Inside tensions built up like fever as we crammed around the TV set or kitchen table, the crowding made more intolerable because of heaps of paper, opened file drawers and shelves packed with books that garnered every section of empty space (a sort of writer’s torture chamber). The family included my third wife Trini; our child, Rubén Joaquín, born in 1988; and my 15-year-old son Ramiro (a 13-year-old daughter, Andrea, lived with her mother in East Los Angeles).
We hardly ventured outside. Few things were worth heaving on the layers of clothing and the coats, boots and gloves required to step out the door.
Ramiro had been placed on punishment, but not for an act of disobedience or the usual outburst of teenage anxiety. Ramiro had been on a rapidly declining roller coaster ride into the world of street-gang America, not unexpected for this neighborhood, once designated as one of the 10 poorest in the country and also known as one of the most gang-infested.
Humboldt Park is a predominantly Puerto Rican community with growing numbers of Mexican immigrants and uprooted blacks and sprinklings of Ukrainians and Poles from previous generations. But along with the greater West Town area it was considered a “changing neighborhood,” dotted here and there with rehabs, signs of gentrification and for many of us, imminent displacement.
Weeks before, Ramiro had received a 10 day suspension from Roberto Clemente High School, a beleaguered school with a good number of caring personnel, but one which was an epicenter of gang activity. The suspension came after a school fight which involved a war between “Insanes” and “Maniacs,” two factions of the “Folks” (“Folks” are those gangs allied with the Spanish Cobras and Gangster Disciples; the “People” are gangs tied to the Latin Kings and Vice Lords, symbolic of the complicated structures most inner-city gangs had come to establish). There was also an “S.O.S.”—a “smash-on-sight”—contract issued on Ramiro. As a result I took him out of Clemente and enrolled him in another school. He lasted less than two weeks before school officials there kicked him out. By then I also had to pick him up from local jails following other fighting incidents—and once from a hospital where I watched a doctor put 11 stitches above his eye.
Following me, Ramiro was a second-generation gang member. My involvement was in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Los Angeles, the so-called gang capital of the country. My teen years were ones of drugs, shootings and beatings, and arrests. I was around when South Central Los Angeles gave birth to the Crips and Bloods. By the time I turned 18 years old, 25 of my friends had been killed by rival gangs, police, drugs, car crashes and suicides.
If I had barely survived all this—to emerge eventually as a journalist, publisher, critic, and poet—it appeared unlikely my own son would make it. I had to begin the long, intense struggle to save his life from the gathering storm of street violence sweeping the country—some 20 years after I sneaked out of my ’hood in the dark of night, hid out in an L.A. housing project, and removed myself from the death-fires of La Vida Loca.
La Vida Loca or The Crazy Life is what we called the barrio gang experience. This lifestyle originated with the Mexican Pachuco gangs of the 1930s and 1940s, and was later recreated with the Cholos. It became the main model and influence for outlaw bikers of the 1950s and 1960s, the L.A. punk/rock scene in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Crips and Bloods of the 1980s and early 1990s. As Leon Bing commented in her 1991 book Do or Die (HarperCollins): “It was the cholo homeboy who first walked the walk and talked the talk. It was the Mexican American pachuco who initiated the emblematic tattoos, the signing with hands, the writing of legends on walls.”
One evening that winter, after Ramiro had come in late following weeks of trouble at school, I gave him an ultimatum. Yelling burst back and forth between the walls of our Humboldt Park flat. Two-year-old Rubén, confused and afraid, hugged my leg as the shouting erupted. In moments, Ramiro ran out of the house, entering the cold Chicago night without a jacket. I went after him, although by my mid-thirties I had gained enough weight to slow me down considerably. Still I sprinted down the gangway which led to a debris-strewn alley, filled with furniture parts and overturned trash cans. I saw Ramiro’s fleeing figure, his breath rising above him in quickly-dissipating clouds.
I followed him toward Augusta Boulevard, the main drag of the neighborhood. People yelled out of windows and doorways: “¿Qué pasa, hombre?” Others offered information on Ramiro’s direction. A father or mother chasing some child down the street is not an unfamiliar sight around here.
A city like Chicago has so many places in which to hide. The gray and brown brick buildings seem to suck people in. Ramiro would make a turn and then vanish, only to pop up again. Appearing and disappearing. He flew over brick walls, scurried down another alley then veered into a building that swallowed him up and spit him out the other side.
I kept after Ramiro until, unexpectedly, I found him hiding in some bushes. He stepped out, unaware I was to the side of him.
“Ramiro … come home,” I gently implored, knowing if I pounced on him there would be little hope he’d come back. He sped off again.
“Leave me alone!” he yelled.
As I watched his escape, it was like looking back into a distant time, back to my own youth, when I ran and ran, when I jumped over peeling fences, fleeing vatos locos, the police or my own shadow in some drug-induced hysteria.
I saw Ramiro run off and then saw my body entering the mouth of darkness, my breath cutting the frigid flesh of night; it was my voice cracking open the winter sky.
Ramiro was born just prior to my 21st birthday. I had been working in a steel mill in Los Angeles. His mother, Camila, not yet 19, was an East Los Angeles woman who grew up in one of East L.A.’s roughest barrios. Yet Camila and her five sisters, with the help of their mother, managed to stave off attempts to pull them into the street life there—even having battles on their front porch with the locas who tried to recruit them.
The media likens Los Angeles to a “Beirut by the Beach.” For 1991, police cited these statistics: 100,000 gang members, 800 gangs, nearly 600 young people killed. Parts of the city, particularly the public housing projects, have been called “ungovernable.” These stats have been used to create a hysteria against black and Latino youth. Police in L.A. have practically instituted martial law in the inner city. Michael Davis in his book City of Quartz (Verso Press, 1991) says that by 1990 the various law enforcement “operations” to destroy gangs (using helicopters, infra-red lights and made-over armored vehicles—not far behind what was used in 1991’s “Desert Storm”) detained or arrested 50,000 youth, in South Central alone.
“The Crazy Life” in my youth, although devastating, was only the beginning stages of what I believe is now a consistent and growing genocidal level of destruction predicated on the premise there are marginalized youth with no jobs or future, and therefore expendable.
Camila’s brothers weren’t spared. One of them became active in a barrio gang, and later a heroin addict and a convict. Another brother got jumped and stabbed seven times—but survived. And an older half-brother was killed while trying to exact some, revenge one night near the Mexican border.
Later, her nephews from an older sister got involved in the gangs and one of them was murdered outside his home at the age of 17 (but not before he fathered a baby).
When Ramiro was two years old, and his sister only 10 months, Camila and I broke up. About seven years later, I moved to Chicago. After being left behind, Ramiro failed miserably in school, although he had been tested as a gifted child. He ran away from home a number of times. Once when he was about 10 years old he hopped a train from L.A. to Chicago, but police pulled him out of a boxcar before he passed the city limits. When he turned 13 years old, he came to stay with me. Because of what Camila and I had been through, we tried everything we could to keep him out of the “life,” even after we divorced and lived a couple of thousands of miles apart. But often there was too much against us.
In East L.A. and in schools like Chicago’s Clemente
were some of the nation’s highest drop-out rates. Youth unemployment hovered around 75 percent in the most neglected areas. And what of those who did everything right, got all the good grades and followed the “rules”? Camila, for example, had been an A student at Garfield High School (site of the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver) and was active in school affairs. But after we married, she applied for work and was told she didn’t know enough to get a basic 9 to 5 office job. She even had to go back to some classes to make up for the lack of schooling she received despite being one of the best students at Garfield! The fact the L.A. schools now give “warranties” only underscores the point.
With little productive to do, drug selling becomes a lucrative means of survival. A 10-year-old in Humboldt Park can make $80-$100 a day as a lookout for local dealers. The drug trade is business. It’s capitalism: Cutthroat, profit-motivated and expedient. Also, the values which drive gangs are linked to the control of markets, in a way similar to what has created borders between nations. In communities with limited resources like Humboldt Park and East L.A., sophisticated survival structures evolved, including gangs, out of the bone and sinew tossed up by this environment.
After Ramiro ran away, he failed to return home for another two weeks. I was so angry at him for leaving, I bought locks to keep him out. I kept a vigil at home to catch him should he sneak in to eat. But then I remembered what I had been through. I recalled how many institutions and people had failed my son—and now he was expected to rise above all this! Soon I spent every night he was gone driving around the streets, talking to the “boys” in their street-corner domains, making daily calls to the police. I placed handwritten notes in the basement which said it was okay for him to come back. I left food for him to get to. Suddenly every teenage Latino male looked like Ramiro.
With the help of some of his friends, I finally found Ramiro in a rundown barrio hovel and convinced him to come home. He agreed to obtain help in getting through some deep emotional and psychological problems—stemming in large part from an unstable childhood, including abuse he sustained as a kid from his stepfathers, one who was an alcoholic and another who regularly beat him. And I could not remove myself from being struck by the hammerhead of responsibility. A key factor was my relative lack of involvement in Ramiro’s life as I became increasingly active in politics and writing.
Although the best way to deal with one’s own children is to help construct the conditions that will ensure the free and healthy development of all, it’s also true you can’t be for all children if you can’t be for your own.
By mid-1991, Ramiro had undergone a few months in a psychiatric hospital and various counseling and family sessions that also involved bringing his mother in from L.A. We implemented an educational and employment plan, worked out with school officials, teachers and social workers (everyone who had dealings with him had to be involved, to get them on “our side” so to speak). I also learned a parent cannot just turn over a child to a school, a court, or hospital without stepping in at various times to insure his or her best interests are being met. My aim was to help Ramiro get through his teen-age years with a sense of empowerment and esteem, with what I call complete literacy: The ability to participate competently and confidently in any level of society one chooses.
There is an aspect of suicide in young people whose options have been cut off. They stand on street corners, flashing hand signs, inviting the bullets. It’s either la torcida or death: A warrior’s path, when even self-preservation is not at stake. And if they murder, the victims are usually the ones who look like them, the ones closest to who they are—the mirror reflections. They murder and they’re killing themselves, over and over.
At the same time, individual efforts must be linked with social ones. I tried to get Ramiro to understand the systematic nature of what was happening in the street which in effect made choices for him before he was born. The thing is, no matter what one does individually, in this setting, the dangers keep lurking around every corner.
A couple of examples helped Ramiro see the point. Not long ago, a few of his friends were picked up by police, who drove them around in a squad car. The police took them to a rival gang neighborhood. There they forced Ramiro’s friends to spray paint over the graffiti with their own insignias—as rival gang members watched—and then left them there to find their way home. It’s an old police practice.
A second incident involved the shooting death of a Dragon, a Puerto Rican teenager named Efrain, who Ramiro knew. Soon after, we happened to drive through a Latin Kings’ territory. The words “Efrain Rots” had been emblazoned on a wall. That night, Ramiro sat alone, intensely quiet, in the backyard, thinking about this for a long time.
Things between us, for now, are being dealt with day by day. Although Ramiro has gained a much more viable perspective on his place in the world, there are choices he has to make “not just once, but every time they come up.”
Meanwhile I’ve pursued writing this book—after a 10-year lapse. The writing first began when I was 15, but the urgency of the present predicament demands it finally see the light of day. This work is an argument for the reorganization of American society—not where a few benefit at the expense of the many, but where everyone has access to decent health care, clothing, food and housing, based on need, not whether they can afford them. It’s an indictment against the use of deadly force which has been the principal means this society uses against those it cannot accommodate (as I write this, Rodney King’s beating by the LAPD continues to play itself out throughout the country. And the Los Angeles Daily News in late October 1991 reported that the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had shot 57 people since the first of the year—about 80 percent were people of color, and a few were disabled or mentally ill; all of them were unarmed or shot in the back).
Criminality in this country is a class issue. Many of those warehoused in overcrowded prisons can be properly called “criminals of want,” those who’ve been deprived of the basic necessities of life and therefore forced into so-called criminal acts to survive. Many of them just don’t have the means to buy their “justice.” They are members of a social stratum which includes welfare mothers, housing project residents, immigrant families, the homeless and unemployed. This book is part of their story.
Although the work begins with my family’s trek from Mexico when I was a child and touches on our early years in Watts, it primarily covers the period from ages 12 until 18 when I became active in Las Lomas barrio.
This work is not fiction, yet there are people I don’t want hurt by having their names and stories made public. I’ve changed names and synthesized events and circumstances in keeping with the integrity of a literary, dramatic work, as an artist does in striving for that rare instance when, as a critic once said, “something of beauty collides with something of truth.”
The more we know, the more we owe. This is a responsibility I take seriously. My hope in producing this work is that perhaps there’s a thread to be found, a pattern or connection, a seed of apprehension herein, which can be of some use, no matter how slight, in helping to end the rising casualty count for the Ramiros of this world, as more and more communities come under the death grip of what we called “The Crazy Life.”
July 1992
Chapter One
“Cry, child, for those without tears have a grief which never ends.”—Mexican saying
THIS MEMORY BEGINS WITH flight. A 1950s bondo-spackled Dodge surged through a driving rain, veering around the potholes and upturned tracks of the abandoned Red Line trains on Alameda. Mama was in the front seat. My father was at the wheel. My brother Rano and I sat on one end of the back seat; my sisters Pata and Cuca on the other. There was a space between the boys and girls to keep us apart.
“Amá, mira a Rano,” a voice said for the tenth time from the back of the car. “He’s hitting me again.”
We fought all the time. My brother, especially, had it in for La Pata—thinking of Frankenstein, he called her “A
nastein.” Her real name was Ana, but most of the time we went by the animal names Dad gave us at birth. I am Grillo, which means cricket. Rano stands for “rana,” the frog. La Pata is the duck and Cuca is short for cucaracha: cockroach.
The car seats came apart in strands. I looked out at the passing cars which seemed like ghosts with headlights rushing past the streaks of water on the glass. I was nine years old. As the rain fell, my mother cursed in Spanish intermixed with pleas to saints and “la Santísima Madre de Dios.” She argued with my father. Dad didn’t curse or raise his voice. He just stated the way things were.
“I’ll never go back to Mexico,” he said. “I’d rather starve here. You want to stay with me, it has to be in Los Angeles. Otherwise, go.”
This incited my mother to greater fits.
We were on the way to the Union train station in downtown L.A. We had our few belongings stuffed into the trunk and underneath our feet. I gently held on to one of the comic books Mama bought to keep us entertained. I had on my Sunday best clothes with chewed gum stuck in a coat pocket. It could have been Easter, but it was a weeping November. I don’t remember for sure why we were leaving. I just knew it was a special day. There was no fear or concern on my part. We were always moving. I looked at the newness of the comic book and felt some exhilaration of its feel in my hand. Mama had never bought us comic books before. It had to be a special day.
For months we had been pushed from one house to another, just Mama and us children. Mom and Dad had split up prior to this. We stayed at the homes of women my mom called comadres, with streams of children of their own. Some nights we slept in a car or in the living rooms of people we didn’t know. There were no shelters for homeless families. My mother tried to get us settled somewhere but all indications pointed to our going back to the land of her birth, to her red earth, her Mexico.
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