A Review of From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity and Disorganized Violence in Belize City

In 2013, I took a repurposed U.S. school bus from the south of Mexico, my adopted home country, to Belize City. Once across the border, we ended up making a lengthy stop when passengers with pre-purchased tickets found themselves unable to board the crammed vehicle and began to protest the perceived injustice. In the scorching heat, the initial exasperation among locals both on and off the bus quickly turned into visceral anger. The episode would stay with me as I wandered around Belize City, shocked by the generalized poverty. The evident abandonment of the place and its people stood in stark contrast with the Marina neighborhood, a bubble of relative wealth where foreign tourists liked to wine and dine.

Disenfranchisement, corruption and violence in Belize City are central elements in Adam Baird’s first book. Baird, a British peace studies scholar known for his work on masculinities, has spent the last few years working as a United Nations analyst from his base in Guatemala. Over the past decade or so, he conducted numerous research trips to Belize, many of them self-funded, to study the links between gangs and violence and to devise practical solutions. From South Central to Southside is the product of these efforts. The ethnography asks how U.S. gang cultures developed in Belize City and might be reduced. Based on the author’s observations and interviews with social workers, gang members and other figures, the volume offers extensive excerpts of these conversations to convey the everyday life and struggles in a marginalized urban community.

From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity and Disorganized Violence in Belize City by Adam Baird (Temple University Press, 2024, 197 pages)

A system of clientelism and patronage, instituted by the two main parties, allows the political class to consolidate its power yet denies dispossessed populations opportunities and participation, Baird tells us. These practices are so pervasive that they have stifled civil society organization and demands for accountability. According to one gang member Baird cites, Southside citizens suffer from “downfallness”_—marginalization so crushing that people feel they cannot change anything. This history of oppression is behind the rise of gangs and violence in Belize.

Baird seeks to understand the growth and influence of street organizations that seemingly operate across borders. Gang transnationalism, he writes, is a form of “transnational masculinity” or a “gendered type of cultural transfer between disenfranchised young men that connects contextually diverse, yet similarly marginalized” urban settings. The Bloods and Crips are African-American street gangs that emerged in South Central Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. These groups welcomed Belizean youths whose immigrant experience mirrored that of Central Americans who would join the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gangs. The maras, and the deportation of their members to northern Central America, prove of considerable comparative interest to the author. In what would eventually become known as zero tolerance policing, the United States began targeting gang members for arrest, incarceration and expulsion. Non-U.S. citizens who had fallen foul of the law entered the prison-to-deportation pipeline.

Blood and Crip deportees first reached Belize in the early 1980s, importing their cultural identity and the conflict between the two gangs. Over the following decade, they gained recruits by sharing gang-colored clothes, money and firearms with alienated young men, thus displacing earlier, more innocuous groups. The Southside Bloods and Crips have symbolic affinity with their U.S. counterparts. Local Creole and Jamaican cultural influences, however, gave gangs in Belize City their own idiosyncrasies.

Their members both use and sell marijuana. But this economy, Baird shows, is different from the transnational, and infinitely more lucrative, shipment of cocaine that extends along the Caribbean coast and involves family-based networks and police officers. Drug trafficking is, in any case, not what has been driving violence in the country. Rather, it is gang fragmentation and leadership changes, coupled with the proliferation of firearms, that has dramatically increased the number of homicides since the late 1990s. The established “Generals” were able to contain the violence that the factions under their control exercised. But as law enforcement crackdowns removed these gang bosses, a younger and more ruthless generation of leaders emerged. Gang structures multiplied, as did the conflicts between them. This is a disorganized violence, propelled by anger and a search for respect and status amid structural exclusion.

The book builds on the idea that chronic violence emerges in contexts of chronic vulnerability. Baird conceptualizes chronic vulnerability as “an intensive impoverishment or exclusion that is historically accumulated and persistent in the same location or communities.” This marginality is gendered, and Baird’s analysis of it constitutes perhaps the most harrowing part of his study. Masculine vulnerability means that young men who lack “licit or dignified pathways to manhood” may find in gangs symbolic, social and material capital that is otherwise unavailable to them. Identity, power, self-esteem and access to money, drugs and women are some of these resources.

Female vulnerability denotes the fact that women cannot formally join Belize City’s gangs, but can access their benefits through “pleasing,” that is, having romantic or sexual relationships with gang members. As women decide to interact with gangs, they also risk being victims of sexual violence. Baird takes a broader look at this issue and finds that both gang members and gang-impacted women often come from households where they experienced neglect and abuse, including rape. When these girls turn to sex work as a survival strategy, they are still in school. Often, they become pregnant, only to find that the fathers want no role in childcare. Among the youths of Southside, the abandonment and abuse they encounter at home result in trauma and anger which, in turn, find outlets in self-harm, gangs, and violence.

Researchers and readers familiar with Central America will have heard of the mano dura or “iron fist” approach toward gangs. Belize has pursued a similar strategy of moral panic and suppression, with similarly tragic results in terms of prison overcrowding and murder rates. The spectacle of police crackdowns is what makes them appealing to popularity-hungry politicians. At the same time, governments have often negotiated violence reductions with the gangs. Baird notes that the splintering of these groups has made truces more difficult. For the most part, however, such peace efforts have been hampered by limited jobs and support services for their members. As part of their “garrison politics” or clientelist practices, the parties continue to use gangs to buy or coerce votes during election campaigns. But their fragmented nature is making these groups decreasingly useful to their political masters.

Years before writing From South Central to Southside, Baird himself designed a donor-funded pilot project aimed at actual and potential gang members. Through mentoring and motivational speakers, the initiative encouraged young men to find positive alternatives to gangs. In practice, the social workers running the program found they needed to add a soup kitchen and help youths get an ID that would allow them get formal jobs. The author acknowledges the complexities of gang interventions, but he stresses that Belize can only hope to reduce chronic violence if it also reduces chronic vulnerability.

As a work of applied research, From South Central to Southside engages with the experiences of marginalized young men typically viewed as perpetrators, rather than as victims. It reflects on a white British ethnographer’s role in a postcolonial country, his assumptions and his intentions. What Baird hopes to achieve with this book is both simple and difficult. He presents chronic vulnerability not only as an analytical device, but also as a “discourse challenge” to punitive policies that distract from the social roots of gangs. Baird’s “discourse challenge” is there for people to think about. It cannot do more than that.

Society and the state need to move, the author maintains, “from seeing poor young Black and Brown men in gangs as the protagonists of violence, to seeing vulnerability as the protagonist of violence.” He intends for the book to encourage Belizeans to discuss and find solutions. Realistically, we might ask, what possibilities for change exist when subjugation has depleted people’s resilience? Readers will discover that Baird’s findings and arguments are consistent with studies of gangs and urban violence elsewhere in the Americas. The fact that relevant research evidence exists but tends to be disregarded is frustrating, but it makes From South Central to Southside an edifying read.

Sonja Wolf is an international relations scholar and author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (University of Texas Press, 2017). She is a Research Professor with the School of Government and Economics at the Panamerican University, Mexico City.

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