La vida loca: Everyday domination and resistance in the barrios of Los Angeles

The following is a work in social political philosophy that takes up the contemporary phenomenon of barrio gangs and mass incarceration. Throughout this dissertation I use Los Angeles, California as an important point reference, I do this because California has the largest prison population in the United States, and Los Angeles County accounts for fully one-third of that population. In addition, Los Angeles is the acknowledged gang capital of the world both in terms of the number of "gang related" homicides, and in terms of the number of gang members on the street. Through Los Angeles then, this dissertation provides a critical historical account of the "gang" legal category in the southwest since it first appeared as an important part of "public safety" discourse in the 1940s. By the same token, and at the same time that this dissertation provides an analysis of the "gang" as a practical political device---the invention of a newly racialized and gendered criminal category---I also posit a philosophical analysis of the everyday social practices that constitute barrio gang life, such that, we can shift our understanding of the gang phenomenon away from the language of pathology and delinquency toward a recognition of the political value that barrio gangs possess. To that end, I bring together three philosophical traditions; first, I rely on the work of Latin American decolonial social theorists like Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo and Maria Lugones and use the concept "coloniality of power" in order to situate and detail the arrangement of power in our modern/colonial society. Secondly, the work of Michel Foucault is helpful in outlining the dimensions of power in Western juridical forms and the function of the state through "governmentality". Lastly, I use the work United States theorists of color like James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Chela Sandoval to detail a conception of "social erotics", such that, the barrio gang can be understood to have a positive well spring as its reason for being---love.