Jumped In Read online

  No one had ever successfully explained to me what it meant to be a mother. I knew I felt connected to Shannon in a way that was totally different from any other relationship I had experienced. It did not matter that I had not carried her to term; I felt like I had birthed her. Everything that I had encountered, learned, believed, or valued was poured into her. And I wanted to share my world with her. So a few months after the adoption, I arranged a family field trip.

  It was time for Shannon to see the Watts Towers and South LA. As soon as I brought the idea up, she announced that she did not want to go into “the ghetto.” Sighing, I prepared myself for the latest scene of the Coen Brothers movie I found myself starring in, Raising Whitey. The more Shannon struggled against my plan, the more obstinately I insisted we go. Mark smoothed the way, telling her we could go for a special treat—breakfast at Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles. He could barely make the suggestion before I energetically agreed.

  “Dad is right. You will love Roscoe’s.”

  It was good to have a partner in parental crime. A détente had been declared at home. I had insisted Mark go to therapy and he had agreed. In turn, I had promised to limit the time I would spend out with homies to twice a week. But I had also declared, “Shannon is going to learn about what I am doing and where I work.”

  “You’ll like Roscoe’s,” Mark told Shannon, announcing, “We’re going this Sunday.”

  Shannon settled for the bribe, happily anticipating breakfast and never dreaming it would be accompanied by a lesson in race relations. However, once we arrived at Roscoe’s, there was no question that she was, indeed, the whitest person in the room, with skin so pale it would burn if she even thought about the sun. The only thing that saved her from total isolation in the sea of black faces at Roscoe’s was Mark. “Ooooh, honey, she looks just like you, you can’t deny her,” the hostess told him as she showed us to our table. I, on the other hand, fit in perfectly. I knew this would happen. With the olive skin that came courtesy my Greek genetics, I could always pass. In dicey situations, I rarely corrected the impression that I was biracial or Latina depending on the color, ethnicity, and hostility of the homie I encountered. No one was paying much attention to me in Roscoe’s—but all eyes were focused on Mark and Shannon. The setting did not affect Shannon’s appetite but it did provide her with an opening for the latest round of attacks disguised as questions.

  “Why is everyone looking at us? And why are you doing all this stuff with gangs? Why are you going into the ghetto? It’s stupid.”

  At this point I lost it and demanded, “Just what do you think this fucking ghetto is like?”

  An African American woman at the next table shushed me. “Now don’t you go talking to that baby like that. Whatcha tryin’ to do?” she admonished while I bit back my self-righteous retort: Trying to raise her not to be a racist.

  Shannon’s eleven-year-old view of the ghetto was nurtured more by DVDs than reality—she saw it composed of tall, dark buildings populated by gangs and rodents. But that day, after breakfast, Shannon learned that the Watts Towers were built by Simon Rodia, an Italian, who probably suffered with schizophrenia along with artistic passion. Rodia labored for forty years, taking broken pieces of pottery that he crafted into sculpture. I had arranged through the local museum for a tour guide: a gorgeous African American woman told us folk tales about the towers and recited a poem she had written in their honor. All the bits and pieces of dishes and brightly colored glass that composed the towers charmed Shannon. We literally walked through each tower and examined their construction carefully. I also told Shannon stories about people who lived in the area—adding that they weren’t all gangsters, that most of them had children and families. Several residents who lived in small houses across the street from the towers walked outside of their houses to wave at us. One older man said, “Welcome to Watts, we hope you like the Towers.” South Los Angeles appeared at its best that day—poor, benign, proud.

  “I see why you like it here,” Shannon admitted. “It’s not the way I thought it would be.”

  I had negotiated a truce.

  Seven. Nuns and Bitches

  No one believes I’m in a gang. My mama don’t believe I’m in a gang. That’s because I’m a woman. And I got a baby. And that’s supposed to make me different.

  —Alicia Perez

  Perhaps it is because I am now officially a mother, but I find myself increasingly drawn to the women in the neighborhoods. I want to understand more about their role in gangs. For months now, I have heard conflicting stories about how active women are. One thing was clear, however. Some women were full-fledged gang members, moving far beyond the more traditional status of baby mama. Kenny Green told me, “They’re a part of it now—they are bad—they roll up and start shooting.”

  Various experts had as much trouble as I did trying to figure out just how active young women are. The National Gang Center highlighted a purposive study conducted in fifteen major cities revealing that 7.8 percent of females, compared with 8.8 percent of males, between the ages of eighteen and thirty self-reported that they were gang members. Law enforcement offered a different view—insisting there were far fewer female than male gang members. The only thing academics and practitioners agreed upon was that the actual number of female gang members was impossible to estimate.

  In the past year, both Greg Boyle and Big Mike have insisted that probably less than 5 percent of “at-risk” young women became active gang members. The numbers weren’t the only area where information was soft. Early on, the accounts of “girls in gangs” mirrored mainstream society: young women were the second sex, playing a supporting role. But from the mid-1980s and into the aptly named decade of death—when Los Angeles experienced up to one thousand gang-related homicides a year—homegirls proved to be much more than Dale Evans with tattoos. Women did not just carry guns—they shot them. They did not just hide drugs for their homeboys—they dealt them, taking care of the cash and the transactions.

  All this female activity in gangs ultimately gave rise to reports of sexual violence. The streets buzzed with stories of girls getting “sexed in” to neighborhoods by being gang-raped. In one rumored initiation rite, aspiring homegirls were forced to have sex with a gang member who was HIV-positive. There were tales of bloody beatings using fists and clubs, with no exceptions for gender. But all of this was secondhand. When I start talking to women in the neighborhoods, joining the gang sounds almost organic—evolving alongside criminal activity.

  “We partied together and then they invited me to go on a drive-by,” Vanity “Dimples” Benton explains. “Next thing I knew, ’cuz I was the only one with a license, they told me to drive while one of my homies opened up shooting. After that I was in the neighborhood. When they caught us and locked me up—I still thought it was worth it, I wanted to gangbang and slang drugs and just hang out.”

  Despite all the information and titillation, it takes me a long time to catch on to what happens with women in the neighborhoods. Too long. I am late to the party because, up until now, I have never been particularly interested in women. Hanging out with the homegirls was just not my speed. In my mind, there were two kinds of women—nuns and bitches—and I placed myself firmly in the latter category. Growing up in a Greek extended family, I watched how “good girls” exhibited a version of female dependency I wanted desperately to avoid.

  Because of this I had no use for the girlfriends of gang members. These girls—some of them only fourteen or fifteen—surrendered their lives. As they entered the bloom of adulthood, they had no plans other than giving birth to multiple children and ensnaring a man. Marriage did not exist; pregnancy was the closest they would come to long-term commitment, and infidelity was the aftermath.

  The attitudes of men in the neighborhoods resembled something circa the 1950s. Women were good for one thing—sex; sex with a beautiful woman was even better and, for God’s sake, domestic sex was bound to be supplemented. Of course, all this posses
sion and infidelity caused unending problems between the neighborhoods. Kenny Green was my guide to the sexual politics in the gang world.

  “Everyone thinks that gangbanging is about turf,” he instructed. “No way. Most of it is about women—they make all the trouble. And now there are the women who want to be shooters and slang; they want to be part of the neighborhood.”

  These are the women who catch my interest. I am not interested in the nuns—the girls who behave as if they are tattooed with the word victim. I stay as far away from them as possible. I want nothing of their silent suffering, their fortitude, or their devotion. Instead, deep down, I know I am just a tough little bitch with too much rage. I identify with the female gangbangers who are angry and “down for the neighborhood.” But, despite my empathy, the women I meet are even more suspicious than the men of the neighborhoods.

  “What do you want?” Dimples questions me after I ask her if we can hang out together. I am blunt; I tell her I want to know why she gangbangs and deals drugs. I may be a chameleon, but I refuse to lie. Lying is dangerous; your street credibility—no matter who you are—depends on telling the truth. Gang members come equipped with a bullshit detector; they call you out for “fronting.” Slowly, Dimples and other women I meet react to the honesty I express. Their stories spill out while I am at Homeboy Industries, gathering information for a research proposal I am writing.

  “This is not about girls becoming like guys,” Meda Chesney-Lind, a gang researcher at the University of Hawaii, tells me. “Although the themes are the same. The girls come from toxic, abusive families, and are re-victimized in the gang setting.” I wonder how the women I am getting to know would feel about being seen as “re-victimized.” They openly describe the trauma they have experienced, the abuse they have known. There are stepfathers who demand blowjobs or cousins who force them to have anal sex. But making the deliberate choice to become part of a neighborhood involves something beyond trauma. Sometimes the act of joining a gang is experienced as empowerment. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a male gang or a female gang—all that matters is the feeling of control, with the added attraction of rejecting both traditional female passivity and victimhood. Chesney-Lind sums it all up by saying, “Girls choose the gang for entirely understandable and even laudable goals, given the constraints that they experience in a society that is increasingly likely to police and pathologize girlhood.” The women I know want to rewrite the rules. These are not the nuns—these are the bitches, the girls who want, somehow, to have control.

  In the midst of my research, I start spending a lot of time with Dark Eyes, whose real name is Joanna Carillo. Joanna is a self-proclaimed third-generation gang member. She grew up watching her grandparents, parents, cousins, and uncles all caught up in the life of different cliques that eventually merged into Florencia-13. Her father was killed in a drive-by shooting a week after Joanna’s thirteenth birthday. After he died, her mother supported the family by dealing drugs.

  “Oh, she’s still dealing,” Joanna volunteers offhand, when we are discussing our relationships with our mothers and how we want to raise our daughters differently. “It’s never been a problem. I’ve always told her, don’t fuckin’ do it around me. You can deal, but go away from the house, go somewhere else. I’ve got values.” But a few minutes later, Joanna tells me that she is more worried than usual about all this “business” because her mother is moving in with her.

  “After all, she is my mother,” she explains. “She can’t take care of herself. But y’know, we’ve talked about my house rules. She can’t do any business in front of the kids. There are enough bad influences around the kids without them seeing their grandmother dealing drugs.”

  “How old is your mother?” I ask Joanna.

  “She is sixty-one—but she seems older, y’know? Her back is bad, her health isn’t good, I need to get a daytime nurse for her. My ex-husband has said he would help out. He’s moved into the apartment downstairs from mine.” I calmly take in this tasting menu of insanity and then the stray thought enters: Well, she seems closer to her mother than I am to mine. Who am I to judge?

  “I wanna meet your mother,” I tell Joanna.

  “Why? She’s no damn good. She’s left me so many times. She’s never there when I need her. And she makes me feel like shit. I gotta take her in because no one else will take care of her. It doesn’t mean I love her or she’s part of my life.”

  Women and their mothers—is there any way to escape it?

  So many of the women I kick it with feel both tied to and emotionally abandoned by their mothers. This is not something I expected to find. But the words are familiar.

  I understand Joanna. She is my sister under the skin, seesawing between two identities: the attentive mother, hovering over her baby girl as she feeds her applesauce, and the enraged homegirl, threatening to split open the face of some bitch who has disrespected her. Men, love, freedom. Joanna’s life runs along the same plot lines as mine—but it is much more complicated.

  “It was always there—the neighborhood was always there,” Joanna tells me. “Everyone in my family was part of it, gangbanging and slanging and getting locked up. And of course there was always domestic violence, my dad beating my mom. Everyone feared my dad—he was high up, a leader—he had a lot of power. I figured the only way I could deal with it was when I said to myself, I am gonna do what I gotta do to earn my respect in the neighborhood. I was only seven years old when I started out there in the street.”

  There are tattoos wreathing Joanna’s neck and upper arms. She is wearing polka-dotted acrylic press-on nails and they curl out like claws. Her nose is pierced, and I can see barely discernable scars on her face.

  “Maybe I understand a lot more now that I am older. But back in the day, it became like an obsession—I stopped being a kid—I lost my childhood. And the weirdest part of it is that my parents were proud—they would look at each other and laugh and say, ‘Yeah, they’re our kids’—y’know in that proud kinda voice—they fuckin’ enjoyed what we were doing. No one ever said, ‘What you guys are doing is wrong.’ If my brothers got beat up or got arrested or got kicked out of school—they were proud of them. And when I started gettin’ into trouble, they were all right with it. They thought that was good.”

  Adolescence brought on her first boyfriend, Flaco, and serial pregnancies—a son at fifteen, a daughter at eighteen. In between there were arrests, time spent in probation camps, and a trip to the California Youth Authority. But Joanna focused on being a mother.

  “I’d dress my kids in gang clothes—I thought they were so cute. I thought I was so smart. I dropped out of school and there I was, a baby mama with two kids in Florencia-13 clothes.”

  Then—at nineteen—Joanna attracted a boyfriend who was “totally different. Roberto wasn’t in a neighborhood; he had been raised in a convent school. I guess he was meant to come into my life . . . he was serious; he said we had to get married before we had kids. He was very Catholic and we got married in the Church.”

  But even in a religiously sanctioned marriage—a rare occurrence—she continued to gangbang and slang drugs, refusing to settle down—attracting and discarding men. She also had two more children—another boy and another girl. There was a decade of marriage and infidelity until her husband finally left her. Joanna took up with someone new. But Juan was the one boyfriend who was stronger and bigger than she is and abused her repeatedly.

  “I let him take over,” she tells me. “I don’t know why. He made me feel like he was good, I was bad. He would tell me, ‘Stop dealing drugs, stay home, take care of the kids, I will make the money.’ I liked that for a while. But then he got crazy. He started beating me. He thought I was cheating on him. But it turned out he was cheating on me. One night he kept hitting me and said the next time he was gonna kill me. He got really drunk and then he crashed. When he was sleeping, I packed up the kids, started the car, and just when I was getting ready to go, I started to panic. I couldn’t breath
e. I didn’t know if I could make it. But somehow, I calmed down and made myself drive. I finally got to a friend’s house—someone Juan never met—and she let me and the kids spend the night. In the morning she took me to see Father Greg. He helped me.” Joanna smiles. “He hired me. And he told me, ‘I’ll be here ’til the wheels fall off.’ ” Joanna started working at Homeboy Industries and promptly found a new boyfriend—Silent.

  “It was the first time I really fell in love with someone,” she tells me, “but then I found out—he was married. What a mess! I broke up with him, but I was so fuckin’ angry. I got stress seizures. I was twenty-nine and I sick. I would act out rather than say how I was feeling—I would look to fight with somebody to take my frustration out. And I was looking for someone to love. And that was Luisa.”

  Joanna breaks down telling me this. I don’t know it but I am listening to the most confusing part of Joanna’s past. I have seen Luisa around Homeboy Industries, but she defies any of the categories I have constructed for gang members. With her shaved head and swagger, her multiple tattoos, she is channeling Boys Don’t Cry, but no one is fooled. Everyone knows Luisa is fronting as a man—that she is actually a girl. Greg Boyle calls her Baby Girl.

  “We embraced her,” G—as the homies call Greg Boyle—remembers. “We surrounded Baby Girl with love.” The homies think Luisa is strange or “mental,” but they also pity her. She has no mother, no father, no family. She meets Joanna—who takes one look at her underfed, overtattooed, androgynous frame—and announces she wants to adopt her. The model of multitasking, Joanna mothers Luisa while she is breaking up with Silent and hustling and seeing a therapist and trying to go straight. Things deteriorate. Despite Joanna’s steadfast connection, Luisa will not stop her ninety-pound demolition derby of self-destruction. There is a long line of arrests and offenses—busted for murder, assault with a deadly weapon. And then she is gone.