Jumped In Read online

  As if listening to my internal monologue, one elderly woman, probably a grandmother, observes, “Just a baby, just a baby,” shaking her head as she walks back to her white frame bungalow.

  It is another forty minutes before things settle down. After the body is taken away and Khalid Washington disappears into the night and the cops drive off to their next radio call and people go back to hiding behind their locked doors, I linger at the scene. And I cannot stop thinking, despite the noise and the chaos and the resignation of so many involved, about him. That nameless boy, his body the first to reach me after so many funerals, so much death.

  I am crying again. I keep thinking of H. Rap Brown’s folk wisdom, “Violence is as American as apple pie.” I keep thinking of the fifteen-year-old who told me he was “just trippin’, just trippin’” after he shot the four-year-old son of a rival gang member. I keep thinking of Father Greg Boyle and his motto, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

  I am standing on the street, thinking of the body and becoming aware of the noise of the freeway traffic a few blocks away. Its steady and persistent hum tells me that life in Los Angeles goes on, oblivious, despite this dead boy, despite the violence, and despite the “gang problem.” I don’t realize it yet but it is one of those very few moments in my life when, as the saying goes, a door opens and the future begins. Because of this night, I feel alive and determined to understand.

  Two. Chameleon

  No one wants to tell the truth—that gangs have been here as long as there’s been the City of the Angels. We are some of those angels. Or devils.

  —Agustin Lizama

  A few months later, at the end of 2002, the National Youth Gang Center reports that there are 731,500 known gang members in the United States. Of these, Los Angeles County counted 80,000 active gang members, making up 1,200 different gangs. This means that roughly one out of every eight active gang members in America was living in Los Angeles. I keep thinking about this after meeting with Lee Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who has just given me that week’s “official” list with the names of every gang set and clique in Los Angeles County. The list numbers somewhere around 6,000—with names as prosaic as “Fuck yo’ mama” and “Playboys 30 Tre.” It will be outdated in one week.

  Trying to decipher the gang family tree from all of this is a fool’s errand. The genealogy of gangs and their history is neither linear nor chronological—it is impossible to understand in Western terms. I am lucky I am an anthropologist. And, after being far from the neighborhoods of Los Angeles for almost ten years, I am lucky to be back.

  I had worked with gangs before—as a neophyte social worker operating out of Martin Luther King Hospital in South Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. Now it was almost twenty years later and here I was, talking to people from the neighborhoods. I had a PhD, a faculty appointment at UCLA, and a half dozen years’ experience in violent environments internationally. I had once thought I would spend the remainder of my career working in foreign settings. But things had changed, and I wanted to figure out what to do about violence that was occurring close to home.

  With the support of UCLA, I was hired to evaluate gang-prevention and -intervention programs. This gave me a reason to walk the streets, to interview people, to ask questions about the neighborhoods. My work was no different than that of an anthropologist who sets out to understand the caste system of India or the problems of youth in Japan. I begin by explaining that I am studying gangs and want to know how to end gang violence. I ask people for their life histories and their opinions. Most of all, I listen. Along with the black and brown “neighborhoods,” people in community agencies, government offices, and public schools have found that I am willing to go anywhere and talk to anyone to learn about gangs. This forms the substance of my writing and research. Most of the research is not published. Instead it finds its way into evaluation reports and curriculum guides about what is needed to keep kids out of gangs or what works effectively with former gang members. But I know that I am doing something beyond conventional research.

  I want to understand the truth about gang members and the reality of their lives. I do not devise formal questionnaires. Instead, I depend on people in the streets. This includes law enforcement officers, priests, politicians, poets, and gang members—active and former. This is why, two days after meeting with the sheriff, I am in South LA talking to Kenny Green. Kenny is a former gang member who rarely speaks of his street associations. He is no longer active and works as an interventionist and case manager. I settle in for the long haul. Any discussion with a gang member or a former gang member is always a long-term commitment; whenever I sit down with Kenny, I budget a minimum of two hours. I will not leave his office until the sun has gone down. An account of any event—even the smallest street altercation—becomes an occasion for a history lesson and a recitation of gang genealogy.

  There are no historians like former gang members. They remember everything—every incident, every fight, every event—and they are ready to serve it up in real time. It is a dream come true for me and for any student of the streets. There is no need for a carefully designed questionnaire or follow-up probes. What is needed is trust. It has taken me over a year to gain Kenny’s trust. He knows I will not betray his confidence. But there are other challenges.

  When talking with any gang member, there are invariably things that are “off the record.” They are left this way for two reasons. First, gang members—active or former—exaggerate. There is no way of knowing if they are telling the truth. It is often unclear if an incident actually happened to them or if they believed it happened to them. Second—and here’s where things get murky—some gang members will confide their involvement in past crimes for which they were never caught. I am careful to warn the men and women who sit down with me, “Do not tell me names.” At all times, trust is fundamental, and it is earned once you are viewed as someone who does not talk.

  I ask Kenny to explain the gangs of Los Angeles to me as simply as possible. He thinks carefully, then says, “To understand gangs in LA you gotta remember it’s the blacks and the browns. And the neighborhoods are different, really different. You can ask anyone.”

  Kenny’s words are crucial to understanding the gang family tree. They are also at a far remove from media sensibilities and conventional wisdom. That is because the popularly accepted face of Los Angeles gangs is invariably black. Most people believe there are two major gangs—the Crips and the Bloods—who are viewed as the Hatfields and McCoys of the street. But this simplification is the first lie in all the information about gangs both in Los Angeles and in general. The Bloods and the Crips are to LA gang life what the cell phone text is to the Rosetta stone. This shorthand robs a message of all meaning but the immediate. And it bears no relation to reality.

  What is true is that the Crips and the Bloods, the gangs that compose two main branches of the African American gang family tree, were born in Los Angeles. There is a mythology that these gangs—or neighborhoods—had their origins in the death rattle of the Black Panther political organization. The story goes that as the Black Panthers and other affiliated radical civil rights organizations splintered and fell apart, political activism gave way to gang violence. None of this is true.

  What is true is that the Crips were founded as an exclusively black gang in 1971 in Los Angeles by two enterprising fifteen-year-olds: Raymond Lee Washington, leader of the East Side Crips, and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, leader of the West Side Crips. After several bloody confrontations, they set up a street merger to consolidate their power and territory. This “deal,” brokered in a high school cafeteria, created what would eventually grow to be a loosely connected network of individual sets that engaged in “warfare” with rival gangs—which included murders, robberies, drug dealing, and other criminal pursuits.

  Raymond Lee Washington and Tookie Williams are now both dead. But the gang they created lives on and has gone global, with branches in exotic locales like the
Australian outback, Edinburgh, Scotland, and the foreign and domestic bases of the US military. The Crips remain one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, with an estimated thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand members in Los Angeles County. Long known for wearing the color blue, their monochromatic haberdashery is no longer as evident, due to police crackdowns and growing sophistication. “It’s old school,” a Crips Original Gangster (OG) tells me. “The only thing that don’t change—we still fightin’ the Blood cliques.”

  In gang culture, legends and acronyms abound. “Bloods” is often said to be an acronym for “Brotherly Love Overcoming Our Depression,” just as “Crips” stands for “Community Revolution in Process” or, alternately, “Continuous Revolution in Process.” And deciphering the organization of the Bloods and the Crips is like reading hieroglyphics: they are broken into “sets” that have subtle variations in their colors and are as strife-ridden as the Middle East. “If the Bloods aren’t fighting the Crips, they are fighting each other,” T. Rodgers has told me.

  T. Rodgers and Lawrence Chin organized the Bloods to break the street monopoly of the Crips in Los Angeles. In 1972 the Pirus, a Crips set who took their name from the Swahili word for “blood,” severed their ties with the Crips during an internal gang war. Together with other loose, unaffiliated smaller gangs, they bonded to “found” the gang that would ultimately be the Bloods. Originally the gang focused on extortion and robbery. With the rise of crack cocaine in the 1980s, the gang’s business shifted to drug production and distribution. Bloods sets operate independently of each other, are currently located in almost every state in the Union, internationally, and—just like the Crips—in the US military.

  Yet it is the ultimate irony that street gang “culture” has become so strongly identified with African American gangs like the Bloods, the Crips, and their offshoots, when the largest, most well-established gangs, with the longest history, are not black. The oldest branches of the Los Angeles gang family tree are actually composed of the Sureños (Spanish for “southerners”), or Hispanic gangs, which invariably account for over six hundred of the twelve hundred gangs in Los Angeles County. It’s old school to think that Hispanic gangs are exclusive to East Los Angeles. In truth, their geographic reach extends throughout Los Angeles, across the Midwest and the Sunbelt, and on to the East Coast of the United States. In addition to African American and Hispanic gangs are the lesser-known but equally criminal Asian-Pacific gangs, whose LA membership hovers at around twenty thousand.

  While the Sureños trace their roots to the barrios of East Los Angeles, over the past decade a powerful trinity of gangs has dominated media coverage and seriously challenged law enforcement. Florencia-13, 18th Street, and MS-13 are the new kids on the block in the evolution of Hispanic gangs—and they bear little resemblance to their small, neighborhood forerunners who fought over control of a few blocks in the housing projects. The gang known simply as 18th Street is a fifteen-thousand-member violence collaborative composed of twenty independently operating neighborhoods located everywhere from the eastern San Gabriel Valley to the southeast pocket of Los Angeles County. Each gang faction—or set—typically has a membership of anywhere from fifty to one hundred, but their origins can be traced to the area of Los Angeles known as Pico-Union.

  The establishment of 18th Street represented a shift in the gang endeavor from the more parochial, small gangs of East Los Angeles that included The Mob Crew (TMC), Cuatro Flats, Clarence Street Locos, Big Hazard, White Fence, and El Sereno. In 1959 members of the Clanton 14 neighborhood organized a new clique that offended their parent gang. Clanton 14 core members insisted that the new clique—Clanton 18—either obey the leadership or break off and start their own gang. In the end, Clanton eventually lost their territory and dominance to the “disobedient” former clique, now known as 18th Street. In the end 18th Street also learned an important lesson from the overcontrol of Clanton 14: discipline should be minimal. In addition, any and all new members should be accepted. Leaving the neighborhood is another matter, however, and 18th Street is unforgiving. “If anyone tries to leave,” Kenny tells me, “18th Street will really try to stop them. Other neighborhoods might think about lettin’ you go. Not 18th Street. If you try to leave, they’ll frame you for a crime or beat you up.”

  Gang dominance in Los Angeles is linked to geography: territory is power. As a result, the urban sprawl of Southern California is echoed in the territorial spread of successful gangs. While 18th Street may be depicted as the predominant Hispanic gang in terms of membership numbers, the largest Hispanic gang covering the most territory is actually one of 18th Street’s main rivals, Florencia-13. Their turf stretches from Central to South Los Angeles, and their businesses reach beyond state borders. Florencia tags with a little flower—an innocent icon for such a lethal entity. And they are as unforgiving as 18th Street. “The only way you can leave Florencia,” Kenny tells me, “is feet first. Stay away from them.”

  I already know that the world of Florencia and 18th Street is a scary one. They are two neighborhoods I rarely have contact with during these first months of interviewing gang members. Instead, a few days after seeing Kenny Green, on a rainy night, I sit in a deputy sheriff’s patrol car driving through Florencia territory and listen to a radio call reporting a gang rape involving a fourteen-year-old female victim. When I hear the disembodied voice of the police dispatcher describing the crime, I know Florencia is different.

  While I embrace alternative approaches to working with gangs, like prevention and intervention, on this night I did not want to be traveling alongside a gang worker; I wanted to be riding with a uniformed officer carrying multiple firearms. There were choices I had to make and this was one—Florencia was not a group I wanted to associate with, nor was 18th Street. “They are the most violent,” Mark has warned me. “I don’t want you to go out seeing them on your own.” I had argued frequently with Mark that he was overreacting or buying in to the hysteria of his colleagues in law enforcement. “You are too rigid,” I’d argue. “You are too much a cop.” But that night, I agreed. It was one of the few times I would listen to him.

  I feel differently about the third gang in this urban trinity—MS-13. Perhaps because I have grown close to a former gang member, Alex Sanchez, who has helped me to navigate the transnational gang panic. “I keep thinking about the police and the media and the FBI. They created us, they demonized us, but they don’t understand us,” Alex tells me. “I was MS-13 and yes, there were some dangerous characters there. But that is not the whole story. People have come to us because they want to belong somewhere, because people felt safe, because the system itself didn’t provide the structure that immigrants needed.”

  The demonization of MS-13 stems from the public belief that it originated in Central America and oozed over the border like something out of a monster movie. The truth is that MS-13—Mara Salvatrucha—was established by Salvadoran immigrants in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Central Los Angeles to provide local residents with protection from other Hispanic gangs, most notably 18th Street. Despite its rather matter-of-fact beginnings, there is a mystique to MS-13. Part of this derives from the name—“Mara” is said to come from La Mara, a Salvadoran street gang, while “Salvatrucha” is shorthand for the guerilla fighters of El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, who many claim form the backbone of the MS-13 veteranos. The 13 indicates their affinity with the Mexican Mafia, a US prison gang also known as La Eme.

  The gang is distinct from the predominantly Mexican gangs of Los Angeles: its membership is composed of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Salvadorans. But like other gangs, MS-13 is a confederation of loosely associated cliques or sets with some ten thousand members in Los Angeles and fifty thousand members nationwide—expanding as far north as Washington state and east to Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC. While membership varies, MS-13 engages in typical criminal activities—dealing in guns, drugs, and co
ntract killing. There are also reports of human trafficking along with prostitution. But any member of MS-13 will explain—as I have been told—that their ultimate goal is to become the most powerful gang in the world. And ironically, their goal has been aided and abetted by the US government.

  Many active members of MS-13 are undocumented or criminal offenders or both—rendering them ripe for deportation to their countries of birth. The deportations usually last long enough for individual MS-13 members to recruit new members and then return back to the States. As a result, the largest mechanism for Hispanic gangs spreading beyond borders is deportation—it’s government-sponsored gang recruitment. Left to their own devices, the gang members I know are about as organized as the Keystone Cops—territorial, petty, and far too focused on local violence to ever form an international crime syndicate. I witnessed this firsthand talking to a tagger who was arrested for vandalism in a small Los Angeles suburb and threatened with deportation.

  “You don’t understand,” he told me. Although I was growing tired of hearing that I did not understand, I still listened closely. “If they send me back to El Salvador I will not be safe. I will be told to get new members or they will send someone to kill me. So I will get new members for the neighborhood. Then I will come back here. Then I will get caught again, probably. Then I will go back there. It will not end until I die. And I want it all to stop. I would rather be in prison here than go back there.”

  I have grown tired of hearing “We cannot arrest our way out of the gang problem,” “We cannot deport our way out of the gang problem.” But one thing my rather embryonic understanding of the gang family tree has convinced me of is that the problem is a lot more complicated than who claims what territory and who throws which gang sign. Ironically, no one knows more than the people who are never consulted. There are real experts. They do not write reports or make public policy. They are the ones who understand “the gang problem” and its causes better than any talking head with an advanced degree. The experts are the people who have been or continue to be active gang members. Their voices are rarely heard. And I am determined to bear witness to their truth.