The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation — Metamorphosis of a Street Gang
By David Surface
Social Work Today
Vol. 4, No. 6, Page 12

Read the story of one notorious group’s transformation. It may change your mind about street gangs.

How to prevent young people from joining gangs and how to persuade young gang members to leave the group and become reintegrated in “normal” society are the kind of questions that preoccupy many professionals working with urban youths.

But what if these are the wrong questions? What if street gangs are not necessarily one of the worst problems facing our inner cities but are part of a potential solution?

This is the unique and controversial perspective offered in The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Street Gang, a new book from Columbia University Press by David Brotherton, PhD, and Luis Barrios, PhD, STM.

In their book, Brotherton and Barrios document a five-year period in the life of one of the most notorious street gangs in New York City, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation. During these years, the Latin Kings publically declared their intention to transform themselves into a nonviolent social service organization. The gang leadership renounced violence and criminal activities and required members to attend school, an effort that—depending on whom you ask—was either a cynical public relations ploy or a remarkable natural evolution.

According to the authors, the transformation of the Latin Kings is an important historical event that challenges society’s perspective on street gangs and promises to change the way in which social workers deal with members of gang culture.

Brotherton, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York Graduate Center, first became interested in working with gang members when he was a social studies teacher at a high school in San Francisco’s Mission District. He discovered that many of the 10th- and 11th-graders he was teaching were gang members. Brotherton took a personal interest in these students’ lives.

“I used to work with them at night in the streets,” says Brotherton. “They wouldn’t show up for school during the day, and I’d go out and try to find them.” Brotherton’s concern for his students was well-founded. “Back then it was really violent. There was a crack epidemic. Kids were dropping like flies. I went to a lot of funerals back then.”

Schools and Gangs
After going to Santa Barbara, CA, for his PhD in sociology, Brotherton returned to the same high school where he began to see things that challenged the official view of street gang youths he’d encountered in school.

“The kids I knew had two identities: They were gang members and they were students,” says Brotherton. “It fascinated me how they walked both sides of the line. It didn’t fit the stereotype that gangs were antischool. They were good students who got caught up in gang subcultures for various reasons. A lot of them came up on their own and were basically raising themselves, living on the streets with other gang members and coming to school. There were all these different stories that completely belied what everyone else was saying about kids in gangs.”

In 1992, Brotherton began writing about what remains a central theme in his work: the relationship between gangs and schools. “No one was writing about that,” he says. “They were all writing about gangs and the streets.”

Upon arrival in New York City, Brotherton was invited to join the New York City Department of Education’s newly formed gang task force. Brotherton quickly found that he was the only academic on the task force. “The other members were principals, security personnel, police, school administrators,” says Brotherton. “Very few academics were interested in gangs.”

Bucking the Stereotypes
During his stint on the gang task force, Brotherton spent two years in three city schools: one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and another in Manhattan. Although all three schools were historically known for their violence, Brotherton found to his surprise that gangs did not appear to be the source of the problem. “There were racial divisions among the students, and that seemed to be the source of the violence,” he says. “But it wasn’t like the gangs were the focus. Occasionally, I’d come across Latin Kings and Queens and Bloods, but they were very small in number.”

The apparent lack of gang involvement in school violence and crime prompted Brotherton to ask, “If the gangs were not primarily involved in ‘traditional criminal gang activities,’ what were they doing?”

The answer to Brotherton’s question came in the form of an invitation from Luis Barrios, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Also a priest and social activist, Barrios had opened the doors of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church to the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation to provide them with a safe place for their meetings. “I didn’t even know he was a priest!” says Brotherton. “He said, ‘I hear you’re interested in the Latin Kings and Queens—would you like to come to my church and meet them?’”

When Brotherton arrived at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church at 126th Street in West Harlem, he was amazed by what he saw. “I got to the back of the nave and the place was jammed,” he says. “There were 600 to 700 people there, men and women with little children running around. There was a whole pew reserved for guests—the Head of the Nation of Islam from Spanish Harlem, a woman who’s the head of a rape crisis center. There was a television crew filming. It was a community event of extraordinary proportions run by the most infamous gang in the United States.”

Brotherton arrived at noon and didn’t leave until six that evening. Even then, he recalls, the meeting was still going strong. “There was poetry, letters from prison, speeches,” he recalls. “They were talking about police brutality, the school system—all the things you’d hear in a radical political meeting. It was very religious as well with all these prayers.”

The Deal
It was at this meeting that Brotherton met the leader of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, Antonio Fernandez—aka King Tone—a man who would play a vital role in shaping Brotherton’s and Barrios’ research. “I’m sitting there, taking notes,” recalls Brotherton, “when the leader, King Tone, comes over and says, ‘Let’s have a meeting and talk about what you want to do with us.’”

There followed an intense period of negotiation during which Brotherton, Barrios, King Tone, and his advisors hammered out guidelines for how the group was to be studied. No real names were to be used, no fabricated material was allowed. A payment of $25 per interview was negotiated, which went directly into the group’s central treasury. The Latin Kings also insisted on reading everything written about them before it was published.

Brotherton believes there’s a kind of voyeurism at the heart of even the best kind of sociological writing. The Latin Kings, he says, weren’t going to stand for that. “In the beginning, they said, ‘Look, you’re not gonna look at us and dissect us like we’re fish in a bowl.’ They reversed so eloquently what the usual relationship had been between researchers and their subjects.”

Brotherton speaks enthusiastically about the collaborative nature of his research with the Latin Kings. “We could ask them questions, they’d ask us questions. It was a very democratic relationship,” he says. “For me as a researcher, it made me much more aware of myself than I’m normally made aware.”

While Brotherton doesn’t deny that the Latin Kings deliberately “used” him to publicize their new public image, he remains confident in the validity of his research because of the sheer amount of time he and his team spent with their subjects.

“Yeah, they were using us,” Brotherton admits. “They were very clear about that. They were in a real political battle. It doesn’t detract from what we were seeing. We were there with them on the street, in prison, at meetings, at weddings, during funerals and arrests. [At] one or two in the morning, we’d still be on the street with them. We were with them so often, things would happen that no one expected. You can’t simulate that.”

What is the significance of Brotherton’s and Barrios’ research for the practicing social worker on our city streets? According to Brotherton, “Enormous. One thing that social workers need to know is the life circumstances and the context of the people they work with, their vocabulary, their symbols and meanings, what motivates them. They need to know the contradictory [nature] of their lives.”

A New Realism
As for whether or not social workers in the field should continue to discourage urban youths from joining or remaining in gangs, Brotherton advises social workers to adopt a realistic perspective.

“Most gang intervention is targeted at getting people out of gangs or stopping them from joining,” he says. “If you’re coming to people and telling them, ‘Leave that group, you’ll never make it unless you leave,’ that’s guaranteed failure. How do you tell someone who’s just come out of prison that this group that’s supported you and may very well have saved your life, how do you tell this person who’s 18 or 19 that they’ve got to leave this group? That group may be the only support network they have.”

Brotherton describes how, in the face of downsized social programs, the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation functioned as a “pseudo-welfare state.”

“One of the functions of this group was to provide people with housing because you’re not allowed to go back into public housing as a felon,” Brotherton says. “They had a pool of money they spent to help women buy Pampers and other supplies. They set up their own Alcoholics Anonymous within the group. They had their own kind of welfare system. This was at the time when the U.S. government was bringing in ‘workfare,’ so the group began to fill these holes as the social safety net was being shredded.”

But the role played by the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation goes far beyond providing material support to its members. The idea that gangs provide their members with a sense of identity is not a new one, but the common public conception of that “identity” is limited to membership in the gang. According to Brotherton and Barrios, the sense of identity the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation provide its members goes much deeper. For example, the group’s official Web site contains information about topics ranging from the Puerto Rican nationalist movement to the Taino Indian culture—not exactly the kind of cultural discourse one might expect from a street gang.

“These are Puerto Ricans who’ve now discovered their national identity,” says Brotherton. “They’re not getting that from the school system, so they find it out from other people on the streets.” It’s this intense focus on cultural/political awareness that mainstream social service programs do not and cannot provide. “It’s not just about a boy’s club,” he says. “It’s about who am I? Boys’ clubs don’t address that. It’s not just about giving them more handball courts. It’s about finding a place in life.”

While the authors offer no detailed suggestions for new models of dealing with gang culture, Brotherton does point to past examples, such as the “Round Table of Youth” organized by former New York City Mayor John Lindsey. “In the 1960s, Mayor Lindsey used to invite the members of street gangs to Gracie Mansion; they’d sit down with the mayor and social services people and talk about what was needed.”

Even though such a move seems unlikely in the current political climate, Brotherton sees reason to hope. “People with courage and foresight admit that the old law enforcement model of dealing with gangs has to change.”

As for the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, Brotherton says, “They’re not going away.”

— David Surface is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY, and a frequent contributor to Social Work Today.