Blood in the Fields: Ten Years Inside California’s Nuestra Familia Gang

Journalist Reynolds’s debut offers a well sourced account of the most important criminal organization you’ve never heard of: Nuestra Familia, a violent prison gang that controls drug trafficking in the correctional facilities and agricultural towns of Northern California. Nuestra Familia poses special challenges for law enforcement, as Reynolds well documents. Only career criminals can advance in its hierarchy, and its top brass operate out of supermax prisons—making the organization extremely difficult to infiltrate. Efforts to dismantle it have, in consequence, resorted to questionable tactics. Reynolds is especially critical of Operation Black Widow, the late-1990s federal initiative that was marred by its improper use of criminal informants and endangered public safety. Individual gang members receive humanizing attention from Reynolds, as do their girlfriends, their families, and their victims. Among the gangbangers, Reynolds finds duty and loyalty in abundance—albeit perverted to criminal ends. These “character” portrayals are valuable, as they demonstrate the complex ties that bind gang members to each other and the gang. Whenever Reynolds’s treatment turns too “fiction-like,” however, her narrative falters. When characterizing emotional states she often lapses into cliché; her strength lies in gathering and assessing of facts. Fortunately, her account of Nuestra Familia need not be a triumph of imaginative literature in order to register as substantive, compelling, and important. (Sept.)