We learn what it meant to be a down bopper or a jive stud, to fish with a beautiful deb to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the Ivy League look. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores.
But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by West Side Story and infamous by the media. They fought-and sometimes killed-to protect and expand their territories. They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They called themselves Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings.
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