The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules

The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rulesis a wonderful testament to the power of ethnography and street-level observations of various alternative means of violence suppression. It provides the possibility of the state resourcing alternative institutions as a means to alleviate inequality. Importantly, these institutions include public education, the churches, and various nonprofit groups who choose to work in high-crime communities. ~International Criminal Justice Review

Martinez undertakes a critical and relevant topic that contributes across many fields. His rich, extensive ethnographic work captures the nature of race relations between Latinos and African Americans in South Los Angeles . . . [and] accounts for how residents do in fact engage their communities in the hope of improvement and how they create their own rules and relations. This book will prove to be a seminal one in its field and across disciplines. ~Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

This book confronts head on the issues of violence and social disorganization among the poor. Cid Martinez has provided new insights into the workings of various local institutions in establishing social order. This is an excellent example of ethnography at its best and an important contribution to the field. ~Martín Sánchez-Jankowski,author of Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods

In this compelling ethnography, Cid Martinez crosses institutional settings to understand how violence is managed by residents of the inner city. He meticulously describes how informal institutions create a rule of law when the state fails to penetrate the social order. Martinezs assessment of alternative governance in the inner city is a brilliant work of urban sociology providing a perfect balance between thick description and theory development. This ground-breaking book makes a timely and crucial contribution to the study of urban poverty, policing, violence and race relations. ~Victor Rios,author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

Cid Gregory Martinezs The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules helps bridge two gulfs in the urban ethnographic literature and its longstanding interest in social dis/organization: the limited attention paid to interracial neighborhoods and the implications of the rise of Latin American immigration, particularly in neighborhoods formerly segregated along white-black racial lines. ~American Journal of Sociology

Scholars will find in the book an important argument regarding the contributions made by some religious institutions to making our poorest urban communities more livable and inviting. ~Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion