MUSE MONDAY
I'm so pleased to have Christina Hoag as my guest today. And her post is so interesting. Read on and enjoy!
Having written both a nonfiction book
and a fiction book about gangs, people often ask me why gangs?
I first encountered gangs as a young
newspaper reporter in New Jersey, when I was assigned to write a story about a
notorious motorcycle gang delivering Christmas toys to a local hospital. I went
to interview them in a small suburban house, very normal-looking apart from the
bunch of Harley choppers out front and its rather gloriously hirsute occupants,
who insisted they belonged to a “club” not a gang. I was fascinated by them and
their chosen lifestyle. They had established their own society with its own rules,
dress, language and culture within mainstream society. What drove people to do
that? I wondered. A side note: A couple
years later, I saw one of “club members” at a New Jersey prison where I’d gone
to interview an inmate for another story. So much for the “club,” I thought.
Years later, on a magazine assignment, I
interviewed gang members deported from Los Angeles to El Salvador, where they
had landed like fish out of water because they’d left Salvador as babies and
small children during the civil war. It was a country that they identified
with, but really didn’t know. Some of them barely spoke Spanish. They had
joined and formed gangs in Los Angeles because their families had moved to
predominantly Mexican-American neighborhoods that had long-entrenched gangs.
The Central Americans formed their own groups
for protection, but because they weren’t U.S. citizens, they later were
vulnerable to deportation when the government started cracking down on
immigrants with criminal records. The
stories of the young men I interviewed were really rooted in an unusual outcome
of both a civil war and the immigrant experience. They ended up staying in my
mind to form the genesis of my novel, Skin
of Tattoos.
Talking to the young men in El Salvador also reignited that
previous interest in gangs from when I had interviewed the motorcycle guys, and
I started reading about and researching gangs in earnest over the following
years. I covered numerous gang issues as a reporter for the Associated Press in
Los Angeles, talking to gang members, people who worked with them, people who
worked against them, ie. cops. Again, I was struck how they live in a parallel
universe that is driven by values that are completely the antithesis of
mainstream society, as in the more violent and feared you are, the more respect
you gain.
There are many factors leading to gang formation, but in
essence, gangs are driven by the human need for belonging to and approval of a
group, and because some sectors of our society feel excluded from mainstream
society, they form their own societies instead. Gang culture is alien to most
of our lives and an extreme consequence of socioeconomic marginalization, but
everyone can relate in some way to feeling excluded, of needing to belong, of
wanting approval. That’s the universal theme that’s inherent in writing about
gangs.
About Skin of Tattoos
Los Angeles homeboy Magdaleno is paroled from prison after serving time
on a gun possession frameup by a rival, Rico, who takes over as gang shotcaller
in Mags’s absence. Mags promises himself and his Salvadoran immigrant family a
fresh start, but he can’t find either the decent job or the respect he craves
from his parents and his firefighter brother, who look at him as a
disappointment. Moreover, Rico, under pressure to earn money to free the Cyco
Lokos’ jailed top leader and eager to exert his authority over his
rival-turned-underling, isn’t about to let Mags get out of his reach. Ultimately,
Mags’s desire for revenge and respect pushes him to make a decision that
ensnares him in a world seeded with deceit and betrayal, where the only escape
from rules that carry a heavy price for transgression is sacrifice.
Says Kirkus Reviews -- “Hoag is a talented writer, summoning
Mags’ world on the page with remarkable empathy and detail…A well-crafted,
engaging novel about an ex-con trying to break free…surprisingly nuanced and
wholly enjoyable. Readers will become quickly invested.”
About the author:
Christina Hoag is a former reporter for the Associated
Press and Miami Herald and worked as a correspondent in Latin America writing
for major media outlets including Time, Business Week, Financial Times, the Houston
Chronicle and The New York Times. She also authored Girl on the Brink, a romantic thriller for young adults (Fire and Ice YA/Melange Books, August 2016) and co-authored Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members
to End the Violence, a groundbreaking book on gang intervention (Turner Publishing,
2014).
LINKS:
Available in ebook and paperback on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2bSRjqP
https://facebook.com/ChristinaHoagAuthor
