[upbeat music]
It seems anthropology is everywhere these days, and that's no coincidence [horn honks]
because anthropologists are everywhere these days.
[upbeat drumming]
Anthropology [dog barks] is the study of us.
Our clothes. Our homes. Our bodies.
How we talk and how we think.
Our past, present, and future.
It's all anthropology.
[music increases]
The American Anthropological Association has created a video series to showcase how
anthropologists are tackling the world's most pressing problems and making remarkable
contributions to human understanding.
[music fades out]
Yeah, my name is Diego Vigil. [upbeat music] I am an urban anthropologist. [trumpets]
The anthropology profession. They do a lot of stuff with people trying to help them 
resolve problems that they have. To me, that is the main goal of social science.
To study the world, to understand that, and to bring about some changes that are gonna be
beneficial for individuals or large groups of people, even all of humanity.
Early on, I was lucky to sort of become an observer, a watcher, a questioner, 
a metiche, as we say in Mexican cultures. 
I learn from people on the street what their life is like, and write about it,
and report about it, and testify in court about it. 
Law enforcement, district attorneys, police like to say that they have a new law.
It's been here since 1988.
It's called a gang injunction. 
The gang injunction is not as pure an idea as they'd been made to be. 
On the case of Chapman, you know, how do we develop? 
How do we get land? How do we, you know, get it cheap?
A geographer from USC has done a series of studies. 
He looked at all the gang injunctions in LA. The gangs that were targeted 
were the ones that were near areas they were gentrifying. 
There's a way of getting rid of Mexicans. Urban renewal's an old pattern.
Get rid of the Mexican neighborhoods. That's how Dodgers got Dodger Stadium, 
when they got rid of [Spanish term], you know, Chavez Ravine.
So that gang injunction went to the federal courts, 
and I was there because I had to testify on behalf of the rural, social nature of that community.
Now, the guys could grow up together. Some are gang members, some are not,
but they're still friends, and the court was very quiet.
Couple of DAs from the Orange County area walked in, and 
believe me, they looked like mafiosos. 
Heavy. Burly. Mean. I'm the law. I'm the man. 
I got up to testify, and they got up to cross-examine, 
and they started trying to, you know, discredit my testimony. 
The judge stopped them, on more than one occasion.
He shut them up, and they just sat there like little mafiosos with their thumb in their mouth.
We won the case. That was the first gang injunction case that had ever been won.
From that time on, those courts in Orange County have very careful --- the DA is very careful
about how they made out a gang injunction, and I feel proud as an anthropologist
to have played a role in slowing down a draconian law. 
It's not enough just to understand the world. We got to change it.
[upbeat music with trumpets]
