The right hands of the State and the warrior capital: an ethnography of the repressive apparatus against the phenomenon of youth gangs in contemporary Spain.

In Spain the topic of gangs is a an object-problem that since 2003 institutes and anticipates the production of a public discourse on migrant youth; a social fact and a media narrative which allows to fix the dangerous status of new social subjects in urban field, strongly connecting them with an ethnic labelling (the Latinos gangs). Since 2004, the wright hand of the State is devoted to control, punish, and correct the gang experience as a youth form of sociality. This article explores the relation between the gang as a problem-object in public discourse and policies and the use of a warrior capital by penal and police institutions in order to eliminate these street-level organizations. The methodology is based on ethnographic experience realized among police gangs and street gangs in Madrid and Barcelona.