Dreams, Gangs, and Guns: The Interplay Between Adolescent Violence and Immigration in a New York City Neighborhood

Abstract

Preventing violence among adolescents is necessary to assure the safety of schools,neighborhoods, and adolescents themselves, but effective prevention requires an understandingof its causes. This report draws on five years of field work in one immigrant community in NewYork City to describe how the generation gap separating immigrant adolescents from theirparents, made wider by the immigration process, leads these children to rely on violent peergroups for protection.