Despite a long history of immigrant successes, accusations of gang formation often challenge new groups in American society. These stereotypes emphasize different lifestyles or opportunities, but may also control community organization or justify exclusion because of culture, race, class or generation. These charges have denigrated African Americans, Irish Americans, Chinese Americans and Cuban Americans in turn. Meanwhile, the specter of clandestine organized crime—whether tongs among Chinese, or the Mafia among Italians—has justified police surveillance, mass media sensationalism, missionary reform and policies ranging from vague urban renewal to gated community withdrawal.

Those defined by such negative views have been more diverse. Criminal behavior emerges from many social forces, including realistic socialization in urban life. In many cases, however, the neighborhood or ethnic group smeared by the acts of a few has been deeply divided by these same actions. This is evident in African American community campaigns against contemporary black-on-black violence. Gang accusations, moreover, often show groups embodying fundamental American beliefs. Virtue, for example, is defined in loyalty to groups and localities, although gangs have promoted strong individualism as well. Gangs also gender crime—they have been strongly associated with males, while females, although likely to belong to associations, are depicted as isolated criminals or fallen women. Finally gangs have come to symbolize negative traits of urban disorder versus rural tranquility or the safety of the small town and the protected suburb.

The twentieth-century history of gangs has been more complex. In the 1920s and 1930s, as urban wars winnowed crime families, new youth gangs continued to spring up in changing environments. The transformations of American society after the Second World War, however, changed the ideological landscape of crime and fear. As suburban havens welcomed the middle class, the city could be perceived as a “realm of hoodlums”. Nonetheless, hot rodders (with anti-social “traits”) turned hallmarks of suburbia—cars and nurtured teenagers—into problems evident in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One (1954).

Study and policy υis-à-υis gangs also have been shaped by politics and representation.

Hence, in the 1960s, researchers sought integrative solutions as their authors detailed portraits of young men in gang nations such as Vice Lords of Chicago, IL or the streetcorner networks of New York City and Washington, DC. Blacks, and later, Hispanics, figured prominently among depictions of urban problems: Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1961) recast Romeo and Juliet as a conflict between Puerto Rican and “American” teenage gangs. Nonetheless, some gangs were incorporated into urban renovation and neighborhood/racial pride.

As urban residents demanded equality however, new questions surfaced. Riots, shifting family patterns and urban decay in the 1960s emphasized the social problems facing new generations. By the 1970s, statistics on gangs and organized opposition increased.

Meanwhile, drug trafficking and new weaponry which linked organized crime and local gangs, heightened urban violence. As consumerist values in the media bombarded those with less access to resources, drugs and crime proved tempting, despite consequences.

When new immigrants formed associations to facilitate assimilation, they were also tainted by reference to gangs. Thus, established Chinese American communities complain about the violent incursions of Fukienese and Southeast Asians.

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed new extensions of crime and association. Women have increasingly public roles in all levels. In 1992 riots in Los Angeles, CA, the notorious gang nations of the city Crips and Bloods, emerged as potential peacemakers, which the Los Angeles Police Department could not be. Meanwhile, news and policy-makers continue to focus on drugs, corruption and drive-by violence.

Mass media have long contributed to a sense of gangs as a pervasive urban problem.

Gangsters have been a movie staple from James Cagney in Public Enemy (1931) to modern depictions such as The Godfather Trilogy (1972; 1974; 1990), New Jack City (1991) and Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as documentaries like A. Mishan’s Bui Doi (1994).

Quite apart from the real and violent nature of many other aspects of American society crime, gangs and other associations around illegal activities have multiple meanings and interpretations, encompassing assimilation, protest and solidarity as well as mere gain or pleasure. Gangs develop from strength as well as weakness, solidarities and alliances as well as divisions. As such, they entail neither simple problems nor simple solutions.