Originating in the prisons of Puerto Rico, the Ñetas expanded to the East Coast of the United States in the late 1980s. At the time of the « war on drugs », they were one of New York’s leading gangs, involved in the turf wars that tore the city apart. At the turn of the 2000s, the group expanded into Latin America and Europe. At the same time, at the risk of internal divisions, La Asociación (as its members also call it) undertook an internal « pacification » to conceive of itself above all as a fighting movement working to improve the lot of the oppressed.
Split between New York, Guayaquil and Barcelona, this investigation examines how such a collective is built and transformed. Beyond the cinematographic, televisual and musical imaginary attached to gangs, it sheds light on their day-to-day functioning: their structuring, the power relationships and tensions that run through them, their own laws and rituals, their different ways of anchoring themselves in space or telling their story, their spiritual, social and political ambitions, their relationship to the written word or to violence.
By tracing the paths of its members, and revisiting the relationship that develops between the anthropologist and the Ñetas, this lively and sensitive ethnography questions what a gang is beyond crime; it shows the resources it can offer to a population stuck on the margins of predatory capitalism.
