Stacy Peralta’s Made in America is an effective and selectively comprehensive, fascinating and frustrating examination of the history of gangs in South Los Angeles. The documentary does an excellent job of demonstrating how the mutation of social and economic conditions in black America from the Civil War to World War II created a climate that birthed and nurtured the gang wars between the Watts Riots and the Rodney King verdict, but it almost completely fails to consider what happened after South Central became associated with a pop culture myth, consumed by white rural and suburban kids via NWA records and John Singleton movies. For a film that makes a convincing and valuable case that gang warfare is, at its root, an economic problem, it’s baffling how little attention is paid to how the rise of the superstar gangster in pop culture has impacted the real people living this life.

The film opens with a sweeping arial shot of Los Angeles urban maze, turned literally upside down. Overhead topographical animations of the city––think the Thomas Guide come to life––introduce us to the sliver of land wedged a handful of miles from Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Disneyland, where various factions of an all-black community have spent the past 30 years fighting each other to the death. Beginning in the 1950s and working to the present (with a brief rewind back in time to lightly touch on the migration of African Americans North and West after WWII), Peralta mainly tells his story via amazing archival news footage and stunningly candid talking head interviews with current and former gang members, academics and activists.

Community elders describe being shut out of the Boy Scouts in the 1950s, and forming their own “street fraternities,” which were endlessly hassled by the police regardless of evidence or wrongdoing. A veteran of the Watts riots powerfully describes throwing rubble from a crumbling, abandoned building at cops during that conflict–”You didn’t move it, you didn’t rebuild it; it’s coming at you!”––essentially, using the city’s indifference towards the black community as a weapon. Watts is described not as a spontaneous outburst of anger, but as a guerilla warfare assault, carefully designed to send the message that the local black community was no longer willing to succumb to the oppression of ghettoization. But it’s not long after that South Central’s street fighters “internalize their oppression” and begin fighting amongst themselves over turf.

So begins a 30 year war, fought block by block, mostly by young men, many from broken homes who have no choice but to go “looking for father figures at the park.” Gang life is so pervasive and inescapable in South Central that, in one of Made in America’s most powerful moments, an interviewee waits for the sound of sirens and helicopters to dissipate to answer a question, and after a few minutes, eventually gives up. “All night, all day,” he sighs. Not only is aligning oneself with either Blood or Crip a matter of survival, but it represents the bulk of the local economy–when you start carrying one or more guns to protect yourself and your friends in junior high school, you’re essentially in training for your default career. Virtually everyone interviewed says the gang wars would end in a heartbeat if there were viable economic options.

But if this is a purely economic problem, it’s all the more puzzling that people like Tupac and Public Enemy make it to Made in America’s soundtrack but, with the exception of a 30-second offhand montage, are virtually excluded from its content. Peralta quickly dismisses gangster rap for failing to live up to its potential to solve the problems of South Central by making the outside world aware of it. But there’s no consideration whatsoever of how the rise of the celebrity gangster might have altered the landscape. Rap super-stardom isn’t a viable out plan for the average gangster, but how many desperate impressionable teens understand that? What does the community think of someone like Ice Cube, who went from living the gang life to rapping about it, to acting in movies about it, to remaking Cary Grant movies as multi-culti family comedies? When you’re a teenager fighting for your life, knowing that there’s a good chance that you’ll either die or get thrown in prison by the time you can legally drink, how do you feel about record companies exporting your daily struggle to–and ultimately amassing profits for––white America?

Maybe this is my media tunnel-vision talking, but these seem to me like extremely important questions, and it seems odd that Peralta––such a deft chronicler of subcultures and their relationship to mainstream culture–doesn’t have time for them. Made in America has the potential to be a serious work of long-term cultural history, but it all but ignores what seem like crucial issues in the short term.