Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (no. 60) was first published in 1994. It has sold more than 400,000 copies. Josephine Metcalf called it the very prototype of the modern street- gang autobiography. And it is very much a Los Angeles story.

Monster Kody's Los Angeles has a long history of racial intolerance and segregation— first, de jure segregation (which lasted in L.A. until 1948) and then de facto (that more comfortable form of segregation which allows even university Marxists to live in nice, white neighborhoods with clear consciences). And as the L.A. economy became ever more suburbanized and globalized, decent jobs for the uneducated were ever more difficult to find in South Central L.A. Those African Americans who could find middle- class employment were likely themselves to flee to the suburbs, often one of the African American suburbs, Inglewood, say, or Carson, taking with them their education, values, votes, work ethic and influence. In the city itself, in the 1980s, when Kody was growing up, African American youth unemployment hovered near 50 percent, and the dropout rate in inner- city high schools was 30– 50 percent (Davis 1992: 304– 07). The result was a degree of alienation unusual even by American standards. And so, as the youth of other urban ethnic groups had done before them, some African Americans, Latinos and Asians in Los Angeles joined street gangs. At a time, then, when the South American Yanomami and Shuar warrior cultures were on the way to pacification, warrior tribes were thriving in Kody's L.A.

Kody certainly thought of himself as a warrior. After one of his raids, he writes, “I felt like a Native American on horseback retreating back to my camp after slaying the enemy” (174). And I soon lost track of the number of people that Kody boasts of having killed or maimed. I use the word “boasts” advisedly: Kody's autobiography is meant to tell his coup tales, to increase his reputation. These stories define him, give his measure, allow us to understand his fame (Figure I.2).