The Ontology of Violence: Growing Up Hayastantsi in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles of the 1990s was not merely unusual, extraordinary, or absurd. It was all those things, but more so, it was also a period of visceral violence, where societal cohesion was upended by an eclectic culture of restlessness, confused identity-construction, and casual cruelty. For those waves of immigrant youth whose families had moved to Southern California during the 1980s and who came of age during the 1990s, being Hayastantsi in Los Angeles was an exercise in exuding the ethos of excessive masculinity (the term toxic masculinity did not come into popular use until after the 2010s). Being violent was not the exception, but the expected norm, where every interpersonal, social, or even business-related matters were addressed through stochastic belligerence. In more simple terms, it was the reigning value system, where a pastiche of formal and informal rules, latent honor codes, and strictly-defined modes of behavior qualified the “proper” magnitude of Armenianness. Needless to say, the level and capacity for violence was positively correlated with one’s level of Armenianness. In essence, a certain brutality matrix, unquantifiable yet more real than anything in the Hayastantsi ecosystem, defined one’s place in the social hierarchy.

The ethicality that informed and defined masculinity within this ecosystem was quite straightforward: excess in the projection and the subsequent act of escalated violence was the metric. But this penchant for glorifying violence did not develop in a vacuum, but rather, it was an intergenerational adoration of brute force. It wasn’t the “streets” that induced or produced this culture, nor was it the struggles of immigrant life. Hayastantsis were simply prone to violence, from the discourse in the household to the socialization process with cousins, friends and broader social circles. Yes, there was an undeniable clannish element to it, but clans are defensive structures that resort to violence only as acts of preservation; thus, preservation of the clan takes precedence over a casual preference for violence. In essence, violence is a solution, and not a preferred act in of itself. For the Hayastantsi subculture, violence was both: it was not simply a preferred method of attaining a solution, but more so, a necessary act in the culture’s symbolic order. Thus, at the risk of sounding too academic, visceral violence was a cultural syndrome.

What the culture of 1990s Los Angeles did was nourish and enable the sub-cultural monster that was the Hayastantsi masculine ethos. That I was a prolific connoisseur of that ethos is an intrinsic fact. And what has fascinated me the most is that whereas extensive studies on in-group and societal violence diagnose the causal factors as economic underdevelopment and lack of education, this was not the case with the Hayastantsis. No one was really poor, but to the contrary, almost all had middle-class and upper-middle class quality of living (the Hayastantsi penchant to complain that they are not rich enough does not constitute poverty). Thus, the issue was not socio-economic, it was ontological. It did not matter if you were a successful businessman, a dentist, a realtor, or an academic: in the domain of resolving conflictual matters, your underlying predisposition and preferred penchant was an unequivocal reliance on excessive use of physical force.

The general postulate that the values of this sub-culture are embedded in a certain Soviet and post-Soviet criminal culture also does not suffice in sufficiently explaining its multifaceted contours. Clearly, attributes of the Soviet and post-Soviet criminal culture, which generally exudes anti-system characteristics, distrust of authority, and in-group conflict resolution processes, was observable in the immigrant Hayastantsi ecosystem. However, the vast majority of those who were part of and subscribed to the Hayastantsi ethos were neither criminals nor was their livelihood in any way connected to criminal endeavors. More to the point, many of my friends, myself included, were exceptional students in high school, many of us graduating at the top of our class, with established career and college plans. So what explains this anomaly, how did all of this play out, and how did the ontologically violent ethos that defined Armenianness of the 1990s come to shape the dysfunction that is now inherent within the current-hybridized Hayastantsi subculture in Los Angeles?

The aporia of being a Hayastantsi was not only perplexing for non-Armenians, but it was also perplexing for Armenians that were not Hayastantsi. In no uncertain terms, Hayastantsis found “Beirutsis” as soft, feminine (ղզիկ), prone to fleeing from conflict (թռնող), and generally unreliable in the domain of honor preservation (անթասիբ). At the same time, they viewed “Parskahays” as introverted, risk-averse, non-confrontational, and devoid of masculine prowess. Regardless of the validity of such stereotyping, these were the concrete perceptions that the Hayastantsi subculture had of the other two subcultures in Los Angeles. And to note, all Armenians that spoke Western Armenian were qualified as part of the “Beirutsi” subculture, regardless of what parts of the Diaspora they were from, while conceptualizing the “Parskahay” subculture was specific to Iranian-Armenians. In the domain of inter-Armenian societal relations, Hayastantsis were not only generally avoided by the other two subcultures, but more so, they sought to evade the former’s proclivity to prey on these “less-honorable” and “less masculine” subcultures. Indeed, an ontological propensity for violence makes one’s demeanor predatory, and in this context, beating up Beirutsis, or mocking Parskahays, and generally engaging in endless acts of bullying, was part of expressing late-teen/early-adulthood masculine traits. That this would escalate into internecine violence with non-Armenian minorities, such as Hispanics and Blacks, was the natural evolution of intersocietal confrontational behavior.

So when a Beirutsi girl was dating an “otar,” it was not comprehensible to the Hayastantsi ethos of the time, how her brother or father could tolerate this infringement upon their honor. Thus, throwing her innocent brother from the second floor of the gymnasium, and then being congratulated by friends, family elders, and even one’s mother for having engaged in “morally” upright behavior, better explains the ontology of the act. Or when a Parskahay girl, during senior year in high school, decided to come to campus with a belly ring, not only did this create shockwaves, but from the perspective of the Hayastantsi ethos, stipulated a correcting of this unacceptable behavior, resulting in the belly ring being partially ripped from the girl’s navel. In qualifying this casual act of sadism as proper masculine demeanor, a sense of subcultural prestige was endowed for having had the “courage” to undertake said act.

These small examples are part of a wider collage of shootings, stabbings, major acts of collective violence, so on and so forth. And again, the types of individuals, yours truly included, were not gang members or part of any criminal groups. There was no monetary incentive or economic component to any of this: one would finish physics class, or complete gym class, and then head out to Griffith Park in Hollywood, near the infamous bear statue (“արջուկների մոտ”), to handle business. It was about being a man’s man (կյանքի տղա), one who had gravitas in life, and was in the process of building social capital and developing a reputation. And therein lies the dichotomous anomaly: the high school administration could not understand how high-performing students, in advanced placement classes, could so casually go from being normal members of the school community to incoherent brutes. The community police liaison struggled to find a mechanism of engagement, and the general non-Hayastantsi community looked on with bewilderment, as if we were some kind of a cult. But most did not and could not understand, and even we did not know, why we had such normalized adoration for violence. And this is why understanding the ontology of violence is so crucial: it is deep-seeded, masquerading as something “natural,” when it is everything but.

The generational shift, and the new inflow of Hayastantsis from Armenia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, altered the contours of the subculture. The pseudo-criminal subculture that was dominating Armenia’s social, political, and ethical value system during this period was transported to the Hayastantsi ecosystem in Los Angeles. The authenticity of violence which had defined our generation was replaced with a monetized culture that justified violence not as an extension of an honor code, but a perversion of it for economic gain. The thuggishness of the Russian criminal realm that had become the dominant paradigm of Kocharyan’s Armenia, where self-proclaimed oligarchs, thick-necked bodyguards with their G Wagons, and state-sanctioned thieves and bandits had become celebrities, transported itself to Los Angeles. What has developed since 2010 is a hybridized deformity of sorts, where incoherence and hypocrisy masquerade as masculine values, where manliness is defined by illicit monetary gain, and where an entire generation, from father to son to grandson become illegal cannabis farmers. In a subculture where selling of drugs (and cannabis categorically qualified as such) was deemed to be the lowest and most despicable of acts, by the mid-2010s an entire industry had consumed large chunks of the subculture, where the ethos and honor codes that had defined masculinity were deformed to justify dishonorable behavior. Violence was no longer ontological: it was about money.

And the mecca of this hybridized Hayastantsi culture, which was now a fusion of the L.A. drug trafficking culture, Russian lexical discourse, and a comical emulation of oligarchic performativity, was North Hollywood. Collectively uneducated, crass in etiquette, and vulgar in temperament, the underbelly of all that was wrong with Armenia of the 1990s and 2000s is now the dominant cultural syndrome of the Hayastantsi subculture in Los Angeles. But more to the thematic point of this article, violence is no longer defined by a rational ethos, or a continuous honor code, but rather, by a general cowardly predisposition of shoot-first-figure-out-the consequences-later, which has resulted in a massive “snitching” culture. In essence, for the first time in the long history of the Armenian Diaspora in the U.S., we are witnessing the self-ghettoization of Armenians, with North Hollywood the epicenter of a churlish peasant class.

Perhaps the next generation of Hayastantsis will be different, perhaps they will be less Hayastantsi, perhaps assimilation will take its toll, or perhaps the disfiguring of the subculture of the last 20 years will have a multigenerational effect. But in either iteration, growing up Hayastantsi in Los Angeles will no longer be the case… that subculture is on life support, and does not look like it will make it.