Vigil Awarded Textor Prize for His Study of Urban Gangs

Katherine S Newman, Chair
Textor Prize Committee

James Diego Vigil

The award committee for the Robert B Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology has selected James Diego Vigil as the winner of the 2007 prize, based on his contributions to the study of pressing problems among poor youth in the Latino communities of immigrant origin in southern California. Vigil’s capacity to understand the genesis of urban gangs or patterns of education attainment is particularly laudable for the way it connects the experience of children to the presence or absence of their parents.

The demands of the workplace and the social costs of insecure employment wreck havoc on parents’ abilities to sustain their children as they are growing up, leaving them vulnerable to gang recruitment or schooling difficulties. Gang leaders become surrogate role models, attracting young men whose real fathers cannot be there for them during those vulnerable years of adolescence. Parents who are working many hours of overtime every week, or who must make extended pilgrimages in search of work, cannot support their children in their schooling. Gangs fill the void and lead to second generation patterns of poverty and deviance. School failure sets the stage for a lifetime of poverty and social exclusion.

Vigil’s fieldwork in Los Angeles is critical in conceptualizing particular cultural groups, comparative cultural dynamics, and transnational patterns in adolescent and gang cultures. This is the underbelly of globalization, growing in our own midst and across our borders. Because this is a critical problem, worthy of the anticipatory insights Vigil has contributed in his many important books and articles, the committee is proud to award him the Textor Prize for 2007.