A Brotherhood Woven in Silence

Gang Culture, Masculinity, and Misunderstood Loyalty Among Pacific Islander Youth in the Diaspora

My eyes squint everytime I hear someone say, “How could they choose that life?”

That question always comes with judgment, never curiosity. Never care.

This isn’t a story about gangs.

This is a story about absence.

Growing up with those in gangs and around gang culture in America, it teaches you things - things most people will never understand. You learn how to recognize the sound of grief before it even reaches your doorstep. You learn to measure loyalty not in words, but in who shows up when the sirens come. You learn that brotherhood isn’t just blood - it’s built in the in-between. In the silence. In the bruises that go unspoken and the losses that get buried before they ever get healed.

But none of that makes the news.

What does make the news is a mugshot. Or a headline. Or another brown boy who won’t make it to twenty-five.

This isn’t about glorifying gang life. It’s about seeing it fully. It’s about expanding the frame so that we see our boys before the world makes them into headlines.

So when I write about Pacific Islander boys that have been pulled into gang life, I’m not writing about monsters. I’m writing about your sons. Our brothers. Our nephews. Our cousins. Our students.

I’m writing about what happens when absence shapes a child more than presence ever did. And I’m asking - what if we’ve been telling the wrong story this whole time?

From Islands to Inner Cities: How We Got Here

To understand Pacific Islander gang culture in America, you have to understand how we got here in the first place.

Our people didn’t just wake up one day and decide to trade ocean for concrete. Migration wasn’t always a choice - it was a consequence. Of colonization. Of militarization. Of climate collapse. Of broken promises wrapped in American flags.

In places like American Sāmoa, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, U.S. presence has never just been symbolic - it’s been strategic. Entire regions of the Pacific were militarized and extracted from, turned into stepping stones for America’s empire. And when the U.S. offered migration pathways - whether through compacts or military enlistment - many Pacific Islander families took them, hoping for better lives.

But what we weren’t told was that “better” in America often came with new kinds of poverty. New forms of violence. New systems of erasure.

We were placed in cities like Long Beach, South Sacramento, Tacoma, Salt Lake City, and Anchorage - not because they were welcoming, but because they were affordable. Often near military bases or industrial zones. Often in already-overburdened communities of color.

And then, we were left.

No tailored resources. No Pacific Islander-focused youth programming. No culturally competent counselors in schools. Our boys were seen as either too quiet or too angry - never as kids navigating generational trauma, displacement, and identity crises in a country that didn’t even know what “Pacific Islander” meant.

Statistically, Pacific Islanders are one of the smallest racial groups in the U.S., but we have some of the highest rates of poverty, school pushout, and incarceration. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Pacific Islanders have higher arrest rates than many other racial groups, yet continue to be left out of national conversations on youth violence and reform.

And so, when systems are absent, communities create their own. When schools fail to protect, the streets step in. When identity isn’t affirmed, it’s reclaimed - sometimes in ways that look like resistance, and sometimes in ways that look like survival with a price tag.

Gang culture didn’t just appear - it filled the void.

It gave our youth a sense of family when theirs was scattered by migration, prison, or silence. It gave them protection in neighborhoods where they were constantly misunderstood or targeted. It gave them presence in a world that made them feel invisible.

This is the context people ignore when they reduce our boys to headlines. They forget that behind every so-called “gang member” is a long history of colonization, of migration, of absence. And this country still hasn’t learned how to see them as sons. Only as threats.

The Making of a Gang: Masculinity, Protection, and Belonging

If you listen closely, you’ll hear it in the way they speak to each other. Not just in words, but in presence. In watching each other’s backs. In showing up - when no one else does.

For many Pacific Islander boys in the diaspora, being a man means never being a burden. It means silence over vulnerability, loyalty over logic, strength over softness. These ideas don’t appear out of nowhere - they’re inherited. Passed down in homes where emotions are tucked under the rug, where parents are working two jobs or fathers are halfway across the world, or where military service taught discipline but not tenderness.

Masculinity becomes a performance of survival.

It’s shaped by what they see: the uncle who drinks instead of talks. The cousin who got locked up. The teacher who never learned their name.

And when the world keeps demanding that they be both invisible and strong at the same time, that performance turns into armor.

So what do you do when you’re a 14-year-old boy and you don’t feel safe in your school, your home, or your own skin?

You find the people who do make you feel safe.

The ones who tell you that you matter - even if they can’t say it with words. The ones who’ll fight with you, and for you.

That’s how gangs become family. That’s how belonging becomes survival. It’s not just about crime. It’s about protection.

Someone who’ll show up if someone disrespects your little brother. Someone who teaches you that you do have worth, even if the rest of the world can’t see it.

What many people don’t realize is that gang culture mirrors cultural values - just distorted through trauma.

Loyalty. Service. Respect. Protection of the collective. These are values we hold in Pacific cultures.

But when kids are left to interpret these on their own, without guidance, they become something else. Something harder. Something heavier. And when their pain isn’t named or nurtured, violence becomes the only language left. Not because they want to hurt - but because they’ve never been taught how to ask for help.

The gang becomes the only space where their masculinity is accepted, where their body means power instead of shame, where their presence means protection instead of being ignored.

It becomes a refuge. And sometimes, a trap.

This is what we don’t talk about when we talk about PI boys in gangs. We don’t talk about how hard they were trying to be good - just in a world that didn’t give them the tools. We don’t talk about how all they really wanted was someone to stay.

Misunderstood Loyalty: The Cost of Brotherhood

Loyalty is everything.

That’s what they’re taught. That’s what they live. That’s what they die for.

But what does loyalty mean when you’ve been raised in absence?

When no one ever explained the difference between loyalty and self-destruction?

When the only love you’ve known is the kind that demands everything in return?

In many Pacific Islander families, loyalty is sacred. You protect your own. You don’t talk back. You don’t leave anyone behind. You carry your brothers, even if it breaks you. These values aren’t new - they’re woven into our cultures, our stories, our bloodlines. But when you take those values and place them in a system of violence, racism, and generational trauma, they shift.

Loyalty becomes silence.

It becomes riding for someone even when your spirit knows it’s wrong. It becomes taking a charge so your little brother can finish school. It becomes visiting graves before you ever get to graduate.

And still, we call them criminals. Still, we don’t ask what this loyalty cost them.

Nobody sees the inner war. The way they mourn in private. The way they carry grief for friends they called brothers. The way they punish themselves for not being there. The guilt. The survivor’s remorse. The dreams they bury because survival came first.

We paint them as hardened - but never ask what hardened them. We see the loyalty but never the loss. We see the group - but not the isolation that brought them together. We don’t see how many of them didn’t want this. They just didn’t want to be alone.

And when you’ve been left over and over again - by fathers, by schools, by systems - loyalty becomes a way to anchor yourself to something. Even if that something sinks you.

So yes, loyalty is everything. But no one talks about how much it asks of them. How it makes them sacrifice their future to protect someone else’s present. How it turns a 14-year-old boy into a soldier - before he’s even learned how to cry. These boys aren’t just gang members. They’re walking testimonies of what happens when loyalty grows in the soil of abandonment.

And they’re not broken.

They were just never taught that real brotherhood doesn’t require your life in exchange.

The Role of the Media & Public Perception

They only become visible once they’re in cuffs.

Or in caskets.

That’s when the media remembers Pacific Islander boys exist. Not when they’re navigating overcrowded classrooms, not when they’re working two jobs to help their mom, not when they’re creating art in journals they never show anyone. Only when there’s crime tape and cameras.

But even in that spotlight, they’re not seen. They’re flattened into statistics or stereotypes. They’re either lumped into “Asian” categories where our experiences don’t belong, or cast as violent without context, without history, without humanity.

The headlines rarely say “Pacific Islander.”

They say “gang-related.” They say “violent altercation.” They never say former church drummer, loving big brother, funny when he wasn’t trying to be. They never mention the systems that failed him first. They never mention who didn’t show up.

And when the news talks about gang violence, we’re often left out of the national conversation. We’re too small to count in their data, too inconvenient to name. Unless we’re being tokenized. Unless we’re being blamed.

What’s worse is how often this silence gets internalized - how our own communities learn to look away. How shame teaches us to disconnect from the ones who need us most. How we say “that’s not us,” when it is us. Because it’s easier to believe the media’s narrative than to wrestle with the truth: That this country breeds violence and then blames the child for picking up the pieces.

That the coverage is never about care - it’s about control.

If the only time we talk about Pacific Islander boys is when they’re in trouble, then we’ve failed them before they ever had a chance to be fully known. They deserve more than erasure. More than criminalization. They deserve to be understood. And understanding starts with this: Not every act of violence is rooted in hate.

Sometimes, it’s rooted in pain.

And pain, when ignored long enough, turns into the only language someone has left.

Hope, Healing, and Reclaiming Brotherhood

Not all boys stay in gang life.

Some find their way out.

Some turn their pain into purpose.

Some become mentors, coaches, organizers - fathers trying to give their sons what they never had.

But they don’t make the news. Healing rarely does. Still, it happens. Quietly. Daily. Against the odds. There are programs built by us, for us - grassroots organizers who show up without judgment. Cultural mentorship circles that teach our boys how to turn loyalty into leadership. Tattoo-covered big homies turned youth advocates, holding space for stories that schools never bothered to hear.

There’s power in that. In knowing that the same boys who once rode for the set can now stand in front of a room and speak life into younger versions of themselves. Not because they were saved by the system - but because they were seen by someone who reminded them they mattered.

Because that’s what it really takes - presence. Showing up. Listening without needing to fix. Holding our boys in their softness, not just their strength.

We need more than prison reform. We need classrooms that don’t confuse culture for defiance. We need mental health care that speaks the language of our pain. We need community centers, not more surveillance. We need to re-teach brotherhood. To reclaim it. To remind our boys that you can be strong and safe. Loyal and alive.

What does protection look like without a gang?

What does masculinity look like when it isn’t punished or weaponized?

What happens when we love our boys before the headlines do?

The truth is, they’ve always been worth saving. The world just never treated them like they were. But we can.

We can start now.

What We Owe Them

This was never just about gangs.

It was always about absence.

And what grows in its place.

Behind every Pacific Islander boy pulled into the streets is a story that starts long before the first fight, the first arrest, the first gang tattoo. It starts with systems that didn’t see them, families trying their best with too little, and a culture trying to survive in a country that never made space for us.

We owe them more than analysis. We owe them presence. Protection. Patience. We owe them full stories, not just headlines. We owe them the kind of love that stays. Because they are not just statistics.

They are sons. Brothers. Leaders. Healers.

And sometimes they’re all of that at once, even when the world only sees the worst version of them. I think about how many of them were just trying to belong. Just trying to feel safe. Just trying to protect something - each other, their families, their names.

And I wonder: What kind of future could we build if we stopped waiting for them to prove they deserve care, and just gave it freely?

Because loyalty, in its truest form, is love.

And it’s time we show them what that looks like - without the price of blood.