Filling the Void (or, Today Carol Goes Off the Reservation)

Several years ago, I helped create and oversee a Federal program that provided funds to organizations that were attempting to eradicate gangs from their communities. I knew nothing about gangs; thus began my education. I remember spending a few days in Chicago, conducting site visits with some grantee organizations to see how their government-funded efforts were progressing. I met with community advocates, some of whom were former gang members who had served considerable prison time for their activities, including murder. They told chilling stories from their gang days, and then shared the reasons why they now worked so selflessly and diligently to help stop gang violence. It was one of those amazing, humbling experiences that dramatically changed my worldview.

During a drive through a rundown, gang-ridden south Chicago neighborhood with an activist pastor who was pointing out various gang boundaries and sites of past violence, I ignorantly asked how it was that gangs had made such a stronghold of the area. I took for granted that everyone knew how awful gangs were, and couldn’t understand how they came to be so powerful.

This patient pastor explained that the area was so blighted that it was ignored by most: there were no businesses, no jobs, little public or other transportation options for the welfare families who lived there. Most of the commercial buildings were abandoned and deteriorating, as were many of the residences, though many of those still housed families struggling to survive. There were no human services organizations, no food pantries, nothing but the few brave churches like his who remained to care for the people there. When you have no transportation, no job options within walking distance, and no ability to travel to where the jobs are elsewhere in the city, what do you do?

It was a hard question, but it revealed the answer to my question: the gangs saw a need, and they filled it. They provided food and other necessaries to those struggling in the neighborhood. They were the human services agency that the local government had failed to make available. As such, gangs won the people’s gratitude, loyalty and affection, enabling them to cultivate and harvest a fertile recruiting ground for new members.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 2008. Pp. viii, 500), has brought that afternoon with the pastor to mind. Just as gangs create complex systems of trade and community relationships to further their own interests, so too did the Comanche manipulate Spanish, Mexican and Texan citizens into reliance and even near-subjection to meet the Indians’ material needs and imperial goals.

Popular American history would have us believe that big, bad imperialist Europeans wiped out all Indians, and the Indians were helpless before the onslaught. Hämäläinen proves that, for the Comanche, at least, this is untrue. She restores Comanche agency and, indeed, effectively demonstrates just how capable they were at beating the Europeans at their own game: “By 1810, the real nerve center of the Southwest was not Santa Fe, but the western Comanche rancherías along the upper Arkansas, Red, and Brazos valleys, where peoples from numerous nations congregated to exchange goods, forge and maintain political alliances, and organize large-scale multiethnic military campaigns. New Mexico’s economic and political ties to Comanchería endured, but they had come to reflect its dependence on, not control over, the Comanche nation.” (202) Hämäläinen goes on to show how New Mexicans ultimately rejected their own government’s directives, choosing instead to nurture and maintain their vital trade relationships with the Comanche. (212-213)

It is the New Mexicans’ rejection that triggered my memory of the blighted south-side Chicago slum. A community pursues that which best takes care of the needs of its people. In the 19^th century, the Mexican government failed to strengthen and protect its New Mexican citizens, opening the door for the Comanche to fill the void, just as gangs do in impoverished American neighborhoods today. It is, to me, a striking parallel.