Gangs in Garden City : How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America's Suburbs

For the past five years, journalist Sarah Garland has followed the lives of current and former gang members living in Hempstead on the border of Garden City, Long Island. Affiliated with Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street, their troubling personal stories expose the cruel realities of segregation, racial income gaps, and poverty that lie hidden behind suburban white picket fences. As Garland travels from Los Angeles to El Salvador and back to the East Coast, she reveals a disturbing cycle of poverty in which families, fleeing from troubled Central American cities, move into America's suburban backyards, only to find the pattern of violence repeating itself. Brilliantly reported and sensitively told, Gangs in Garden City draws back the veil on a hidden, troubling world. This book is an investigation into the troubling rise of Central American gangs in America's suburbs. For decades, street gangs have been synonymous with inner cities. But in a disturbing new trend, two gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street, with roots in Central America and Los Angeles, have ventured beyond our urban centers and into America's most exclusive suburbs. In this investigation, the author, a journalist travels from Long Island to Los Angeles to El Salvador, and reveals how these gangs traversed a continent and are transforming our understanding of suburbia. Following the lives of current and former members, she not only explores our false assumptions about gangs, but also shows how immigration raids, rising incarceration rates, suburban decay, and inadequate funding of schools have worsened an alarming situation. This work unveils a hidden troubling world that exists in the shadows of our own

A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism that explores the startling growth of Central American gangs in the suburbs of America

The Washington Post - Justin Moyer

…a comprehensive history of the transition of Nassau County, N.Y., from idyllic Long Island retreat to posse-plagued demilitarized zone. In muscular, Hemingway-esque prose, Garland weaves an economic and social history of Latino gangs in suburbia around unrelentingly bleak personal narratives of gang members

Provides a look at the major changes taking place in the suburbs due to immigration, poverty, violence, and segregation and the motivation of the youth of today to establish new gangs in previously unaffected areas.