ABSTRACT
This chapter will detail the work of James Diego Vigil and his legacy on the critical study of gangs in Los Angeles. Diego was part of the first generation of researchers from the barrio who went back to the barrio to study and write about communities like the one he had grown up in. His humble upbringing in the core of Los Angeles and Diego’s history of militant activism during the civil rights era conferred an authenticity that had been severely lacking in the academy. The multiple marginality framework he developed as a result of this positionality remains the core theoretical foundation in the field of critical gang studies and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Diego reintroduced anthropological perspectives and methodologies into the field, including extended individual case studies and detailed historical analysis in order to establish context. Diego should be rightly recognized as a progenitor of the critical gang studies tradition that this volume celebrates, moving the field forward from the foundational work of his mentor Joan Moore and making numerous contributions to the core traditions in critical gang studies.
