LOS ANGELES — What happened to the “gangbanger,” the figure who ruled hip-hop — and, seemingly, the streets of America’s cities — from the late 1980s to the end of the millennium? Americans projected their racial and social anxieties onto this figure, inflating him into a “superpredator,” fuel for the tough-on-crime policies of the ’90s. By the turn of the century, though, the gangbanger’s power waned in our imaginations, drained by the exploitation of the entertainment industry and by the fact that so many actual gang members had been swept into prison.

No place seemed to epitomize the “gangsta” lifestyle more than Los Angeles, with television and movie portrayals of mostly black and Hispanic gang members transforming Southern California’s laid-back image into one of racialized terror.

There was a reality behind the representation, of course — desperate young people who sometimes caused great harm to others and to themselves, and who might have been only dimly aware of the larger forces pushing them: deindustrialization and globalization disrupting blue-collar paths toward the middle class; the interwoven interests and cynicism of the war on drugs that set many young minority men up to fail; the racial tensions between the police and urban residents.