Bread and Bread

Working at Homeboy Industries comes with a certain cachet. Most liberal-to-moderate people love the story of the radical priest who rode his bicycle into the middle of gang fights and refused to see gang members as evil incarnate. Today even law enforcement gets the basic axiom that “hurt people hurt people.” In grant applications, I boast about working with the “least likely to succeed.” Tour groups pull up to our headquarters by the busload, partly because people with tattooed faces are still something of a sideshow attraction, but partly because they’re moved by the idea that all these tatted-up gangsters have changed their lives for the better. Sometimes tourists sit for hours in our postage stamp of a garden, listening to stories of pain, confusion, relapse and redemption from literal killers. So it’s hard to remember what things were like back in the day. In 1988, when Homeboy was a tiny jobs program at Dolores Mission Church, gang members were the subject of fear-mongering ...

1. battle hymn of the rust belt over-achiever “Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity,” writes J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of growing up in a Rust Belt town inhabited by economic migrants from Appalachia, “in which some of the very traits that our culture inculates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” I wanted the book to feel more like its cover. I imagine New York agents and editors sending his manuscript around in emails sprinkled with “zeitgeist” and “the white working class” and “fresh, underrepresented voices.” I imagine them filling an unspoken quota that demands more work by conservative writers (Vance claims a conservative identity, although the book is only lightly political). If that sounds like an ungenerous impression, it’s because the book doesn’t quite accomplish what it explicitly sets out to do: represent for an economic and cultural underclass, and offer some loose suggestions about what this group needs, and ...