Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

From the left: Alice Cepeda, Avelardo Valdez, Diego Vigil, John Hagedorn, Robert Durán, and GCI Director Teresa Córdova engage in discussion. Photo by Miguel Vasquez

This past Friday proved to be an engaging and thought-provoking forum on Latino gang structures and their impacts on the wellbeing of both communities and individuals. The research and rigorous collaborative methodology of Joan Moore has proven to be impactful over the years. Across the United States, her former students are producing meaningful research on Latino gangs and engaged in both applying that research to policy issues and individual cases surrounding the incarceration and treatment of former gang members. Friday’s speakers were:

• Alice Cepeda is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Her research examines the complex of social determinants that influence the development of drug abuse health disparities across generations of Mexican-origin populations. Dr. Cepeda has been a recipient of several National Institutes of Health federal grants. Her most recent National Institute on Drug Abuse funded study is following up a cohort of Mexican American adolescent females who were affiliated with male gang members during their adolescence.

• Robert Durán is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. His areas of research concern racism in the post-civil rights era and community resistance, from gang evolution and border surveillance to disproportionate minority contact and officer involved shootings. He is the author of Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider’s Journey (2013) and his forthcoming book is The Gang Paradox: Inequalities and Miracles on the U.S.-Mexico Border, both published by Columbia University Press. He is the recipient of the 2010 Hispanic Faculty and Staff Caucus Junior Faculty of the Year Award at New Mexico State University and the 2011 New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology Division on People of Color and Crime.

• John Hagedorn is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of People & Folks, Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City. This book re-framed the study of gangs in the United States by focusing on the impact of deindustrialization. He is currently studying why Chicago’s homicide rate has not decline like New York City’s. He is beginning a study of “armed young men” around the world, including institutionalized gangs, para-militaries, militant fundamentalists, terrorists, and drug cartels. He is co-editor of Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender, the only edited volume ever published in the U.S. on female gangs. He is the designer of the website: net and is currently writing a history of gangs in Chicago.

• Avelardo Valdez is a Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. A primary focus of his research is on the relationship between substance use and violence. His research have been among populations such as youth and adult gang members, injecting and non-injecting heroin users, sex workers on the U.S./Mexico border, immigrant day laborers, Katrina evacuees and crack use in Mexico City. He is a recipient of numerous grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is involved in longitudinal study of Mexican American male gang members in San Antonio. He was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to the Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration that published The Growth of Incarceration in the United States (2014). He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

• Diego Vigil is a Professor in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine. His education includes a doctorate and a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught and/or held administrative positions as visiting professor at Harvard University, as professor of anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA for five years, and as professor of anthropology and Director of Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California for fifteen years. His expertise is in urban street youth, urban psychology, socialization, and educational anthropology, as well as in the ethnohistory of Mexico and the United States Southwest. Vigil also acts as a consultant and an expert witness in cultural defense in gang-related homicides.

Future Great Cities Institute activities and blogs will address some of the recommended policy changes made by these esteemed researchers.

This Friday, March 11, the Great Cities Institute will sponsor a forum on Latino gang research honoring Joan Moore. Several of her students, including Lalo Valdez and Diego Vigil, Robert Durán, Alice Cepada and John Hagedorn will present on their gang research and reflections on the influence of Joan Moore on their work.

Who is Joan Moore? Joan was the co-author of the country’s first large scale study on Mexican Americans. Her role in the Mexican American Study Project was to organize community studies across the Southwest to document the lives of what was called ‘the silent minority.” As Mexican Americans were protesting injustice in the late 1960s she worked with LUCHA, a self help group of ex addicts and pintos, or gang members founded in San Quentin prison. Together they embarked on an unprecedented study of male and female gang members in three East Los Angeles barrios and described generations of gang members and their changing struggles for justice and survival. The research questions of the studies were those the pintos themselves helped develop.  Joan devised a never yet duplicated methodology in gang research of random sampling of rosters of gang klikas, or age-graded groups. The pinto researchers believed that good quality research and exposure of the discrimination and conditions of their lives could persuade policy makers and the public of the need for more humane public policies and the evils of a reliance on incarceration.

As is often the case in academia, no good deed remains unpunished and Joan was denied tenure at USC for blatantly political and non-scientific reasons. She moved to Milwaukee where I had the good fortune of learning from her collaborative methods which guided my studies of Milwaukee gangs.  Joan retired twenty years ago and is bravely fighting terminal colon cancer.

Joan concludes her autobiography written for this forum in typically modest fashion. “I am enormously grateful to those who share my concerns with the vitality of collaborative research, with defensible methodology and with social justice. They help me feel that I’ve kept faith with our pinto collaborators.”

Joan Willard Moore is an exemplar of how to do research that can be useful for social justice and for Latino communities.

–

Grebler, L., Joan Moore, Ralph C. Guzman (1970). The Mexican-American People; The nation’s second largest minority. New York, The Free Press.

Moore, J. W. (1978). Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Moore, J. W. (1991). Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

About the Author:
John Hagedorn, Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice. John Hagedorn is the author of People & Folks, Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City. This book re-framed the study of gangs in the United States by focusing on the impact of deindustrialization. He is currently studying why Chicago’s homicide rate has not decline like New York City’s.

On Feb 22 and 23, 2016 Thea Crum, GCI’s Director of Neighborhoods Initiative, joined more than 60 community leaders, elected officials, researchers, and civic technologists in Washington DC, to map a future for Participatory Budgeting (PB) in the US.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the Democracy Fund hosted an event which built on an initial convening on PB in the US co-hosted in 2014 by The White House and The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP).

It was just seven years ago that the first PB process in the US was launched in the 49th ward, Chicago. Since 2012 GCI has partnered with PBP, elected officials, community leaders and funders to expand PB to seven Chicago wards, one school and one tax increment financing district engaging over 9,000 Chicago residents in deciding how to spend more than $12 million in public dollars.

“Today there are over 46 processes, and The White House and Harvard are promoting PB as a best practice of local government. PB is repairing the relationship between government and the people,” said Josh Lerner, PBP Co-founder and Executive Director, at the event.

US Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President, Megan Smith shared The White House’s perspective that collaboration with and participation in government are the key to solving our nation’s greatest challenges. Ms. Smith stated that “Governments are just us. They’re whoever shows up.” She also shared the international commitments that The White House has made to supporting participatory budgeting efforts through the second and third US Open Government National Action Plans.

Attendees shared experiences, new data and tools for how to make PB and participatory governance more successful. Thea Crum served on the Advanced Participatory Budgeting panel and shared her experiences working with and evaluating PB processes in Chicago. “How we expand and institutionalize PB will depend on our goals. To reach our goals of equity and inclusion, we need to conduct PB processes with larger pots of money and with funds that can be used for programs and capital infrastructure so that we can truly address the most pressing needs in low-income communities of color” said Ms. Crum at the event.

Attendees left the event with clear commitments to expanding and supporting PB moving forward:

• Elected officials and community activists new to PB committed to building political support for PB in their communities and to attending the May Participatory Budgeting Conference in Boston to learn more about the PB process.
• Elected officials, PB practitioners, and researchers committed to sharing their experiences and expertise with new communities organizing to launch PB processes.
• Federal agencies already publicly supportive of PB will encourage other bureaus to officially embrace PB in national policies and plans.

Tom Glaisyer, Program Director for Democracy Fund, “proposed how PB could rapidly grow in scale: “$275 billion of the US federal budget is allocated to local governments each year, excluding health entitlement programs. That’s a huge opportunity for PB.”

Thank you to everyone who made this possible including the Administration’s commitment to supporting participatory budgeting and to the Chicago elected officials and funders, the PB Chicago City-Wide Steering Committee members, and residents who work every day towards building a more democratic Chicago.

Keith Negley, New York Times

In its lead editorial, the Sunday New York Times, called for Congressional action to address conditions of unemployment in “minority” communities. Citing the Great Cities Institute report on joblessness among young people, the editorial goes on to express outrage that Congress has rejected programs that we know work and “that could help rescue a generation of young men from failure and oblivion.”

Specifically, the New York Times editorial references a component of the Recovery Act of 2009, an employment subsidy program that “created more than 260,000 temporary jobs.” The non-profit, Economic Mobility Corporation, released an analysis in 2013 through which they concluded that this program, which placed workers largely in the private sector, not only aided local businesses that did the hiring, but also those who were hired, increasingly their likelihood of finding permanent employment.

These promising results suggest that carefully targeted subsidies that place unemployed people into private-sector jobs can be a potent tool in reducing the devastating unemployment in minority areas of big cities where young people are disconnected from work and civic life.

As the Times points out, employment subsidy programs have been around since the 1930s. They suggest, however, that such programs should be created to place individuals in the private sector, including those who may have criminal records and need the opportunity to prove themselves as “motivated workers.” “Carefully developed subsidy programs are worth pursuing even if they do not produce big earnings gains. Getting jobless young people into the world of work is valuable in itself.”

The Times Editorial is a call to congressional action but concludes that if Congress fails to act, then this is something that the states should fund.

The idea of employment subsidy programs to place workers in the private sector, as already evidenced, can yield results. A subsidized employment program for public works, as we saw from the 1930s, could also put people to work, and at the same time, rebuild the decaying infrastructure in cities and states.

We are excited that the report from Great Cities Institute is generating conversation about solutions. This is a situation that calls for an array of strategies to address a set of conditions that did not occur overnight. The urgency of joblessness among young people, particularly among young Black men, calls for our focused and concerted attention to finding solutions.