Focaal no. 36, 2000: pp. 117-142 117 In caló, Mexico City’s street argot, the word banda basically stands for young street people in the plural. The term is often used as adjec- tive. Being banda sums up feelings of a shared identity, to street children’s being ‘of the street’ but then in their own terms. It is street youths’ common expression to refer to their lifestyle and demarcate it from others. An adjective as de la banda describes forms of street culture: one is banda when one speaks banda, behaves in banda style through survival and self-de- struction, and when one looks banda through tattoos, baggy trousers, expensive sports shoes and/or rags. As a noun, in contrast, la banda describes a peer group of street children. Such a group consists of three to fifteen or even more persons, in their majority young men. ‘Vivir en banda’ thus means that one does not live with one’s family but in a group of mostly young street people. In everyday street slang, however, ‘la banda’ often indicated a collec- tivity more abstract than the peer group but still more concrete than street culture: the street community. The importance young street peo- ple attach to their banda-as-community could be deduced from the questions they invariably asked when I visited them in the street or in the (youth) prison: “Did you already see la ban- da?”, “Where does the banda stay now?”, or “Who is now in la banda?” This article describes la banda de Gari, the youthful street community of Plaza Garibaldi, Mexico City’s famous square and center of night life. I have done fieldwork among this banda from 1990 through 1996, in five peri- ods of six months or so. Plaza Garibaldi’s young street people occasionally called them- selves ‘la banda de los olvidados’ (the gang of the forgotten children) or ‘niños sin amor’ (children without love, after a famous rock song), but normally they saw themselves as la banda de Gari. This name was actually the ag- gregating device for almost all the street poor that identified with Plaza Garibaldi. These up to 200 persons were familiar with each other and recognized one another as banda. Thus, understanding la banda de Gari as a youthful street community is an outcome of what these young people informed me that they lived in and cherished. 1 La banda de Gari The street community as a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes Roy Gigengack “Historically, ethnographers have avoided tackling taboo subjects such as per- sonal violence, sexual abuse, addiction, alienation, and self-destruction. Part of the problem is rooted in anthropology’s functionalist paradigm, which imposes order and community on its research subjects” (Bourgois 1996: 14). “[T]here is no chaos in any absolute sense. No grouping of humans, however disorderly and chaotic in the eyes of those who form it, or in the eyes of observ- ers, is without structure” (Elias & Scotson 1994: 179-80).