Gratitude and a Band of ‘Heroes’

Most residents of the Los Angeles area felt genuine relief when a suspect in the so-called Night Stalker case was finally arrested last week. Latinos felt even more--a special pride that suspect Richard Ramirez was captured by a handful of residents of the East Los Angeles barrio.

However, I am not sure that non-Latinos really understand why Ramirez was caught the way he was. And, as a result, some of the praise being heaped onthe Latinos who nabbed him is not just off-base, it is also downright patronizing.

The gratitude that we all feel about the arrest is understandable. For most of the summer, fear hung over us like smog, and not just because of the brutality of the Night Stalker killings, rapes and robberies.

What made the crimes especially fearsome was the fact that they occurred not on Skid Row, where a serial killer called The Slasher was caught several years ago, but in quiet suburbs. And the victims were not prostitutes, as were many in the Hillside Strangler case, but middle-class men and women asleep in bed. The Night Stalker captured our imagination as no other serial killer ever had. He was not killing “them” in a faraway, dingy place. He was killing people like “us” in comfortable, ordinary homes. So when the authorities announced that they had a prime suspect, the sense of a pall being lifted from the city was palpable.

In the Latino community there were special reasons to celebrate the arrest. To a people striving for upward mobility, social acceptance and economic and political power, Richard Ramirez, a 25-year-old native of El Paso, is a living reminder of the painful problems that many non-Latinos associate with barrio communities: poverty, drug abuse, crime and violence.

That is why it means so much that he was captured by residents of the barrio. If such a coincidence had been thought up by a screenwriter, it would not have been any more appropriate.

Ramirez, a drifter with a record of petty crimes in Texas and California, was caught along the 3700 block of Hubbard Street, a residential area of working-class Latino families. He had tried to steal a car from Fausto Pinon’s driveway, then demanded Angelina de la Torre’s car keys and hit her when she resisted. Several neighborhood men--including Pinon and Angelina’s husband, Manuel--ran after Ramirez. They caught him and beat him into submission, holding him until a lone sheriff’s deputy arrived to arrest the bloody and dazed “car theft” suspect.

Since then the residents of Hubbard Street have become local celebrities. The De la Torres, Pinon and their neighbors Carmelo Robles, Jose Burgoin and his sons Julio and Jaime, have been hailed as heroes by the City Council, the county Board of Supervisors and even the state Legislature.

While the residents of Hubbard Street deserve praise, the tone of some of the accolades troubles me. It is as if the rest of the city is surprised that Latinos are capable of being good citizens. Somehow I thought that all the war heroes and just plain hard-working folks who have come out of barrios like East L.A. had dispelled those doubts a long time ago.

According to federal crime statistics, low-income people like the Latinos who live in East Los Angeles have the greatest chance of being victims of crime, especially property crimes like burglary and auto theft.

That is an important factor being overlooked in the hoopla over the “heroics” on Hubbard Street. Ramirez was set upon not because he might be the Night Stalker but because he was a stranger in the neighborhood who hit a woman and tried to steal a car. You don’t do that in a barrio, which can be as close-knit as a family.

Beyond the role that they played in Ramirez’s capture, the residents of Hubbard Street deserve credit for their honesty and modesty in explaining why they went after him. In the Spanish-language media, especially, they have made it clear that they did nothing that they consider heroic, only what they thought was right. This kind of instinctive community self-defense is the positive, flip side of what brings Latino youths together to fight for their “turf.”

I doubt that the politicians falling all over themselves to laud the residents of Hubbard Street have thought much about that. Next month they could easily be sounding loud alarms over youth gangs in East L.A., and never understand that those gangs are just one more facet of a complex community that they were eager to praise when it suited their purposes.