For those acquainted with what governing elites in Washington, DC and the US mainstream media frame as highly threatening transnational criminal organizations, La Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang will likely be familiar. Presented as bloodthirsty syndicates based in Latin America and tightly tied into the international drug trade, they embody, we often hear, threats of both a personal and a national security variety. As prominent Republican politician Newt Gingrich argued in a 2005 Fox documentary, one he hosted, there is a danger that criminal enterprises such as these “will use their networks to, for the right price, traffic terrorists and weapons into the country” (221). In Space of Detention, anthropologist Elana Zilberg powerfully and effectively unpacks such representations and, as the subtitle of her book suggests, illuminates their production.

Zilberg is at pains to emphasize that this is not a book about gangs per se, but about how a view of members of the 18th Street Gang and La Mara Salvatrucha as a “new criminal type” came into being in both El Salvador and the United States. She does not seek to romanticize or vilify gang members – they are “neither demons nor heroes” (9), she writes. Instead, her main concern is to understand the “productivity of repression” in the form of so-called zero-tolerance antigang strategies and how they reproduce “that which they purportedly set out to repress: gang violence” (18).

She begins chronologically in 1992 – when the riots in Los Angeles took place, Bill Clinton was elected to the White House, and the peace accords between the leftist FMLN and the military- and economic-oligarchy-dominated Salvadorean state were promulgated. And she ends her book in 2009, a year that seemed to many to be one of great political changes with the coming to presidential power of Barack Obama in the United States and the FMLN's Mauricio Funes in El Salvador. At both ends of this chronology, while they seemed to be moments of hope, Zilberg finds that “the politics of possibility were quickly forestalled” (244).

In demonstrating this, Zilberg takes the reader to Los Angeles – the first half or so of the book's geographical focus – where she examines the dominant framings of the 1992 riots and Latinos-as-problem (in the form of the looter and the unwanted, “illegal” immigrant). These framings helped to cast the very space “of the inner-city immigrant barrio as a lawless place in need of a greater presence of law enforcement, be it the police or the police in concert with immigration” (73). These representations, and their associated practices, articulated with those produced by post-riot redevelopment agencies and counterrepresentations from organized labor, various sectors of the Latino immigrant community, and youth gangs to reshape residential and commercial space in complex and contradictory ways. In showing how this interaction played out, Zilberg illustrates the unequal, albeit contested, power relations at work and how the champions of corporate redevelopment and “zero-tolerance” policing combined to hijack post-riot reconstruction.

The second half of the book concentrates on San Salvador, focussing on so-called criminal deportees from Los Angeles, on whose streets, Zilberg asserts, “the United States is most effectively policing the boundaries of the nation-state” (133). These “forced transnationals” are what she describes as the “shock effects of globalization as it clashes with nationalism” (134) – or, perhaps, better said, nationalisms, those of the United States and El Salvador. In terms of the latter, Salvadorean nation-statism is one in which the line between the military and the police is quite blurry, a blurriness justified in the name of fighting gang violence. It is a struggle that makes efforts by current and former gang member to constructively remake themselves exceedingly difficult. This difficulty reflects in part the extremely fuzzy distinctions between gang member and peace and social justice activists; between “good guys” and “bad,” criminals and cops; between war and peace.

For Zilberg, the local and national contexts certainly matter in the making and unmaking of these categories, but one cannot understand the gang crisis through a lens limited to those contexts as it is also produced in a transnational space, one she calls, drawing on the work of Hugh Gusterson, a “securityscape.” It is one which reflects and is reproduced via the practices and “flows” (ones, she insists, that are “characterized by a dialectic of mobility and immobility” (3)) surrounding youth, migration, and violence in and between El Salvador and the United States. The particular securityscape Zilberg focusses on is a neoliberalized one, one in which freedom of movement for capital is sacrosanct, but international mobility for the poor and non-white is increasingly challenged.

Space of Detention is an important book, one based on a fascinating and extremely impressive body of ethnographic work. While it sometimes gets bogged down in excessively academic jargon and analysis, the book succeeds in so many ways that it merits a wide audience. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars in the areas of law and society, US American and Latin American studies, anthropology, geography, and sociology would benefit greatly from deep engagement with Zilberg's text.