Reviewed by Avelardo Valdez | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.1

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Reviewed by Avelardo Valdez | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War*. By Karen Umemoto. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. xiv + 232 pp. Maps, photos, tables, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. $57.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Karen Umemoto's thesis in The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War is that gang conflict and violence is embedded in a constellation of complex social processes imposed upon disadvantaged communities. Umemoto's book focuses on a racialized gang war between black and Mexican gangs in a Venice neighborhood on the coastal edge of Los Angeles. Prior to this conflict, the Oakwood neighborhood was an established community where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds had built strong social and family bonds. However, in a matter of weeks a gang war between two neighborhood-based street gangs resulted in seventeen people killed and more than fifty injured over a ten-month period. As a result, the community polarized along racial lines, with Mexicans and blacks as the antagonists.	1
The conflict began as a personal dispute between gang members but rapidly transformed into a full-fledged racial war through a process Umemoto identifies as "morphology of conflict" (pp. 86–87). She uses this framework to delineate the ebb and flow of events that took on racially charged meanings leading to antagonism and a polarization that went beyond the gangs. In the process, race became the most salient identity for most residents (especially for those more removed from the epicenter of the conflict); families; and, finally, the gang members themselves. The various meanings that the different groups gave to the conflict led to its morphing from individual conflict to one that engulfed the entire community and split along black and brown color lines. The author discusses at length how this transformation was based on the emergence of "multiple realities" as experienced by different groups and persons based on their individual perceptions and interpretations of events. This led to the formation of "multiple publics"—groups that identified with one another and shared interpretative lenses through which they saw the world around them.	. . .

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