Keith L. Camacho

This book project examines the historical formation of Samoan youth gangs in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With its focus on Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau and Los Angeles/Tovaangar, this study specifically analyzes the ways in which Samoan youth gangs engaged the fa’a Samoa—Samoan culture—of working-class neighborhoods; the homophobia, misogyny, and racisms of rival gang members, police officers, and teachers; and the protest traditions of the Black diaspora, Māori sovereignty, and Pacific Christianity. This book project ultimately demonstrates that despite their marginalization in society, Samoan youth gangs have long shaped and been shaped by the cultural and racial politics of education, immigration, self-determination, and urbanization in Auckland and Los Angeles.

This project explores the carceral, indigenous, and juridical confluence of power in the mid-twentieth century Pacific. Drawing from postcolonial studies and its related fields, this project examines a series of court cases wherein the indigenous Chamorros of the Mariana Islands, as former subjects of Japan's wartime empire, came under the scrutiny and judgment of the US Navy's War Crimes Tribunals Program from 1945-1949. These trials focused on collaboration, homosexuality, patriotism, and treason, among other categories of wartime recognition, including cases which involved familial, clan, and village disputes.