Group Processes and Street Identity: Adolescent Chicano Gang Members

Adolescence is often characterized as a period of life in which a person's identity undergoes marked changes to adjust to new body appearances and societal expectations. Early life experiences, sociocultural environmental conditions, and agents of socializaton must be accounted for in assessing this new identity formation. For a small, but considerable portion of barrio (neighborhood) youth with problematic backgrounds, the street gang has arisen as a competitor of other institutions, such as family and schools, to guide and direct self-identification. For those who do become members, the gang norms, its functions, and its roles help shape what a person thinks about himself and others, and the gang provides models for how to look and act under various circumstances. Such youths usually become involved with the gang during their adolescent "psychosocial moratorium" (Erikson 1956), a stage between childhood and adulthood when peers especially help guide self-identification. For some gang members the psychosocial need for peer affirmation, convention, and support becomes more or less long lasting. Through immersion in gang routines and affairs, they accomplish the personal task of age and sex role clarification, contribute to the role defini