front cover of The Jack-Roller
The Jack-Roller
A Delinquent Boy's Own Story
Clifford R. Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 1966
The Jack-Roller tells the story of Stanley, a pseudonym Clifford Shaw gave to his informant and co-author, Michael Peter Majer. Stanley was sixteen years old when Shaw met him in 1923 and had recently been released from the Illinois State Reformatory at Pontiac, after serving a one-year sentence for burglary and jack-rolling (mugging), 

Vivid, authentic, this is the autobiography of a delinquent—his experiences, influences, attitudes, and values. The Jack-Roller helped to establish the life-history or "own story" as an important instrument of sociological research. The book remains as relevant today to the study and treatment of juvenile delinquency and maladjustment as it was when originally published in 1930.

 
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Jesus and the Gang
Youth Violence and Christianity in Urban Honduras
Jon Wolseth
University of Arizona Press, 2011
In urban Honduras, gun violence and assault form the pulsing backdrop of everyday life. This book examines the ways that young men and women in working-class neighborhoods of El Progreso, Honduras, understand and respond to gang and gun violence in their communities. Because residents rely on gangs and Catholic and Evangelical Protestant churches to mediate violence in their neighborhoods, these institutions form the fabric of society.

While only a small fraction of youths in a neighborhood are active members of a gang, most young men must learn the styles, ways of communicating, and local geography of gangs in order to survive. Due to the absence of gang prevention programs sponsored by the government or outside non-governmental organizations, Catholic and Pentecostal churches have developed their own ways to confront gang violence in their communities. Youths who participate in church organizations do so not only to alter and improve their communities but also to gain emotional and institutional support.

Offering firsthand accounts of these youths and how they make use of religious discourse, narrative practices, or the inscription of tattooed images and words on the body to navigate dangerous social settings, Jesus and the Gang is an unflinching look at how these young men turn away from perpetuating the cycle of violence and how Christianity serves a society where belonging is surviving.

This book will appeal to readers with an interest in Latin American studies, urban anthropology, and youth studies. With its focus on the lives of young men and women, it’s also a compelling read for anyone interested in the plight of urban youth trying to escape the gang life.
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A Jumble of Needs
Women’s Activism and Neoliberalism in the Colonias of the Southwest
Rebecca Dolhinow
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Many immigrant communities along the U.S. border with Mexico are colonias, border settlements lacking infrastructure or safe housing. A Jumble of Needs examines the leadership of Mexican women immigrants in three colonias in New Mexico, documenting the role of NGOs in shaping women’s activism in these communities. Ethnographer Rebecca Dolhinow, who worked in the colonias, uncovers why such attempts to exercise political agency are so rarely successful.
 
Central to the relationship between NGOs and women activists in colonias, Dolhinow argues, is the looming presence of the neoliberal political project. In particular, the discourses of caretaking that NGOs use to recruit women into leadership positions simultaneously naturalize and depoliticize the activist work that these women do in their communities. Dolhinow discovers the connections between colonias as isolated communities and colonia leaders as political subjects who unintentionally reinforce neoliberal policy. In the long run, she finds, any politicization that might take place is limited to the women leaders and seldom involves the community as a whole.
 
Surprisingly, Dolhinow reveals, many NGOs promote neoliberal ideals, resulting in continued disenfranchisement, despite the women’s activism to better their lives, families, and communities.
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Just Kids
Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency
Risa Applegarth
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
Although children have prompted and participated in numerous acts of protest and advocacy, their words and labors are more likely to be dismissed than discussed as serious activism. Whether treated disparagingly by antagonistic audiences or lauded as symbols of hope by sympathetic ones, children and teens are rarely considered capable organizers and advocates for change. In Just Kids, Risa Applegarth investigates youth-organized activism from the 1990s to the present, asking how young people have leveraged age as a rhetorical resource, despite material and rhetorical barriers that limit their access to traditional forms of electoral power. Through case studies of antinuclear activism, im/migration activism, and activism for gun reform, this book reveals how childhood both limits and enables rhetorical possibility for young people. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with activists, Applegarth probes how participants understand the success and failure of their efforts beyond the immediate moment of impact. Methodologically innovative, Just Kids develops a framework of reflexive agency to make sense of how participants' activism has mattered over time within their lives and communities.
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Justice at Work
The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
Marc Doussard
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities

 

In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.

Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. 

Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities. 

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Justice For Marlys
A Family’s Twenty Year Search for a Killer
John S. Munday Munday
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Marlys Wohlenhaus was an animated, energetic eighteen-year-old girl. Then, one afternoon, everything changed. She should have been safe working at the town restaurant. She should have been safe in her own home. She should still be alive today. But in May 1979, Marlys became the victim in every parent’s most horrific nightmare.

At once a gripping story and an in-depth look at the grief of losing a child, Justice for Marlys relates the true account of a serial killer, Joseph Ture Jr., who slipped past the law again and again during a three-year-long crime spree. It was Ture who brutally murdered Marlys Wohlenhaus in her own home. John S. Munday, the husband of Marlys’s mother, reconstructs the murder and the seventeen-year investigation that led to the capture and conviction of Ture, allowing the reader to explore the horror, obsession, dedication, and finally the peace that he and his wife experienced in the search for and eventual conviction of her daughter’s killer. Justice for Marlys generates suspense and sympathy as Munday recounts how Marlys’s case was solved through the efforts of the victim’s tenacious family, supportive news media, and persistent investigators.

 Munday gives readers a terrifying sense of the unimaginable grief and despair in the hearts of those who lose a child, yet he also shares his intensely personal exploration of the resilience and power within the human spirit.

John S. Munday is an intellectual property attorney who lives with his wife Fran in Isanti County, Minnesota. He is also the author of Surviving the Death of a Child, a contributing editor for Grief Digest, and a member of the board of directors of the Other Side Magazine.
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Juárez Girls Rising
Transformative Education in Times of Dystopia
Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Working-class girls in Ciudad Juárez grow up in a context marked by violence against women, the devastating effects of drug cartel wars, unresponsive and abusive authorities, and predatory U.S. capitalism: under constantly precarious conditions, these girls are often struggling to shape their lives and realize their aspirations. Juárez native Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon explores the vital role that transformative secondary education can play in promoting self-empowerment and a spirit of resistance to the violence and social injustice these girls encounter.

Bringing together the voices of ten female students at Preparatoria Altavista, an innovative urban high school founded in 1968 on social justice principles, Cervantes-Soon offers a nuanced analysis of how students and their teachers together enact a transformative educational philosophy that promotes learning, self-authorship, and hope. Altavista’s curriculum is guided by the concept of autogestión, a holistic and dialectical approach to individual and collective identity formation rooted in the students’ experiences and a critical understanding of their social realities. Through its sensitive ethnography, this book shows how female students actively construct their own meaning of autogestión by making choices that they consider liberating and empowering.

Juárez Girls Rising provides an alternative narrative to popular and often simplistic, sensationalizing, and stigmatizing discourses about those living in this urban borderland.  By merging the story of Preparatoria Altavista with the voices of its students, this singular book provides a window into the possibilities and complexities of coming of age during a dystopic era in which youth hold on to their critical hope and cultivate their wisdom even as the options for the future appear to crumble before their eyes.

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