Studies on Street Youth Gangs in El Salvador and Central America: A Revision of Their Participatory Nature

Abstract

Street youth gangs known also “maras” represent one of the most dramatic social phenomena in the recent history of El Salvador and other Central American countries. This article reviews the different methodologies utilized in research conducted on street youth gangs in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, since the 1980 decade to the present. In addition, it describes how the participative dimension emerged with unexpected results in the study, Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador [Solidarity and violence among San Salvador's street gangs] (Cruz éz Portillo, 1998), which was conducted with the direct and active participation of gang members as researchers. Such approach, called here subject-participant research, differs in many ways from other methodologies used in Central America to study street youth gangs and it is posed here as a more democratic and alternative methodology to access the world of such youth groups from the academia.