Directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker and lifelong LA resident Stacy Peralta, and financed by NBA star Baron Davis and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Stephen Luczo, Made in America tells the story of the Crips and Bloods, South Los Angeles’ two most infamous African-American gangs.
Combining unprecedented access to ACTIVE GANGS—including Blood and Crip sets from neighborhoods all over South Los Angeles—contemporary interviews, political and social commentary, both current and rare archival footage, Made in America transcends the typical lurid expose style and instead offers a compelling, character-driven documentary narrative which chronicles the decades-long cycle of destruction and despair that defines modern gang culture.
The film opens with a graphic segment depicting the shocking, war-zone reality of daily life in the South L.A., where every corner is potential a battlefield—where over a thirty year period one hundred thousand residents have been shot and fifteen thousand have been murdered. More lives have been lost on the streets of South L.A. to gang violence than to the brutal sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland and yet it continues today with no effective solutions in sight.
Made in America then turns back the clock to the 1950s, profiling the birth of the earliest known black gangs like the seminal Slausons. Here we meet three eloquent original “Slausons;” Ron, Bird and Kumasi. The trio recounts the genesis of LA’s "gang’ culture, while at the same time articulating the volatile mixture of pride and outrage in the face of social oppression and pervasive racism that primed them for participation in the civil uprising of 1965, known as the Watts Riots, and later the Black Pride Movement.
With palpable regret these surviving Slausons relate how, following systematic attacks on "The Movement"—including the incarceration and assassination of many of the era’s iconic black leaders—a culture of hopelessness fermented among African American youth, giving birth to a violent new gang culture personified by South LA’s Crips and the Bloods.
The film chronicles the rise of the Crips and Bloods, tracing the origins of their bloody four-decades long feud, and setting up the introduction of a cast of contemporary gang members whose street-level testimony provides the film with a stark portrait of modern-day gang life: the turf wars and territorialism, the inter-gang hierarchy and family structure, the rules of behavior, the culture of guns, death and dishonor.
More than a simple account, perspective is an essential element of Made in America. Throughout the film ex-gang members, gang intervention experts, writers, activists and academics analyze many of the salient issues that contribute to South LA’s malaise: the erosion of identity that fuels the self-perpetuating legacy of black self-hatred, the disappearance of the African-American father and an almost pervasive prison culture in which today one out of every four black men will be imprisoned at some point in his life.
Also included in the film is an insightful look at the early growth of Los Angeles’ African-American community beginning at the turn of the previous century: its promising beginnings during the economic boom of WWII, despite Los Angeles’ own sunny brand of segregation; its brief halcyon in the 1950s, and its demise in the early 1960s, when this burgeoning black middle class lost so many of its gains in the socio-economical collapse of the early 1960s, as de-industrialization crashed head-on into their version of the American Dream.
This segment leads the film back to contemporary times and an indictment of contemporary society’s continuing inability to stem gang violence and gang culture. The standard “war on gangs” response is revealed to be completely ineffectual and, in fact, a contributing factor to a repeat of the Watts upheaval: the catastrophic civil unrest following the verdict in the 1992 Rodney King trial. Following the ‘92 Rebellion— and despite private civic interests and even a short-lived Crips/Bloods truce—the violence is shown to have continued for the next fifteen years virtually unchecked.
The ultimate cost of this violence can be seen in the faces and voices of mothers who have laid their murdered children into the ground, wrenching testimony to the toll that gang violence exacts from South Los Angeles residents day after bloody day. Here is an entire community suffering from post-traumatic stress, neighborhoods in which every resident, including young children, are being ushered through life at gunpoint.
Solutions are at the heart of the final chapter, as Made in America offers perspectives from politicians, community activists and gang intervention specialists, addressing the issue’s two most pervasive and provocative questions: Why have we allowed this cultural atrocity to continue, and what can we do about it? How can we fix it? And finally we hear from the active gang members themselves, who, despite their often brutal war-zone sensibilities, articulate their enduring dream of a better life. They provide Made in America with its ultimate statement: a message of hope, and a cautionary tale of redemption—of salvation—aimed at saving the lives of a new generation of kids.
