Fruits of War
The streets and prisons of El Salvador are swelling with California’s gangs. During the 1980’s thousands of young Salvadoran war refugees were raised in the midst of Chicano gang culture. Many of those young immigrants joined gangs. When El Salvador’s war ended in 1992, the INS began deporting Salvadorans convicted of gang related crimes back to El Salvador. The floodgates had been opened, and in the last ten years legions of gang members have been sent “home” to a country they hardly know. Finding themselves separated from their families in a strange land, these young people have re-created their gangs as a support system and a wall of physical protection from the extreme violence of post-war El Salvador.
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