far left corner by the trailer is a table with all the White kids, most of whom are from the middle-class neighborhoods in North Fresno or Fresno’s more affluent suburb, Clovis. Next to them is a table with a multicultural group of students, most of them also from the Northside, who dress like skaters and hang out with the Whites. Continuing to scan the blacktop clockwise, to the right of them are most of SJEA’s Black students; first the teens from the Northside (although not as far north as the White neighborhoods) associated with Murder Squad, then the thirty-foot gap, then the Westside youth categorized with Twamp Gang. Next down the line is the table with all the Norteñas/os and all the Latina/o students from the Westside, then a table with a few Asian kids. Finally at the far right was the “Sureña/o table,” mostly filled with Latina/o youth whose families had recently moved to Fresno from Southern California.
FIGURE 1. The segregated blacktop at San Joaquin Educational Academy.
Patrick Lopez-Aguado
The size of these groups and the dynamics between them could shift with the demographics of the students enrolled at any given time because student turnover was very high, but even groups that were absent for a time still had a space that was recognized as theirs. When I first came to SJEA, one of the staff members pointed out each of the groups on the blacktop before pointing to an empty space and telling me “there aren’t any Sureños here right now, but when there are they stay over there.” The division of space was fundamental to the daily operation of the school to the point that it was recognized even if the isolated group was not even present—illustrating how the presumed need to categorize youth is engrained as a dominant logic, such that the categories ascribed in this process hold meaning even when there is nobody to fill them. The consistent emphasis placed on identity categories defines group boundaries by constructing the collective threat of an “other,” even when this other is an imagined enemy. This othering is accomplished through the designation of group space, and space is only divided among gang collectives. In this arrangement there is no space for unaffiliated youth of color, meaning that nonwhite youth are always imagined as gang members.
BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE
Fresno’s criminalized residents encounter a consistent social order in both the state prison and local juvenile justice facilities, one in which they are put into race- and place-based groups that are then separated from each other in relation to gang rivalries. Also consistent across these sites is the institution’s direct role in designing and enforcing this system. Facility staff members not only classify incoming inmates/students into racially defined groups and separate them spatially, but they then also police the boundaries between these groups. This reinforcement of spatial boundaries in turn reifies carceral affiliations as cohesive groups with powerful collective identities. By encouraging people to stick with “their own” and structuring an environment in which it is hard not to do this, the institution engrains into individuals the rationale that segregation is an important means of protecting themselves from violence.
It is not hard to see how inmates quickly understand this logic in reception. Reception centers are overcrowded facilities with high rates of turnover and reputations for being unstable and dangerous institutions. Facilities like Wasco have relatively high rates of inmate violence, and a 2006 report found that Wasco