“Nuestra Familia is spreading throughout the country via the federal prison system, and their numbers are far greater than better-known gangs like the MS-13.”
Known as the Salad Bowl Capital of the World, northern California’s Monterey County is famous for its bountiful produce and for its famous son, Nobel prize-winning “Grapes of Wrath” author John Steinbeck. It is also home to one of the nation’s most brutal and violent gangs. Investigative journalist Julia Reynolds dives in deep, offering a compelling first-person account of a group that has turned a largely Hispanic community upside down and is expanding its reach far away from its start in sleepy Salinas, California.
“It was always the farmworkers who found the bodies as they lumbered into their workdays, whether in a sunny spot on Old Stage Road or, in the case of Sal, in a ditch between rows of artichokes,” reads one passage in Blood in the Fields: Ten Years Inside California’s Nuestra Familia Gang. Reynolds, an award-winning investigative journalist, spent a decade researching and reporting on Nuestra Familia (Our Family), a criminal enterprise that was founded in the 1960s in San Quentin prison in northern California. It was started by five inmates and originally called La Familia Cinco. It expanded to another California prison – Soledad, about 25 miles from Salinas, before spilling out into the streets.
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