Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  A number of times over the few months since school had started that semester, Ms. Thomas had called Edwin’s mother, Marlyn, to discuss his behavior and to try to make plans to set him back on track. Marlyn, age thirty-nine, was eight months pregnant when I met her more than a year after the shooting. She speaks almost no English, relying on her children to interpret for her, so we spoke through a translator, Miriam Garcia. Marlyn came to the United States via the border town of Laredo in 1985, hiding in the driver’s cabin of an eighteen-wheeler with eight other people. She was nineteen, and she wanted something better than what she felt the future held in her native Honduras. One of seven children from El Progreso, an impoverished farming town at the foot of the Mico Quemado mountain chain, her future there appeared bleak. She paid coyotes $1,800—half up front and half on the Mexican side of the border—and traveled for a month, through Guatemala and Mexico. “I always wanted to have a family and give them more than we had, but I knew that doing that would be very difficult. I wanted to come to America because I thought I could make decent money and send it back to my parents to help them out.”

  It didn’t quite work out like that. She did raise a family. Edwin was her oldest, followed by Sandra, fourteen, Victor, twelve, and Giovanni, nine. But she never learned English and never got the kind of training that would pull her out of the most basic, vulnerable manual labor. She cleans apartments and sometimes cooks for people. “The gold fell from very high in the sky,” wrote John Berger in his book about the immigrant experience, A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe. “And so when it hit the earth it went down very, very deep.”2 She barely has enough money to support her own family; it’s unlikely she’s sending much home.

  Marlyn had come a long way at great risk and effort to give her children a better life. Now her eldest was playing the fool at school. She could not fathom what had gotten into him. He had been a sickly infant, hospitalized for seven days when he was eight months old for pneumonia. Marlyn was terrified back then. “He was my first child. He was my life. I was very worried. They are all my life,” she said casting her hand in the direction of her other children. “But he was my first, so he was very special in that way.” While he was in the hospital, he was also diagnosed with asthma. His father had asthma. The doctors told them it was hereditary. It was the reason why they could never have a pet. But as the years went on, Edwin’s asthma became less pronounced before effectively dissipating into a range of less serious allergies. As a child, he had always been very calm and obedient and sought to set an example for his three younger siblings. He’d never done brilliantly in school academically, but up until this point he had not caused any trouble either. Now Ms. Thomas kept calling her in.

  Each time they told Edwin they were calling his mother, his demeanor would change markedly. His mother was not familiar with the clowning and defiant behavior of his school world. Having her hear about it would not get him in serious trouble—Marlyn doesn’t appear to be a big disciplinarian. But, more devastatingly to him, it would disappoint her and diminish her impression of him as the responsible eldest son.

  Holding her hands together palm to palm, as though in prayer, she would say to him in front of his teachers, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Promise me you’ll stop. You’re supposed to be an example for your brothers and sisters.” Edwin would give his word. He said he was just playing and put the trouble down to a bad relationship with just one teacher. “I promise you they’re not going to call anymore,” he’d tell her. And that promise would be as good as the next call. “By December I promise you my grades are going to go up,” he told her. “That’s what I was looking forward to,” she says.

  Ms. Thomas had a plan for Edwin. She’d decided to move him into her behavior class, which had fewer students and two teachers. She called a meeting for eight a.m. on Monday, November 25, to talk about it with her superiors and was getting the paperwork together the previous week. On Friday, November 22, as Jaiden lay on life support over a thousand miles away, Ms. Thomas came back to school from a meeting elsewhere to find that Edwin had been sent to her again. “Why are you down here?” she asked him, somewhat wearily. He wouldn’t say exactly, beyond saying that his teacher had sent him to wait for her. She entered her office, and he followed her in, placed a chair against the wall, and sat in front of her desk playing Fruit Ninja on his phone. “Miss, do you like playing Fruit Ninja?” he asked, swiping away at the produce with his finger. “No, Edwin,” she said. “I don’t play those stupid games.” She asked him what he’d done this time. Once again he’d been joking around and refused to stop when he was told. “Edwin, I’m gonna choke you if you don’t stop,” she said, repeating the threat she jokingly made to all her students whose behavior wore out her last nerve. Edwin carried on playing Fruit Ninja. He stayed in her office for the remainder of the day, and when the bell rang he got up. “See you later, Miss,” he said. “See you Monday,” said Ms. Thomas, who starts to cry as she recalls saying good-bye for the last time.

  That weekend, Ms. Thomas collated the paperwork for the Monday morning meeting. “I’d already pretty much completed it, but I’m, like, a perfectionist, and everyone has to put their eyes on it,” she says. “So after I cleaned up the house on Saturday morning I took another look, made sure everything was laid out in his folder correctly, and put it in my little backpack so it’d be ready.”

  AT FIVE FEET TEN, Edwin was a fairly tall, slender, handsome boy with tight black hair like wire wool and bushy eyebrows to match. He looked young, even for sixteen; he had a smooth-looking face not yet ravaged by acne or stubble, with the complexion of watered-down milk. Depending on where you are, he could have been mistaken for many races and ethnicities, including white. Marlyn has darker, Amerindian features one would associate with South or Central America. But Edwin was more of a shape-shifter. In France people would assume he was from the Maghreb; in Germany he might be Turkish; in Spain or Portugal some locals might claim him as their own. In Houston, he was Latino.

  It was perhaps a mark of his immaturity that he’d not found a way to capitalize on his good looks. He never had a romantic relationship. He’d had plenty of crushes, says Gabriel, but he was always too shy to talk to girls. No matter how many times Gabriel told him to lighten up, Edwin could never get up the courage up to ask a girl out. He’d laugh it off. “Your girl will be my girl too,” he’d tell Gabriel. When Gabriel told him he’d have to get his own girlfriend, Edwin would plead for help. “I can’t, but that’s because you don’t help me, man,” he said. Gabriel would tease him relentlessly, approaching “random girls” and telling them Edwin liked them. “He’d turn completely red,” says Gabriel, who would then tease him some more. “Hey, what’s up with you, Mr. Tomato Head.” “He was shy,” says Marlyn. “But the girls were after him.”

  One girl he was particularly close to was Camilla. She came from a rough family. Her mother, it is claimed, was a Cholo gang member. Her apartment is defended by a ferocious pit bull. Camilla openly and proudly identifies as a gang member. Her Facebook page carries the letters SWC (Southwest Cholo) after her gang name. She has not only bought into the gang culture; she literally wears it. Her hair sits high atop her head in a supertight ponytail, her eyebrows are drawn on in black, string rosaries hang around her neck. Big black shirt, big black pants, a black belt so long one end hangs lank close to the ground, black and white bandanna around her neck, and a pair of black Chuck Taylors on her feet. Butch and dark, black on brown—it’s the chola style.

  “He was always playing with her, but she had a tough attitude,” says Marlyn. “They loved each other very much. She protected him a lot.” “I knew him since third grade,” says Camilla. “He was my best friend. We went to school together in the morning, and then we’d come home together after school. We were like brother and sister.” Once, Gabriel asked him why he didn’t date Camilla. “You’re always with her. You might as well go out with her.” “Nah man, she’s like my sister,” said Edwin. “
Are you sure? Because you’re always with her,” said Gabriel. “Nah,” insisted Edwin. “She’s my home girl.”

  For the last few years, Edwin and Camilla had been living in Bellaire Gardens, a low-rise apartment complex on a busy road of commercial and residential properties in southwest Houston in an area called Gulfton. A greenfield site until shortly after the Second World War, Gulfton was rapidly developed during the seventies, at the height of Houston’s oil boom. Ambitious energy workers flocked to Texas from the Rust Belt and abroad, prompting opportunistic developers to hastily build “luxury” apartment complexes for young professionals. In the absence of zoning laws, these new complexes sprouted up all around Gulfton and boasted fancy names like Chateaux Carmel and Napoleon Square with amenities like swimming pools, hot tubs, laundry rooms, and even discos while offering free gifts like VCRs to new tenants. These gated communities, strewn along roads with dense traffic in between commercial outlets, were often built like small fortresses, with many stipulating that no children were allowed. Precious little in the way of social infrastructure—parks, libraries, even schools—followed.3

  When the oil bust came, this new clientele moved on, and the speculators were suddenly left with vast property portfolios and no tenants to fill them. They found new customers by slashing rents, eliminating the “no children” rules, and forgoing background checks to draw in low-income migrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America. Within a decade, Gulfton had been transformed in Houston’s imagination from trendy “Swingersville” to the “Gulfton Ghetto” and soon became notorious for gang crime.

  Bellaire Gardens is one of those complexes. It sits between a store selling bridal wear and highly flammable-looking dresses for quinceañera—the celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday—and the back of a Fiesta supermarket, a Texas-based Hispanic-oriented chain with garish neon lighting that makes you feel as though you’re shopping for groceries in Vegas. Opposite are a pawn shop, beauty salon, Mexican taqueria, and Salvadorean restaurant.

  The complex comprises two, two-story apartment buildings and is laid out in a square with a swimming pool and laundry room at the heart of a larger courtyard. The apartments are brick and in a poor state of repair. Each one has a porch, where plants, bicycles, and barbecue grills wait for warmer weather. Marlyn was always happy there. “It was very nice,” she says. “He loved that place. We knew the neighbors. Nothing bad ever happened. They all grew up there so they all loved it.” She lived there for eight years. They moved once, incidentally to a complex where Camilla’s family was also living at the time. But she missed Bellaire Gardens so much she soon returned.

  They lived in an apartment overlooking the swimming pool in the central courtyard; Camilla’s unit lay on the periphery, closer to the entrance past the laundry room and just a minute away. Marlyn didn’t approve of Camilla’s family. She knew them well enough to say hello to them but had never visited their apartment and was none too keen on Edwin’s spending so much time there. She heard they dealt drugs and feared that Camilla might lead Edwin astray. “She’s my best friend, she won’t do anything to me,” Edwin told her. But Marlyn was not convinced. Camilla had a sense that Marlyn was not a fan. “Your mom keeps looking at me weird,” she told Edwin. “She doesn’t like me.”

  But although Camilla came from more difficult circumstances, she was also much more focused at school and aspirant than Edwin. He went to school to mess around, but she had goals. She wanted to be a pharmacist. She played snare drum in the school band. She was getting good grades. None of her siblings had done well in school. “She was a bright girl,” said one of her teachers. “She could have been the one.” When she felt down because she had performed badly academically, she would get upset and Edwin would try to cheer her up. “Let’s go chill with some home boys and smoke some weed,” he’d suggest. “I can’t because I have to stay for band practice,” she’d tell him. Her nickname for him was McLovin, after the hapless character in the teenage movie Superbad.

  The Southwest Cholos run this neighborhood, complex by complex. There is no avoiding them. “They start them really, really young,” a teacher at Lee High told me. “In elementary. Third grade, fourth grade. And that’s just how it is for kids.”

  What defines gang membership are extremely subjective and loose criteria. Gang leaders don’t hand out membership cards. Sometimes there is initiation. However, since gang affiliation can be a guide to criminal activity and allegiance, with at least semiformal codes and boundaries, authorities are constantly trying to demarcate a more definite way to identify them.

  Almost inevitably, such proscription falls back on stereotypes. In a 1999 article in Colorlines, it was pointed out that “In at least five states, wearing baggy FUBU jeans and being related to a gang suspect is enough to meet the ‘gang member’ definition. In Arizona, a tattoo and blue Adidas sneakers are sufficient.” In suburban Aurora, Colorado, local police decided that any two of the following constituted gang membership: “slang,” “clothing of a particular color,” “pagers,” “hairstyles,” “jewelry.” Black people comprised 11 percent of Aurora and 80 percent of the gang database. The local head of the ACLU was heard to say, “They might as well call it a black list.”4

  “You join for protection,” explains one of Edwin’s teachers. “Even if you’re not cliqued in, so long as you’re associated with them, you’re good. You have to claim a clique to be safe. If you’re not, if you’re by yourself, you’re gonna get jumped.” This is what makes the term gang-infested so loaded and so unhelpful. Many young people in certain areas are gang members in the same way that Soviet citizens were members of the Communist Party and Iraqis under Saddam Hussein were in the Baath Party—there was precious little choice. In and of itself their gang affiliation doesn’t tell you much. To treat all affiliation as complicity is to write off children in entire communities for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  When it came to the Southwest Cholos, Camilla was a devoted member; Edwin was not. Though nobody said it, one gets the impression that his immaturity would have been a liability. He was a wannabe. “They accepted him,” says Ms. Thomas. “He hung with them. But he wasn’t in yet.” His mother knew nothing of this. But then parents rarely do.

  WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, I went on a camping holiday to Germany with a friend. On the way back to England we stopped in a small Dutch border town called Nijmegen. The first thing we did was go to a “coffee shop” and buy as much marijuana as we could. It might have potentially lasted us for a couple of weeks, but my friend and I stuffed it all into two huge joints. We went for a walk, bought packets of cookies, bags of potato chips, and pastries, sat in a clearing behind a housing estate, and smoked them both. We laughed uproariously and lay down for what seemed like hours, either rambling like fools or in total silence. Eventually the police came. They asked us questions in Dutch. We thought their accents hilarious and kept on laughing. They told us to go back to the campsite, but when they saw us head off in completely the wrong direction—we had no idea where we were—they circled their van around and picked us up.

  At the site, they made us show them our passports and train tickets. “There’s a train that leaves here this afternoon that will get you to the Hook of Holland in time for the night boat,” they told us. “You should be on it.” By this time, even though we weren’t quite thinking straight, we knew we were in trouble. We scrambled to pack our things—not easy when you’re as stoned as we were—and sheepishly, still not fully sober, we went home. My mother was pleased to see me, but surprised because I had come back a day early. On the mantelpiece was an unopened envelope with the results of two O levels—standardized tests given to secondary-school students in the UK—that I’d taken in politics and economics. I’d received A’s on both tests. If anyone had asked her how my summer went, she’d have told them I’d had a lovely holiday and did well at school. She had no idea I’d ever smoked marijuana, let alone about my brush with the law in the Netherlands. As far as she wa
s concerned, her A-student son couldn’t wait to get home, and so he returned from his adventure prematurely.

  Parents may have perfectly loving, functional relationships with their children but still, particularly in the children’s teenage years, have precious little idea what they’re getting up to. Of course, there may be signs that an adolescent is having sex, taking drugs, or drinking. But they may not be obvious, the parents may miss them, the child may be incredibly good at covering his or her tracks, or the parents may avert their gaze in a mixture of discretion and denial. It is possible to transgress any number of boundaries and still keep curfew, achieve acceptable grades, and be civil at home. Parents may have known their children longer than anyone else and understand their impulses better than anyone else. But that’s not the same as actually knowing what they’re doing at a given moment.

  Marlyn, like most parents, had a very different understanding of what Edwin was doing than what he was actually doing. She knew he was messing around in school. How could she not, given the number of times she’d been called in? But beyond that, she was less aware of what he was getting up to. When I asked one school friend, Diego (not his real name), what he did when he hung out with Edwin, his response was brief and to the point: “Play soccer and smoke blunts.” Gabriel said that, among other things, they liked to smoke. On his Facebook page Edwin refers to smoking quite a bit. “Man just snook out of ma house and went to go smoke a joint with ma homegirl Camilla-fukkin high-B).” There are several posts declaring things like “Everything’s better when you’re high”; one post displays a picture of a woman with smoke pouring from her mouth and the words “Blaze it up.” For a few months in July, his Facebook cover photo was a marijuana leaf surrounded by smoke. There were signs.