Responding to Violence, Keeping the Peace: Relations between Black and Latino Youth

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates how violence shapes relations between black and Latino youth in the poorest neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Most academic work views interracial relations as a cause of conflict and violence. My work reverses the causal arrow and looks at violence as a central force in creating and shaping interracial relations. My findings build on Roger Gould’s theory of group solidarity by demonstrating how violence is a central precondition in shaping group identity. I revisit the concept of interracial avoidance between blacks and Latinos, and its connections to violence, group identity, and interracial relations and explain its role within what I call alternative governance , which consists of avoidance, protection, and negotiation.