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Bangkok (AFP) – The crowd roars in the tightly packed room as the broad-shouldered, tattooed men stop pummelling a young recruit and smother him with hugs — completing his initiation into one of Thailand’s “Chicano” gangs.
For the tight-knit group of friends, the ritual embodies a concept of a Mexican-American Chicano culture increasingly embraced in Asia, with sounds, styles and swagger from the United States finding a home first in Japan, and now Thailand.
Dressed in baggy T-shirts and jeans, with bandanas and wraparound sunglasses only partially obscuring their intricate tattoos, Thais can now be seen on Bangkok’s sweaty streets celebrating a fusion of their own and Chicano culture each weekend.
But while the Chicano movement in the US began as a political and…
