Mean Streets

Mean Streets focuses on twentieth-century Chicago beginning with the era of the race riot to cast a new light on Chicago's youth gangs and to place youths at the center of the American experience. Andrew J. Diamond breaks new ground by showing that teens and young men stood at the vanguard of grassroots mobilizations in working-class Chicago, playing key roles in the formation of racial identities as they defended neighborhood boundaries. Drawing from a wide range of sources to capture the experiences of young Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, Poles, and others in the multiracial city, Diamond argues that from the early 1900s through the 1960s, youths in Chicago gained a sense of themselves in opposition to others.