Stacy Peralta’s Made in America is an effective and selectively comprehensive, fascinating and frustrating examination of the history of gangs in South Los Angeles. The documentary does an excellent job of demonstrating how the mutation of social and economic conditions in black America from the Civil War to World War II created a climate that birthed and nurtured the gang wars between the Watts Riots and the Rodney King verdict, but it almost completely fails to consider what happened after South Central became associated with a pop culture myth, consumed by white rural and suburban kids via NWA records and John Singleton movies. For a film that makes a convincing and valuable case that gang warfare is, at its root, an economic problem, it’s baffling how little attention is paid to how the rise of the superstar gangster in pop culture has impacted the real people living this life.
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