Associative organizing

Associative organizing among youth assumes myriad forms, although early works reveal two forms—youth gangs and dominant cliques in peer status systems within schools—as carrying especially generative capacities for constituting and sustaining youth-centered socio-legal orders.Footnote ⁸ Both forms are recognizable, have unwritten rules for the internal and external management of disputes, and are sites for making identities (Adler and Adler Reference Adler and Adler1998; Sánchez-Jankowski Reference Sánchez-Jankowski2003). Key differences between these forms include how they are known collectively to youth and adults and their degree of formality. Gangs generally adopt names associated with particular locales and exhibit more formal organizational structures (Sánchez-Jankowski Reference Sánchez-Jankowski2003). Youth in the same locales generally know who is in or out of a dominant clique, although those groups may or may not have specific names, and they dramatically vary in their degree of formality (Adler and Adler Reference Adler and Adler1998).

Frederick Thrasher’s, ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) The Gang and James Coleman’s (Reference Coleman1961) Adolescent Society offer classic points of departure for viewing the associative organizing of youth-centered socio-legal orders. Although written a century ago, The Gang remains one of the most influential works on gangs ever published (Sánchez-Jankowski Reference Sánchez-Jankowski1991; Moore and Stuart Reference Moore and Stuart2022), while Adolescent Society is recognized as making foundational contributions to youth studies (Furlong Reference Furlong, Woodman and Bennett2015). Despite their importance, pairing these works together may seem incongruent given their contexts and motivations. The Gang draws on a cornucopia of empirical materials—271 ethnographic vignettes depicting everyday youth life in gangs, in-depth interviews, newspaper articles, photographs, and official statistics—to document street gangs and delinquency in lower-income, early twentieth-century Chicago neighborhoods.Footnote ⁹ Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 15), on the other hand, explains his motivation as trying to understand how youth “status systems” operate in schools while disavowing his research as a “study of juvenile delinquency.” Based on hundreds of survey responses, early social network analysis, and in-depth interviews of youth in ten, mid-twentieth-century, middle- and working-class Illinois high schools, he finds that “[a]dolescents as a whole are not delinquent, and their activities, although quite different from adult activities and sometimes irresponsible, are not in general antisocial or delinquent” (15; emphasis in original). It is not Thrasher’s focus on delinquency nor Coleman’s eschewing of delinquency that makes these works valuable for the purposes at hand but, rather, their extended explorations of how gangs and dominant cliques constitute youth-centered socio-legal orders.Footnote ¹⁰

For Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 126), “gangland” is a socio-legal order wrought by youth in response to “social disorganization”—urban contexts marked by unstable family life with little parental control, precarious educational and economic opportunities, police indifference and coercion, and a lack of “wholesome” values. “Gangland” is known by its distinctive forms of organizing as Thrasher writes on the opening page of The Gang:

Territoriality (“feudal estates”) and leaders’ authority (“barons”) operate as both normative and cognitive institutional pillars in the gangland socio-legal order. A third pillar, again mixing cognitive and normative bases, anchors to both material and symbolic resources as gangs compete for “booty” (for example, alcohol, drugs, or other goods that can be possessed and/or sold) and respond to breaches in established rules (“inflict punishment”).

As Coleman (Reference Coleman1961) signals early on, gangs and delinquency, at least as Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) used the terms, rarely appear in Adolescent Society. Yet “adolescent social worlds” are nonetheless quite compelling in young people’s lives, owing to the pervasiveness of age-grouped education, which “cuts off” young people from most adults, and mass media, which glorifies youth “subculture” (Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 3). Sitting atop every peer status system that Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 35–36) studied is a dominant peer clique—what teens call the “big clique,” “top clique,” or “leading crowd”—which governs daily youth life in schools and continually records and processes reputations among peers and adults (for example, teachers and staff). Unlike the Chicago neighborhoods studied by Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000), the status hierarchies and dominant cliques studied by Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 4–6) emerged in schools and communities with “stable” official structures and parental control. In this sense, adolescent society does not exist because of what adults do not provide but, rather, because youth carve out domains in which they hold sway and exert influence in institutions ostensibly governed by adults. As one male football player put it,

This football player paints a vivid picture of how dominant cliques operate. Athletic prowess is the main criteria for inclusion in male dominant cliques, which exert influence among both young people and adults.

Across all dominant cliques, academic accomplishment and social class matter less than Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 40) expected (except indirectly in that family wealth enables male youth to avoid holding jobs after school). Coleman finds that female cliques select members based on “good looks,” the “clothes” they wear, and their romantic links to high-status male youth (37–50).Footnote ¹² The enforcement of the rules of dominant clique occurs through a variety of means, most often via selective inclusion or exclusion from clique activities, ostracism, and various kinds of verbal intimidation and physical altercations, which the football player referred to as “jumping on somebody.” Interestingly, he expresses ambivalence about “jumping on somebody,” which was perhaps a function of social desirability bias in the context of the interview, the unsavory aspects of the practice, or both. Taken together, Thrasher and Coleman demonstrate that youth exercise socio-legal agency to build and sustain the associative organizing that can anchor youth-centered socio-legal orders in contexts with or without general social instability.

Dispute management

Much of the dispute management that occurs within youth-centered socio-legal orders unfolds beyond formal law and the adult gaze. Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 64–67) offers a historical window on to these dynamics that holds up surprisingly well a century later. He portrays peer conflict as largely “conventionalized” via “codes” that regulate intra- and intergang dispute management. Disputes of similar content, yet among members of the same or different gangs, can draw entirely disparate settlement processes. Intra-gang disputes typically resolve through negotiations, unilateral settlement by the gang’s leader or leaders, or simple majority voting of the gang members. In more intractable disputes, “boxing matches” between the disputants witnessed by fellow gang members or private physical punishment inflicted upon a “deviant” gang member by leaders also occur. Intergang disputes also follow a “regulated character,” which involves negotiation and highly stylized confrontations that may include physical altercations but often do not. When physical fighting (“war”) occurs, it does so most often without weapons (“fisticuffs”), although when weapons are used they include not only improvised ones, such as baseball bats or bottles, but also knives and guns. Not all intergang disputes stay within the agreed-upon norms and occasionally escalate to draw “emergency” interventions from other gangs and/or adults, such as parents, teachers, police officers, social workers, or clergy, who act as third-party peacemakers (66, 75–76).

Aside from emergency interventions or when gang members are taken into custody by the police for criminal or other offenses (for example, “truancy”), Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) describes two types of situations when legal officials become directly engaged in the management of disputes involving gangs. The first situation is low-level, police-gang conflict, which occurs, for example, when police bother youth by “try[ing] to break up small groups of gang members who ‘congregate’ on ‘street corners’” (15). These interactions sometimes escalate into physical confrontations among adults and youth and occasionally involve physical violence and end in arrests. The second involves police or other legal officials who try to mediate long-term intergang disputes. In these cases, much of an adult third party’s actions involve attempts to facilitate “truces” between “feuding” gangs. In one example, Thrasher describes an attempted adult third-party mediation by police that failed when only one of the two feuding gangs showed up to a settlement meeting because it did not trust the adult mediator (66). Both gangs later met without an adult present to negotiate their differences.

Coleman (Reference Coleman1961) offers fewer fine-grained descriptions of disputes among dominant cliques compared to Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000), but what he does offer echoes, to some degree, the patterns identified by Thrasher. At school, a great deal of peer conflict is managed via non-violent means, such as ostracism, avoidance, or talking through the trouble. Violence rarely comes into play, and, when it does, it conforms to highly stylized, regulated actions (Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 34–35). Unlike Thrasher’s findings regarding the occasional intervention into gang conflict by adult third parties, Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 36; emphasis in original) reports that adults rarely appear in the dynamics of youth conflict in schools and are “often blind to the fact that teen-agers in a school do constitute a community.” Moreover, youth can harbor ill will toward teachers either because of specific disputes or because adults are “not interested in teen-agers” (261, 286). As a result, dominant youth cliques enjoy especially strong influence in all aspects of youth (and, to some degree, adult) lives both inside and outside schools.

Observations of an informal “code” regulating disputing (and non-conflict-related action) among youth in American low-income urban neighborhoods emerged again during the late 1990s under the “code of the street” rubric made famous by Elijah Anderson (Reference Anderson1999). The setting shifted from Chicago to Philadelphia, but, similar to Thrasher’s ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) findings about how codes regulate peer disputes, Anderson (Reference Anderson1999, 34) argues that the “code” regulates public interaction, especially among Black youth, and was a “cultural adaptation” to the simultaneous economic abandonment and institutional punishment of Black inner-city neighborhoods in large American cities during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ¹³

The code is a bifurcated socio-legal order with its own normative demands and modes of dispute management. One mode—“street”—is common among poor Black male youth and requires reciprocated performances of “hypermasculinity” (Fader & Sebastian León, Reference Fader and Sebastian León2024). To be convincingly street, male Black youth must threaten or engage in interpersonal violence to settle peer conflict, which paradoxically both deters and invites future threats in public spaces. This orientation extends to all aspects of male Black life, including economic activities and the treatment of men and women in personal relationships. The “decent” mode, by contrast, is known by the temperate handling of disputes, especially in personal relationships (among men and women) and extends to generating “respectability” via non-conflict pursuits, such as gaining an education or sustaining lawful employment. Although some research has found affinities between male youth gangs and signaling a “street” orientation (Matsuda et al., Reference Matsuda, Kristy, Melde, Taylor, Freng and Esbensen2013), Anderson (Reference Anderson1999) ties the duality of the “code” to families; some families socialize children and youth into “street” perspectives, while other families lean into being “decent.”

A generation of scholars has confirmed aspects of the “code” empirically (Fader & Sebastian León, Reference Fader and Sebastian León2024) and voiced withering criticism of it as an analytic tool (see, for example, Wacquant Reference Wacquant2002, 1486–1501). Nikki Jone’s (Reference Jones2010) Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence offers an especially gripping interrogation of the “code.” Based on a multiyear ethnography of poor Black Philadelphia neighborhoods close to where Anderson (Reference Anderson1999) conducted his research, Jones explores how Black female youth negotiate what appears to be two overlapping socio-legal orders; one anchored in “Black feminine respectability” (“good”) and the other in hypermasculinity (“ghetto”).Footnote ¹⁴ At first glance, “good-ghetto” appears to map on to “decent street” one to one, but such a mapping obscures the moral complexities faced by Black female youth. Both sets of moral orientations are cultural adaptations, per Anderson’s observations, born of living in economically distressed neighborhoods with little public institutional support or protection. “Good ghetto,” however, underscores the multiple contradictory expectations of “Black girlhood,” including “premature knowledge” as a result of “hardships that force [Black girls] to think and act like adults” (Wright Reference Wright2016, 12) and “adultification” that casts Black female youth as “less innocent” than similarly aged, white female, and Latina youth and, hence, more vulnerable to institutional punishment (Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda Reference Crenshaw, Ocen and Nanda2015). Thus, “good ghetto” is less a continuum than two contradictory approaches to dispute management.

Black male youth drawing from the “code” ultimately resolve the tensions between “manhood” and “respect” at the core of the “code of the street” by developing strong reputations that reinforce hypermasculinity and performative, if not actual, violence to handle public disputes. Even “decent” masculinity can still couple verbal or physical “aggression” with “strength” (Jones Reference Jones2010, 5, 156). Some Black female youth studied by Jones similarly resolve the contradiction between “good” and “ghetto” by investing heavily in hypermasculinity that avows a deep commitment to a “fighting career” as a means to achieve personal and public “freedom” (75). In this sense, they never step outside the socio-legal order defined by “ghetto” dispute management and the social organization of families and allies committed to that orientation.

Seventeen-year-old DeLisha illustrates this approach. She began fighting early in grade school and has fought continuously since then. She volunteers that she can “walk the streets as though I know where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. I do anything I want to, anytime I want to do it. … If I want to go home three o’clock in the morning, I’m going to go home. I’m not looking over my shoulder (Jones Reference Jones2010, 75, 87). Jones (Reference Jones2010) notes that it is unclear if DeLisha actually strolls the streets late at night and what the frequency of her actual fights is, but it is clear that DeLisha believes she could stroll the streets; her account expresses a strong sense of agency in how she understands herself and how she approaches disputing with peers. Yet her approach to violent preemptive and “retaliatory actions” generates contradictory costs and benefits; she acknowledges that anytime she ventures into public, her fighter image can lead to troublesome encounters with peers that range from “non-verbal looks and stares to life-threatening assaults” (77).

Many of the depictions of dispute management among youth found in the works by Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000), Coleman (Reference Coleman1961), or Jones (Reference Jones2010) would be conventionally labeled as delinquency from an adult-centered, criminological perspective. A youth-centered, non-criminological vantage point offers more texture and meaning to youth intensively talking through their troubles to negotiate a dispute, holding an impromptu boxing tournament as a physical form of conflict resolution, or engaging in verbal or physical intimidation to manage conflict through the “code of the street.” All these actions illustrate what Donald Black (Reference Black1983, 34) calls the “moralistic … pursuit of justice” via self-help, which may lead to or curtail further efforts at dispute management. This reframing points to future research or interventions that take into consideration the dynamics of youth-centered socio-legal orders and how youth interact within or across them as a basis for understanding youth dispute management rather than individual young people’s proclivities toward or away from delinquency.

Identity making

A core dynamic regarding identity among youth involves cultivating an “authentic” image—a “real” as compared to a “false” self (Alchin et al. Reference Alchin, Machin, Martin and Burton2024). Authenticity becomes especially important among young people because it signals the normative boundaries and aspirations of youth-centered socio-legal orders. These ideas resonate with Thrasher’s, ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) early insights about the roles played by peer “reputation” among youth and anticipate the importance of dominant cliques within schools and gangs. Thrasher reports how youth become gang members through cultivating a “worthy” reputation, for example, due to their “brains,” “special [work] abilities” (such as, carpentry, accounting, cooking), status as a tough “fighter,” or their “personality” (for example, being able to tell and/or take a joke) (114–16). Gang members solidify their membership by proving themselves through hard work for the gang or by standing up to the police, and they must meet even higher standards of authenticity to be considered leaders, as illustrated by this young person’s characterizations of “George’s” reputation:

The narrator identifies a dominant clique within his gang and lists multiple, substantive aspects of George’s reputation. For example, George is “ingenious” and “possessed of much imagination.” He also is committed to particular values, including “ambition” and being an “A-number-1 man,” while opposing gangs (“enemies”) follow his lead in handling intergang conflict.

Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) also drew attention to other elements of reputation that youth use to define the authenticity of gang leaders, which turn on coercion and violence and emerge out of, and set the tone for, interactions among youth and between youth and police. “Danny,” for instance, “used to have [lead] a lot of gangs. … He wasn’t a-scared of nuttin’ [sic]. He handled a gun well. He pasted [hit] anyone in the teeth. He would jump [fight] a copper too” (121). These latter aspects of youth reputation illustrate what Thrasher calls a “hard rock” youth who routinely threatens or engages in violence (119), and they resonate with the “street” or “ghetto” reputations identified decades later by Anderson (Reference Anderson1999) and Jones (Reference Jones2010), respectively.

Although Coleman (Reference Coleman1961) only mentions delinquency and gangs in passing, the reputational dynamics described by Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) appear similar to what occurs in dominant male cliques. The aforementioned football player tells how the dominant clique in his new school “automatically” selected him into their group as soon as he transferred from his old school because of his reputation. Once in the clique, his status as an authentic member turned on performing acts (“jumping on somebody”) on behalf of the clique. By contrast, dominant female cliques focus on reputations tied to romantic liaisons with male peers and “having good clothes” (Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 37). In these contexts, clique-worthy reputations are as much grounded in interpersonal relations within and beyond the clique as they are in the symbolism of material artifacts (for example, clothes).

Both Thrasher and Coleman consider the consequences that come with attempting to sustain authentic reputations in youth-centered socio-legal orders. Whether in 1920s street gangs or mid-century Illinois high schools, young people like George, Danny, or the unnamed football player could parlay their reputations into jobs or local politics (Thrasher [Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 141–68; Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 315–17). To sustain a youth reputation can also generate negative effects in both the short and long term, including mental health problems among both male and female youth (Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 220–43) or, in the context of Chicago gangs, limited social and economic mobility, arrest, or death. Youth reputations also can bring increased collective scrutiny of youth-centered socio-legal orders as illustrated by police “crackdowns” on gang territories (Thrasher [Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 17) or administrative scrutiny on student bodies (Coleman Reference Coleman1961, 282).

The challenges of authenticity loom large with regard to the “code of the street,” especially for female youth who lean too far into either a “good” or “ghetto” identity (Jones Reference Jones2010). The earlier example of DeLisha illustrates the costs and benefits of being labeled a “fighter,” yet being known as wholly “good” also entails costs. Chief among these costs is what Jones calls “relational isolation,” which directly “reduce[s] the likelihood of … involvement in physical conflict” while largely relegating one’s self to private spaces in adult-centered contexts and “limited movement in public spaces” (54). As a result of these tradeoffs, Black female youth engage in “code switching,” signaling the identities of “good” or “ghetto” contingent upon context (11–12; see also Anderson Reference Anderson1999, 48). Code switching does not go unnoticed by peers who can perceive code switchers as “think[ing] they are better than their peers,” which itself can generate physical altercations and personal anxiety (Jones Reference Jones2010, 12).

In recent decades, reputations tied to the “code of the street” and gang life moved beyond the neighborhood to become commoditized in the “online attention economy,” which Forrest Stuart (Reference Stuart2020) insightfully explores in Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drills, and the Power of Online Infamy. In this new economy, attention is the key currency of commensuration, measured by quantifiable indicators such as “followers” (for example, on X and Instagram) or “views” (for example, on YouTube) that become the metrics through which attention is converted to older currencies (that is, money) via advertising, direct sales, and other economic activities (Pedersen et al. Reference Pedersen, Albris and Seaver2021). The question animating the Ballad of the Bullet is whether and how young Black people living in poor urban areas have accessed this new economy.

Stuart (Reference Stuart2020, 3, 127) seeks answers to this question by embarking on a multiyear ethnography in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side, focusing on Black male youth who upload original music videos of “drill music”—a “hyperviolent, hyperlocal, DIY-style gangsta rap that claims to document street life and violent criminality … the code of the digital street.”Footnote ¹⁵ Stuart’s window on to this world is through a peer group that he calls “Corner Boys Entertainment,” which is comprised of a group of Black male “drillers” affiliated with, and adjacent to, gang life who began uploading videos to YouTube in the 2010s. Authentic, online identities, however, do not begin and end with music videos but involve creating a socio-legal order online through posted staged photos and texts that signal gang-related rules, language, disputes, and identities in which the focal driller plays a leading role. After months of hanging out with the Corner Boys, however, Stuart “discovered that a good majority of the drillers’ online displays of violent criminality are gross exaggerations and at times, complete fabrications” yet nonetheless can carry serious consequences (76).

Many of the most serious consequences emerge from peer attempts to undermine drillers’ “clout” as an “authentic gangbanger” via online searches or offline by catching a driller in activities that cast aspersions on their reputations (Stuart Reference Stuart2020, 78–80, 102). Although Stuart found that the Corner Boys were not nearly as violent as their online “micro-celebrity” personas suggest, the “code of the digital street” still generates a tit-for-tat involving the threat of and actual violence (11). Other consequences involve local law enforcement, which often takes drillers’ social media posts at face value and, by the mid-2010s, used posts in the majority of criminal investigations of Black youth in Chicago (146). Online “clout” also creates “sticky reputations” that limit jobs, education, or the possibility of starting a family as drillers attempt to “go legal” (39, 139). And those drillers who achieved success saw most of the revenues they generated accrue to music corporations or better-known rappers who appropriated in their music the Corner Boys’ videos and posts (153–77).

It is clear that youth-centered socio-legal orders exercise profound influence in the daily lives of young people. The influence of adult-centered orders on youth-centered orders is also profound, although that influence varies considerably and is contingent upon many social factors, including race, social class, gender, timing, and historical and cultural context. How youth-centered socio-legal orders influence adult-centered orders is less explored, and we turn to it now.

Mobilization

When scholars study the upward influence of youth-centered socio-legal orders on adult orders, they most often focus on dramatic forms of intentional collective action through the lens of social movement theory (see, for example, McAdam Reference McAdam1988).Footnote ¹⁶ Kathryn Abram’s (Reference Abrams2022) Open Hand, Closed Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State offers a poignant example by demonstrating how an “unlikely” social movement emerged, led in part by undocumented young Latinas, to push back against Arizona’s oppressive anti-immigrant laws during the 2010s. The broad socio-legal orders that immigrants of all ages, especially the undocumented, have navigated over the past few decades have been especially challenging—a roller-coaster federal political backdrop marked by hoped-for-yet-never-realized congressional immigration reform, endless red tape in the bureaucracies managing immigration policies, increasing detentions and deportations of undocumented persons, and executive orders (for example, “deferred action for child arrivals” [DACA]) during the Obama administration that operated as partial work-arounds for the congressional impasse on immigration law reform (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2016).

Undocumented youth often experience local manifestations of the broad federal brushstrokes of immigration law and policy in ways that are bifurcated by age. While they are children, their proximate social worlds may look very much like their documented peers as they connect to, and mix in, many of the same formal institutions, especially schools (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2016, 58–72). As undocumented children age into periods of their lives when they need formal documentation of citizenship and birth certificates, such as when obtaining a driver’s license or financial aid for college, they “learn to be illegal” as a coming-of-age dynamic that shifts them into a shadowland socio-legal order with few, if any, of the rights of their documented peers. “Learning to be illegal” can also compel undocumented youth to exercise socio-legal agency by purchasing fake driver’s licenses, social security cards, and birth certificates or “borrowing” the identity of a legal citizen. A lack of formal or informal social support in schools and day-to-day social stigma from peers and adults (especially, but not only, white people) adds to these social tensions, all of which underscore a young person’s sense of their identity as “illegal” or “without papers.” Coupled with their own or their family’s economic survival, these patterns compel undocumented youth to “early exits” from formal institutions that anchor citizens’ socio-legal orders, such as schools, and move them toward low-paying jobs with few or none of the protections afforded documented youth workers (120–48).

In 2010, the Arizona legislature passed Senate Bill (SB) 1070—formally known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act—which sought “to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would self-deport to their countries of origin” (Abrams Reference Abrams2022, 1). SB 1070 withdrew nearly all state-provided services, penalized aid to undocumented people, and authorized law enforcement to demand immigration papers from anyone suspected of being undocumented.Footnote ¹⁷ Aligned with SB 1070, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County (the most populous county in the state and where the state capital, Phoenix, is located) volunteered his department to assist federal immigration enforcement through neighborhood sweeps and workplace raids, practices that expanded racial profiling and threatened all families of Latina/x/o descent. In retrospect, Arizona proved to be a testing ground for many of the federal policies and enforcement practices tragically targeting immigrant communities during President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Abrams (Reference Abrams2022) began her fieldwork five years before Trump came to power in 2017 and extended it through his first term. Following clues from classical social movement theory (Snow et al. Reference Snow, Soule, Kriesi, McCammon, David, Sarah, Kriesi and McCammon2019), she focused her attention on the activist organizations that comprised the core of the Arizona immigration rights movement and observed and conducted nearly one hundred interviews with activists from those organizations over her years in the field.Footnote ¹⁸ The depth and breadth of her fieldwork, coupled with its long timeline, enabled her to chronicle the “temporal progression” of the movement and its influence, which is a rare feat for socio-legal scholars (Abrams Reference Abrams2022, 216).Footnote ¹⁹

Open Hand showcases movement organizations largely led by Latina youth, already experienced activists, who recruited older women—often “moms”—to chronicle their lives among other activists through “experiential story-telling,” revealing emotions that “redefined the undocumented experience” (Abrams Reference Abrams2022, 15, 213). Experiential storytelling in turn laid the foundations for “performative citizenship” through which undocumented youth and adults (and documented allies) enacted rights of association and political expression that the undocumented did not formally possess. Through collective action, such as protests, voter registration drives, and rights education campaigns, the movement became a key organizing anchor in a youth-centered Latina/x/o socio-legal order that led to instrumental shifts in law and policy in formal adult-centered, white socio-legal orders.

The immediate instrumental influence of the movement reached its peak in 2016 when it played an important role in registering 150,000 new voters to defeat the 2016 re-election bid of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, electing new politicians who strongly supported Arizona’s Latina/x/o population and securing progressive ballot measures, including Proposition 206, which increased the state’s minimum wage and sick leave for Arizona’s low-income residents (Abrams Reference Abrams2022, 163). The movement also influenced governance policies related to higher education, including a campaign by the youth Latina-led Arizona Dream Act Coalition to persuade the Maricopa County Community College District to grant in-state tuition to DACA recipients (100).

The cultural influence of the movement in the short term proved even more profound for the broader adult-centered Latina/x/o socio-legal order. “Know your rights” training, for example, which was offered through movement organizations, became as much about understanding immigration and constitutional law, and knowing as an undocumented person what to do if confronted by law enforcement demanding one’s immigration documents, as it became a way for undocumented persons to reconstruct their identities around “empowerment” rather than “vulnerability” (Abrams Reference Abrams2022, 183, 199). More generally, Abrams argues that the movement “shape[d] and support[ed] agency in the individual” for both younger and older persons of Latina/x/o descent (10). Identity hierarchies, particularly related to age, became less salient as the movement evolved, as did the processes for managing tactical disputes between youth and adults. Rather than only defer to movement leaders (whether youth or adults), movement organizations settled important disputes via open debate and internal majority-rule votes. Not all members agreed with, or adhered to, these procedures, but the younger and older activists who did believed that these procedures modeled democratic norms and helped sustain the movement (34). In these ways, the movement collectively reframed the normative and cognitive identities—what is appropriate and possible—among younger and older persons of Latina/x/o descent that not only helped change the adult-centered Latina/x/o socio-legal order but also provided cultural resources to influence the broader, hostile adult-centered white socio-legal order.

C. J. Pascoe’s (Reference Pascoe2023) Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High offers another take on youth mobilization. The scene shifts from Arizona to Oregon and from marginalized youth who are undocumented to a socially diverse population of young citizens attending a public high school. The adult-centered socio-legal order in question is not overtly hostile to youth or regimented in its adherence to state and federal policies. Rather, at “American high school,” the administration generated a culture of ostensible belonging across a diverse student body—a “regime of kindness”—while, at the same time, practicing suppression that cools out youth and staff from organizing to protest social injustice (24). Pascoe engaged in two years of fieldwork during the late 2010s to understand this “regime of kindness” by logging over five hundred hours of observations in classes and other collective gatherings and conducted fifty-one in-depth, taped interviews, divided among students, parents, and school staff (195–200).Footnote ²⁰

In the words of students who Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2023, 4) came to know, American high school is “full of the sweetest people in the world,” a “special place” where “everyone stands up for each other” and “accepts the bejeesus out of you.” Students have close ties with staff, including a security guard who, in the words of the president of the Black Student Union (BSU), “does much more than what a security guard does. He connects with every single one of us” (3). She, like graduates, found American high school to be “a place that’s hard to leave” (4).Footnote ²¹ Student affinity organizations, such as the “Asian Club, the Pacific Islander Club, Latinos Unidos, the GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance], the Climate Action Club,” and the BSU mobilize much of the “everyday activism” at American. The BSU’s lead in these efforts became especially pronounced during its months-long efforts to bring “controversial” (from the school administration’s perspective) poster displays to the school to raise student consciousness about “Black Lives Matter” and police violence against Black persons (87). Other collective action focused on the nationwide “March for Our Lives” walkout, keyed to the anniversary of the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, about which the principal announced via the campus-wide intercom system that “we as a school cannot take a stand on this issue,” while adding that the school would record unexcused absences for all students attending (35). In these and other actions, students (working with adult allies) pursued two lines of collective action: one focused on larger social justice issues and a second pushing against roadblocks issued by the administration.Footnote ²²

In their mobilization, student organizations on the political left and, occasionally, on the right pierced the “regime of kindness” with adult allies, following students’ lead “to signal solidarity with students” (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2023, 36). Scholars of legal consciousness and rights mobilization in authoritarian regimes find similar patterns in which oppositional activists must first see through how these regimes make culture control “feel normal and natural by shaping wants, interests, and meanings of relationships” and then find spaces where they (the activists) can take stock to “tailor their actions according to the repression and their interests” (Chua Reference Chua2019, 362, 367). Indeed, the undocumented youth activists studied by Abrams (Reference Abrams2022) may find it easier to recognize what they are fighting in Arizona in that their target is a hard-edged, white, authoritarian adult-centered socio-legal order. Social movement organizations in Arizona are necessary less to discern what to target than to settle on tactics and combat the fear and powerless that many young people and adults feel at the hands of the socio-legal order oppressing them. By contrast, the comity and kindness that dominates daily life at American high school obfuscates injustice and can render collective action to fight injustice that is illegible to many young people. When that comity fractures to reveal the hard administrative power inside, most youth may find it disorienting, even troubling, but not as a call to resist. Youth of color and their allies, operating in small classroom islands of mobilization with activist teachers, did pull back the curtain of “kindness” that revealed the actual realities of the socio-legal order in the school. But the steadfast efforts of the school’s administration to promote the kindness regime while suppressing organized efforts related to Black Lives Matter and the March for Our Lives continued to grip the larger student body.

Abrams (Reference Abrams2022) and Pascoe’s (Reference Pascoe2023) works illustrate intentional collective youth mobilization that attempts to produce both instrumental and cultural change, although the ultimate impacts of these efforts may be temporary at best. At American high school, for example, youth-led collective action challenged “the kindness regime” as it pursued broader issues of social injustice and all against the broader political backdrop of a federal authoritarian regime coming to power in 2016 and again in 2024. Pascoe is not optimistic about the lasting influence of the student mobilization that she observed. For example, she reveals that the school administration countered the efforts of activist students and their adult allies to promote the Black Lives Matter agenda with a demand for “bothsidesism”—specifically, that the police perspective must be presented in conjunction with the BSU’s efforts to display a poster series depicting the stories of young Black victims of fatal police shootings (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2023, 87). While student activists were not condemned or sanctioned for their activism, teachers who aligned with the youth received warnings to back off.

Youth mobilization in the 2010s in Phoenix changed both youth- and adult-centered Latina/x/o socio-legal orders in Arizona, as noted above, but it produced mixed results in the formal socio-legal order of the state. In 2024, Arizona voters elected more progressive state leaders and opted for Trump, and the Arizona legislature continues passing anti-immigrant laws with organized, collective pushback from younger and older persons of Latina/x/o descent and their allies.

Cooperation

What of the subtle processes of influence that flow upward from youth- to adult-centered socio-legal orders that do not involve intentional, sustained collective mobilization? We first came across such processes in our own study of how youth manage disputes among themselves in a high-poverty public high school that works both educationally and culturally (Morrill and Musheno Reference Morrill and Musheno2018). One such practice involved student engagement in what we term “anchored fluidity” through which students long took advantage of an open campus to move heated peer trouble away from the most public places, like the cafeteria, to what they called “sanctuaries” often near or in the homerooms of trusted teachers (45–46, 86–88, 186). Such places of dispute management were subject to interruption when a principal new to the school moved to restrict freedom of movement on the school campus, justifying this action as being consistent with the “safe schools” logic, a downward school-security policy initiative taking hold throughout the country during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Teachers who were supportive of the students’ engagement in anchored fluidity resisted by maintaining their classrooms as sanctuaries, places of comity and peacemaking for students to gather and interact with one another during break times and after hours while teachers caught up with their own work (171–97).

Such informal processes of youth-adult collective action and cooperation are unstable, capable of breaking apart should the interests of youth and adult collectives no longer be aligned. And, of course, they can be broken up by adults with greater authority—notably, schools where principals and their staffs hold nearly authoritarian power over students and their teaching staffs (Chemerinsky Reference Chemerinsky2000). Cooperation across youth- and adult-centered socio-legal orders nearly always unfolds amidst asymmetric power relations and statuses and with adults—particularly, authority figures—treating youth, in Coleman’s (Reference Coleman1961, 36) words, as “isolated entities.” But even the mere exchange of ideas and practices between youth and adults through bare-bones cooperation can be generative of influence that flows both ways, with each taking stock of how the other articulates goals, identifies strategies, and engages in tactics when confronting a common foe or task. Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) offers numerous examples of bare-bones cooperation from “gangland,” of which the most poignant involve the influence of youth gangs on the adult-centered socio-legal order surrounding local politics. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Chicago’s political “bosses” began relying on youth gangs to get the vote out and engage in more unsavory tasks, such as “stealing ballot boxes” or intimidating voters. In exchange for their cooperation, gangs expected “immunity” from legal prosecution for criminal activity (162–63).

Deeper cooperation is evidenced where both youth and adults see a convergence of interests related to shared spaces and constituencies. Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 96), for example, reports that youth gangs and police worked together to provide security for funds raised from “charitable events” for religious and community service organizations and for “neighborhood picnics” and “athletic contests.” Abrams (Reference Abrams2022) and Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2023) offer illustrations of collaboration among youth and adults in Arizona’s movement organizations and among activist youth and teachers at American high school. The unwritten rules governing the parties’ actions and dispute management, and even the underlying normative and cognitive assumptions built into their identities, meshed together to create a socio-legal order that is neither youth nor adult centered but mutually shared across the generations. These types of orders appear relatively rarely in schools or other settings in which youth and adults find themselves and are not perfect. But they typically generate mutual social trust that facilitates disputes being handled among youth without defaulting to violence or other forms of coercion (Morrill and Musheno Reference Morrill and Musheno2018).

Co-optation represents a form of social manipulation achieved through joint work that seeks to reproduce the entrenched power of a higher-status party and can appear as either collaboration or cooperation (Selznick Reference Selznick1949; Morrill Reference Morrill and van Seters2021). Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 163–64) gives us a sense of this practice, such as when youth gangs co-opt police into doing their “dirty work” to protect illegal ventures. In these situations, youth appear to be cooperating or even collaborating with police to achieve their own or mutual goals but are actually influencing police to work on behalf of the gang, sometimes leveraging the name of a political boss to whom both police and the gang are connected. Police can reciprocate co-optation by appearing to cooperate with youth, only to have the latter engage in legally risky activities on behalf of the police. In these dynamics, it is difficult to tell who is truly co-opting whom.

Imitation

If cooperation and collaboration push toward deep, mutual learning in the course of joint work among youth and adults that can lead to shifts in unwritten rules, dispute management, and identities, imitation operates via modeling, often at a superficial level. Thrasher ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000, 159) and Coleman (Reference Coleman1961, 141) both offer examples of imitation, such as when police copy the “feudal” style of youth gangs in their own internal relations or when teachers engage in some of the same tactics as dominant youth cliques to enforce unwritten rules among their own ranks. The online attention economy offers endless opportunities for youth-centered socio-legal orders to be imitated by adults in far-flung contexts, sometimes with a youth “ghetto ambassador” to witness an inauthentic performance by adults (Stuart Reference Stuart2020, 155). Such was the case for one of the Corner Boys, “Junior” (accompanied by Stuart), who “Chad,” a white “wealthy fan” of driller music in his mid-twenties, invited on an all-expenses paid trip to a toney Los Angeles neighborhood. Chad wanted to learn more about driller music and the daily actions that constitute the “code of the street.” When Junior and Stuart met Chad, he affected all the styles he learned from watching Corner Boys videos on YouTube, including complex handshakes, clothing, South Side Chicago slang, and concern about surveillance by police or rival gangs despite Chad not being gang affiliated and the obvious affluence of his neighborhood (155–57).

The “code of the street” is always performative, both compelling and rationalizing actions via accounts (Jimerson and Oware Reference Jimerson and Oware2006). To be authentic, these performances must align with the normative and cognitive expectations of relevant youth-centered socio-legal orders. Cut off from these actual contexts, Chad’s performance represents “transgressive, intimate, yet safe opportunities” to interact with a youth-centered order—in effect, to cosplay the “code of the street” as a way to “shake up” one’s personal life (Stuart Reference Stuart2020, 154). It is unclear how many “Chads” there are watching drillers’ videos and superficially modeling their actions and identities from driller music and posts. Over the past decade, the Corner Boys and other drillers have received millions of views around the world. A key question going forward is whether what began as a superficial imitation of the youth-centered “code of the digital street” may ultimately become more substantial in adult-centered socio-legal orders.

Imbrication

A fourth mechanism of youth-centered socio-legal influence involves what Henri Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre2009, 245) terms “imbrication,” the “entwining” of the interactional rhythms and spaces of everyday life among social groups of differential power. One can still discern distinctiveness among these groups, but their social and spatial worlds overlap, like terracotta roof tiles or fish scales, and ongoing engagement occurs on the edges of the overlaps. As we use the term, imbrication encompasses more than discrete instances of cooperation or collaboration and involves institutionalized “trading zones” of “local coordination” along the boundaries of distinctive socio-legal orders despite the differences on many other dimensions (Galison Reference Galison1997, 783).

Our authors give us glimpses of imbricated socio-legal orders. Thrasher’s, ([Reference Thrasher1927] 2000) stories of the increasing cooperation and collaboration among youth gangs and political machines in 1920s Chicago may represent the imbrication of youth- and adult-centered socio-legal orders. Political figures elected to municipal positions had gang affiliations even as they became candidates for office and leaders in the political machines of that era. A more benign form of intermeshing is noted by Coleman (Reference Coleman1961), who observed dominant youth cliques and adults routinely meshing in and around the stands during Friday night male football and basketball games, places where privileged status of both the adults and the youth was on display. In both of these examples, the distinctiveness of the youth- and adult-centered socio-legal orders is not lost, but it routinely overlaps at certain times and places. The collaborations among youth and adult allies in Arizona and Oregon described by Abrams (Reference Abrams2022) and Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2023) also suggest imbricated socio-legal orders, although, in some instances, these orders move beyond imbrication to become the joint membership of blended, multi-generational social justice organizations. Whether the “code of the digital street” leads to imbricated youth- and adult-centered socio-legal orders is an open question (Stuart Reference Stuart2020), perhaps contingent upon how much overlay exists among the online and offline worlds.