BEYoND CRIME: ETHNOGRAPHY OF A TRANSNATIONAL GANG

Martin Lamotte

(CNRS, 328 pages, 2022)

In 2011, anthropologist Martin Lamotte befriended several gang members of the Ñetas in the South Bronx. The Ñetas—also called the Asociación—was one of the main gangs in the New York metropolis at the time of the “war on crime” initiated by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Founded in a Puerto Rican prison in the 1980s to protest poor conditions of detention, they were active in the New York prison system via Rikers Island and embroiled in turf war in the streets of New York in the 1990s. By the time Lamotte got acquainted with the Ñetas, they had expanded their activities into Latin America and Europe, in particular Ecuador and Spain.

Over the course of a decade, Lamotte immersed himself in the Ñeta world from New York to Guayaquil, Madrid, and Barcelona, partaking in the daily lives of those who trusted him, always negotiating his presence while attending reunions and celebrations, learning about codes and rituals, power struggles and interpersonal conflicts. His resulting book delves into the Asociación’s writings and other personal archives detailing the group’s official history and that of its original leader, Carlos la Sombra, as well as the organization’s hierarchy, its rules and code of discipline, and its mensajes de consciencia: messages of political, personal, and spiritual content meant to guide and inspire the members.

Tracking the Ñetas’ path of internationalization, Lamotte seeks to understand how the Ñetas form a criminal community on a global scale while negotiating at the local level with very different state and community actors. At the turn of the 2000s, and at the risk of internal divisions, some New York chapters launched a process of internal “pacification.” Intent on returning to their political roots, they began to engage in community work, sometimes in tandem with municipalities, and at other times with the police to mitigate gang violence.

In this unprecedented, lively, multi-sited ethnography, Lamotte contests the mythology that sees gangs only as epiphenomena or violent apolitical organizations. He looks beyond popular cinematographic and musical representations to shed light on the solidarity that can bind a gang’s members, its cultural, social, or political ambitions, and the resources it can offer to a population living on the margins of a capitalist economy. In a context rife in violence, Lamotte’s lucidity never fails as he navigates the pitfalls of storytelling: those stories told about the Ñetas, and those they tell about themselves.

Martin Lamotte is an anthropologist and researcher at the CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. His work has been published in international journals. In 2015, he received the award for “Best Innovative Dissertation of the Year” from the INRS-Canada.