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Mexican American youth represent one of the fastest growing subpopulations with persons of Mexican origin comprising approximately 65 % of the Hispanic population in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). Mexican Americans also represent a disproportionate percentage of both substance using and gang populations (Valdez and Sifaneck 2004). In part, this may be due to both a young Mexican American age composition that reflects immigration patterns and an age-graded proclivity towards adolescent substance use and gang membership. In addition, due to socioeconomic disadvantages, Mexican American youth may be at an elevated risk for compromised social bonds and subsequent delinquent behaviors. This chapter employs a life course perspective to examine the extent that adolescent informal social control processes mediate the relationship between gang memberships and adolescent delinquent behavior in a population of young Mexican Americans.

In this chapter, we address how ecological and spatial factors contribute to behaviors that led to heroin use among Mexican-origin persons in the United States. Most of this contemporary drug using population is embedded in socio-economic environments that shape heroin use and other deviant behaviors. Using the experiences of San Antonio’s Mexican American population, the chapter illustrates how the dynamics and consequences of heroin use among this group can best be understood when considering the intersection of context and culture from both a historical and current framework. Specifically, it addresses how the constellation of social-historical patterns of inequality, ecological and deviance containment, and proximity to vice districts in San Antonio sustained and exacerbated heroin use among this population. What emerges from this analysis is how these historical precedents together with ecological and urban spatial processes provide a theoretical framework that helps to explain Mexican American heroin practices.