Ethnographic Café

Friday, April 18, 2025 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET

Randol Contreras in conversation with Ranita Ray 

The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles

Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952

Password: 1234

Read excerpts from The Marvelous Ones here.

Randol Contreras acquired his Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of the multiple-award winning book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream, which captures how the transformation of an illegal drug market in the South Bronx shaped and influenced drug dealers to become violent drug robbers. He has also done research in South Central, where he examined the ethnic conflicts between Mexicans and African Americans, especially in how residents interpret ethnic gangs. 

His recent book entitled, The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, was published by the University of California Press (April 2024). It is based on field research in East Los Angeles and documents how aging Mexican gang members struggle to matter in the world as they deal with the traumas of violence, substance abuse, and homelessness. A common theme in his work is the critical intersection of history, social structure, and biography, an intersection that sheds light on how criminal phenomena emerge and how they shape the behavior and meanings of people.

Ranita Ray is an ethnographer, author, and reluctant sociologist. Her work deals with teacher racism; K-12 schools as hostile institutions; gendered racial violence in education; social mobility and racialized poverty; and reproductive justice. Ray's 2018 book The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City recounts the three years she spent with 16 economically marginalized young Black and brown people to challenge common wisdom that focusing on "risk behaviors" such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood is the key to ameliorating poverty in Black and brown communities. Her next book, Slow violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom is an unflinching exposé of the American public education system’s indifference toward Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and economically marginalized children. Ranita is a vigilant ethnographer, cautious of its dark history and unpleasant pitfalls; nonetheless, she believes in its radical potential.