Sito
An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A riveting and heart-wrenching story of violence, grief and the American justice system, exploring the systemic issues that perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the country, through the story of one teenager.
In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on.
But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way.
Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anthropologist Ralph (The Torture Letters) offers a riveting and personal account of the 2019 San Francisco murder of a distant relative, his stepson's half brother. Luis Alberto Quiñonez, who went by Sito, was killed at 19 in retaliation for the 2014 slaying of Rashawn Williams, a murder committed by Sito's acquaintance Miguel during a street fight for which Sito was also present. Sito was initially arrested for the murder, serving several months in juvenile detention before video evidence exonerated him. Ralph, who had spent much of his career studying gang violence, was spurred to investigate the circumstances surrounding Sito's death, which had a profound impact on his family though he himself had barely known Sito. He analyzes the environment that shaped Sito's youth, which he argues was characterized by a form of toxic masculinity, as well as San Francisco's justice system and the structural racism Ralph argues was evident in its handling of Sito's arrest and the trial of Sito's murderer—Rashawn's brother, Julius Williams. He identifies the justice system and street culture as two halves of a closed loop of violence that ensnares Black and brown men and boys. The work gains complexity as he juxtaposes his sympathy for the murderer with his personal connection to the story and his family's desire for justice. It's a gut-punch personal narrative with broader societal implications.
