Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him

AN IN THE MARGINS BOOK AWARD HONORARY TITLE

WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA'S 2025 DELMOS JONES AND JAGNA SHARR MEMORIAL BOOK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE COUNCIL OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION'S 2025 OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD

A "profound", heart-wrenching story of violence, grief, and the American justice system, explored through the story of one teenager (Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted).

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 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 the subject in a profoundly different way.

Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and 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 ultimately, grace.