La Mala

I'm sorry to hear some players couldn't imagine that. Before that ULSA faction started up, everyone I knew RPing university students on GTAW were also involved in illegal RP. People are more complicated than 100% legal or 100% illegal, and many underworld types (especially women from what I've read) are expected to have a legal side. I think interesting characters exist in multiple worlds, they show different sides of themselves to different groups, like friends or family or work. School can be a big focus in any storyline where a character is trying to get out of the game and find a better life. I enjoy the tension of two worlds pulling on a character, like their home life against their school goals. Also there are legit real University of California professors (ULSA IRL) who used to be involved in gangs and drug dealing. It's like the gang capital of the world no? And of course, some professors and grad students actually participate in street crimes while studying street gangs. Street gang characters might be less common but it's possible to be involved in gang life or on the edge of gang life and still working a legal job or attending some classes. But I'd definitely expect there to be students who were children of oligarchs, children of Asian autocratic elites, and children of mob style crime bosses. Like do people think these kids are getting schooled in an evil castle in the mountains? The whole idea of the underworld is that it literally exists under the world, everywhere we look there is some crime under the surface. But like people here are saying, I don't think the classes/lectures are really the most important thing for us. I think a super helpful thing about RPing a school experience is the structure it brings to RP. Like we don't even need a faction for all types of students. Like if a character lives off campus and is always traveling back and forth between classes, that creates opportunities to encounter RP and also for a character to experience different vibes. If a character is mostly experiencing just one neighbourhood, I think being in a new environment can help open up lots of ideas. But of course the experience of living in dorms or just going to a big city university can change a character. I was super sheltered and ignorant about so many things before university. It'll be fun to see characters from Blaine County attending ULSA and experiencing some culture shock. I know people who had never left their home county before moving into the dorms before they came to university. These students legit never seen a skyscraper before.

IMO it is in the server's interest to have a news system that won't die when a business faction disappears. IDK how a media faction would get money. If the San Andreas government funds a wire service or something, and it's buying from freelancers and amateurs and whoever, then it also creates a more stable environment for smaller crews to come together and build up their own private media companies instead of feeling pressure to be everything to everyone. People can RP going out and getting news, instead of worrying about having an office or securing ad revenue or whatev. Someone can make a new character and start RPing a journalist the same day. Both the Associated Press and the Canadian Press started out as cooperative nonprofits with major news outfits as members. So you could have the San Andreas News Association (SANA) or something like that, and its money would come from the government but ICly you could say it comes from all the news channels and papers that realistically would exist. You could always have some opt-in global IC news feed, and it would be like "Shooting reported in Davis, 3 in hospital ((story and video on the forums))" and then the forums could have text and pics/video. But I think we can get too obsessed with visuals/audio on a text RP server, like we can pretend a still image has video, I think the important thing news can do is create opportunities for characters to talk to each other, feel fear or worry or curiosity about what's going on, having an awareness of different neighbourhoods, feel that atmosphere. Though I would expect most stories to be delayed by a day or 2, but it still creates a vibe when you check the local news and see trends. Here is a piece from a legit news stringer in Los Angeles (warning: bloody) https://onscene.tv/2-wounded-in-brutal-stabbing-hollywood/ This is a sample of the type of package they sell to news channels. I've seen news RP that involved super long complicated articles with lots of images, but if I was RPing a news stringer I would be putting together super short pieces like the example: one paragraph, maybe a few screenshots, maybe an OOC note saying "your character might see this rebroadcast on the local Spanish language channel" or something like that.

In a past life, I was considering RPing a news stringer. (I won't have time to get involved at launch.) There is a lot of freelance work in media, so maybe some type of media company could be created where they buy stories from freelancers and repackage it? By "media company" it could literally just be one player, like a news presenter or something. Decentralizing news coverage and providing financial incentives could bring in lots of random/gritty stories from people who wouldn't usually be submitting photos/video. IMO that could have more reach than a single news faction that does it all in-house with their own team.

I'm not super familiar with NoCal gangs, but a lot of your post matches what I've seen in research by Norma Mendoza-Denton on gang members in the Bay area. I'll share some info I learned. Looking mostly at Surenas across multiple studies, the NoCal ones seemed obsessed with saying "I'm a Surena because I'm not like a Nortena" but the SoCal Surenas never really talked about being "Surena". The whole concept didn't seem to matter to them. Girls were more likely to talk about their specific gang/barrio, rather than the larger "Sureno" or "Southern" culture. I think the important thing is that a lot of the Bay area kids in the Mendoza-Denton study were acting a certain way not because of their upbringing/childhood, but because they wanted to show "we're different from that other group". Maybe in Los Angeles you don't need to prove you are a "true Mexican", but the Bay area kids in her study are obsessed with questions about being a real Mexican or fake Mexican. I think living in that type of border zone (between gangs of the same ethnicity) can create that drama and tension and confusion. So much of this matches up with the idea that NoCal Surenos "took up the sureño identity purely out of hostility to norteños" In the Mendoza-Denton study, Spanish was "backwards" and English was "snobby". Southern students would speak Spanish and follow Mexican pop culture trends, but Northern students would speak English and follow American (black) pop culture trends. At one point the Surenas try to get Mendoza-Denton to break up with her "gringo" boyfriend. Nortenas would date white boys, black boys, anyone they wanted, but Surenas would only date "Spanish" boys. A lot of the specific elements of this dynamic are dated now, but I think the overall dynamic itself is interesting. They were using symbols to prove they were North or South. Like largehazard was saying, the Southern students were often from rural/working class immigrant families. (The more middle/upper class Mexican immigrants tried to avoid gang dynamics.) Even if Surenos knew English, they would speak Spanish to prove that they were "Southern". It was the same with the Northerners insisting on English. If a kid ever switched between North and South (maybe because their family moved) they would suddenly forget how to speak the other language at school. An interesting thing to me is that so many of these kids probably knew Spanish, based on the demographic data. But in some schools, Spanish=13 and English=14. Adopting symbols/language/code was of course super important. When Mendoza-Denton was talking to an MS13 member, he told her about a Mexican-American boy who started speaking like a Salvadoran when he joined their gang. It wasn't because he grew up around Salvadorans, it was because he joined the gang. This type of shift isn't something I saw as much in Los Angeles research. I don't know the specifics either, but my takeaway from Patrick Lopez-Aguado ("Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity") is that the California correctional system itself can play a big role in defining culture. Sometimes the feeling of gang culture is created by experiences in jail/prison or youth facilities, and sometimes a homeboy doesn't know he's a Norteno, Sureno, Bulldog, whatever, until he actually ends up in juvenile/jail/prison. (Girls adopt this culture from their neighbourhood/family, not from incarceration.) And my takeaway from David Skarbek's work on prison gangs is that the correctional system starts segregating populations when the violence reaches a certain level. When violence spread between Fresno gangs and other Northern gangs, the authorities separated the Fresno gangs, and Lopez-Aguado's work suggests the real Bulldog culture was born after this happened. So I'm just speculating but at some point there might have been a spike in violence like that, so the authorities separated the NoCal Surenos from the Nortenos. Some of these NoCal Surenos might not have even thought of themselves as "Surenos" until they were segregated, and that's when they came into contact with the Mexican Mafia. So maybe it was just a case of different groups taking advantage of the situation. (So I think the Lopez-Aguado stuff matches what you're saying as well when you say "These northern sureños would be exposed to SoCal sureños in prison, who up until then were not aware of their existence.") You can see this on a smaller scale in high schools in the Mendoza-Denton study, where ESL performance could factor into Norteno/Sureno status, often because of who you got put in a class with. The gangs would recruit whoever the teacher put in front of them. So in one case an upper-class girl almost became a Surena because of her class assignment. You'll hear some academics argue that schools are just mini-prisons.