Murals: Symbols of Pride or Violence to East L.A. Gangs?

Alongside the graffiti-splashed walls of a Boyle Heights neighborhood, where spray-painted names and gang insignia cover mom-and-pop stores, a 10-by-40-foot mural rests untouched.

Set against the red, white and green of the Mexican flag, the painting shows a Christ figure emerging, arms spread, from a Bible. On one side is an Aztec warrior and on the other a modern street gang.

But more important than what is there may be what isn’t.

The mural is free of vandalism, spared in the usual graffiti sprees because it is, as one neighborhood gang member said, “all about respect.”

It is, in fact, all about the East L.A. 13 gang, painted for its 50 or so members by a controversial county agency. Community Youth Gang Services has created murals for six Eastside gangs in an effort to establish a rapport with the gangs that it considers vital to its campaign against street violence.

Pride and Neighborhood

To East L.A. 13, its mural is “like gold,” according to gang member Armando (Priest) Gomez. He said the artwork symbolizes the gang’s pride in itself and its neighborhood.

But some Hollenbeck division police officers see the East L.A. 13 mural only as a symbol of the frustrating battle they are fighting against the gangs, a battle made more difficult, they say, because the mural was dedicated to a gang member who was under investigation for murder at the time he was killed.

It is a youth services field worker, Danny Martinez, a self-taught artist and former gang member himself, who approaches gangs like East L.A. 13 and asks them what they would like on a mural.

(Murals have a particular significance in Latino neighborhoods. A school of mural art carrying social commentary started in Mexico City in the 1920s.)

Martinez solicited the ideas of East L.A. 13 members in February, then received permission from grocer Miguel Mendoza to paint an exterior wall of his store, which stands at Brooklyn Avenue and Fickett Street.

The county youth agency see the murals as a “symbol of a truce,” Martinez said. “Rival gang members will scratch out other gangs’ insignia when they see them on the street but they leave the murals alone.”

Before he started the mural, Martinez gained East L.A. 13 members’ trust because he had been through similar experiences. Unlike some of the others, however, he decided to change his life when he was 18. “I was arrested and I had my car impounded. . . . It was right then that I decided to hang up my gloves, grow up, and face my responsibilities,” said Martinez, 31.

Knifed to Death

As the East L.A. 13 mural neared completion, 19-year-old Anthony (Chico) Barrera was knifed to death in a gang fight. East L.A. 13 members asked Martinez--who had done most of the artwork himself with some help from gang members--to dedicate the mural to Barrera because, “he was one of our first home boys to get killed.”

Martinez agreed and painted an inscription to Barrera and beneath it the Lord’s Prayer in cholo slang, along with the words viva y deja vivir , “live and let live” in Spanish.

Martinez said dedicating the mural to Barrera seemed logical because the slain youth had been proud to be a gang member.

East L.A. 13 members said Martinez succeeded in capturing that sense of pride, not only in his work honoring Barrera but in his portraits of the five gang members who posed for the mural.

“This mural is like a treasure . . . it’s like gold for us,” Armando Gomez said.

The mural, however, is no treasure to Detective Ben Lovato and his partner, Joe Friend.

Lovato, a veteran of 17 years in Boyle Heights, said he hates the mural because it glorifies both gang violence and Barrera, whom Lovato was investigating for murder at the time he was killed.

“They dedicated the mural to him!” the detective exclaimed. “What are they trying to say?”

Witnesses had linked Barrera to the murder of Jose Guerra, 16, a Mexican national who was knifed to death in Boyle Heights in February, Lovato said. But Barrera was murdered before he could be questioned, the detective added.

Both the Barrera and Guerra murders remain under investigation.

For Lovato, the artwork is a reminder of the Guerra case and of his police station’s basic mistrust of the youth agency.

“I don’t know what their job is . . . what they are there for,” Lovato said.

Steve Valdivia, director of the 5-year-old agency, said some police officers will always mistrust the county youth agency because of the way it tries to establish relationships with the gangs.

“When CYGS said it would hire ex-gang members, a lot of cops took it the wrong way,” he said.

Martinez said that he and CYGS’ other 54 field workers use their rapport with the youths and their knowledge of the streets to talk gangs out of getting into trouble. Some agency staff members arrange football games. Martinez paints.

The agency has ex-gang members on call 24 hours a day to help prevent violence. “I try to talk to them and tell them (they shouldn’t fight with each other) because they are all from the same race,” Martinez said.

“I share my experiences with them and tell them there are much better things in life than fighting.”

‘Code of Honor’

Field workers are aware that much of the street talk they deal with can be very touchy.

“This is really a problem,” Valdivia said, because to be effective in the gang environment, CYGS often must work within “the code of honor” of “not snitching to police.”

“Some information I don’t even want to know. . . . “ Valdivia said. “I leave it up to the field workers to use information as they need it to move and prevent violence.”

This policy has been a major reason for mistrust by police, Valdivia said, because CYGS is caught between both police and the gangs.

“We’re right in the middle, which is a very tough position to be (in) . . . the toughest thing of all is mediating between the gangs and keeping a good relationship with law enforcement,” Valdivia said.

“If some gangs thought we were snitches, we would never get through to them . . . (because of this) some police will never trust us,” he said.

Lovato, for one, doesn’t trust them. “I’ve never received any information from them,” he said. He also questions the validity of reasoning with gangs and painting murals as ways to prevent violence.

“There have been four (gang-related) murders in that area (near the mural) in the last five months,” Lovato said. “Who are they protecting? . . . These aren’t any little crimes; you’re talking about murder.”

CYGS field worker Norma Escarcega, also a former gang member, said gangs are misunderstood by police and others who often dismiss them as “hoodlums.”

“People think of them as criminals, but they don’t see the other side,” she said. “They don’t see that they get scared.”

East L.A. 13’s Gomez agreed. He said police could be more effective in dealing with gangs if they wouldn’t always “try to make you feel low.”

“Instead of helping you, they try and intimidate you. . . . I can’t make it with cops.”

Gomez, 19, has been a gang member for four years. He said he has feared for his life at times, but he is a gang member because “there is nothing else.”

“If I got a good job and a good woman I would give it (the gangs) up. . . . A gangster thinks about going through life with a commitment, of getting a job and making something of himself,” Gomez said.

But, he added, “you get into gangs because everything, the drugs, the environment is right there.”

Gomez’s mixed feelings about street life are part of a strange dichotomy that exists in many gang members, Martinez said.

“Like everything else, the gangs are a mixture of good and evil,” he said.

Gomez, for instance, insists that a Christ figure was essential to the East L.A. 13 mural. At the same time, he threatened to kill anyone who damaged the artwork. “Anybody who messes with this would be heading for a bullet in the head,” he said.

The mural encourages that kind of violence, Lovato claimed. “Almost every time we get a call (on a gang-related crime) we will interview someone and he’ll tell us, ‘Hey, man, we were just kicking back drinking a few beers when the trouble started’. . . . That is what this mural reminds me of.”

Lovato said the problem lies not only in what is said, but in how--murals glorify a way of life that he calls destructive.

“They should eliminate things that project the gang member as part of the community,” he said.

Martinez, of course, disagrees: “This mural is all about (the gang members) saying, ‘I am somebody.’ I guess all of us are screaming that out.”