Structure and agency in life stories: how to become a gang member

Abstract

The text is an attempt to rethink the structure / agency dilemma from life stories, putting into practice Franco Ferrarotti's (1981) proposal to ‘read a society through a biography’. To do so, we focus on a singular account of the member of a transnational gang. The protagonist was born twice: the first, as César Andrade, in an coastal village in Ecuador in 1976; the second, as King Manaba, in a inland city of the same country in 1996, when he was crowned Latin King. After his ‘coronation’, his life went through three stages: that of the Primitive King, including his emigration to Spain in 2003; that of Conservative King, including his time in prison after 2009; and that of New King, after his liberation and rebirth as a citizen. His life stories is analyzed from three points of view: as a subaltern story; as a chronotope; as a vertical synthesis of a social history and as an horizontal synthesis of a social structure. This last interpretation allows us to read the structure, through the vertical axis of the Latin American exodus to Europe and of the post 2008 crisis, as well as the horizontal axis of the penal and media instances that criminalize the youth of the gangs. But it also allows us to read agency, the protagonist's ability to overcome and be reborn as a phoenix, transforming resistance into resilience.