![]() ![]() They told him about their dreams and motivations. He visited them in hospitals after they were shot or stabbed and visited them in prison after they were convicted. He drank with gang members at parties, baked birthday cakes for them and met their families. Ward spent the better part of 16 years inside what is considered one of the world’s largest gangs. ![]() Though the incident was a sobering reminder of the dangers of participant-observation fieldwork with hardcore gang members, Ward wasn’t deterred from completing his ethnography of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. His brush with death was a promise and a threat - the USC professor better pass the gang’s background check or else. (Photo/Eddie North-Hager)ĭuring his fieldwork one evening in Los Angeles, Thomas Ward found himself staring down the barrel of a gang member’s gun. Thomas Ward, a USC anthropologist, documents his life with MS-13 members in Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang. ![]()
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