Mexican Immigrants, Long Beach Gangs : Hope, Fear Both Live on Henderson Ave.

Henderson Avenue is the territory of violent youth gangs and special police patrols. It is also the home of immigrant families with modest dreams who have come here to start over.

Narrower than most streets, unused by through traffic, Henderson’s 1400 block seems a world unto itself.

It is lined by two-story walk-ups whose front stoops are crowded with Latino youngsters and whose hallways echo with mariachi music. Kids on bikes whoosh down sidewalks past toddlers left in their sisters’ care.

At least 20 gangs have scrawled their names on buildings. Even the ice cream truck carries the initials of youth rivals. Kids talk of a stabbing on the corner and of shotguns waved in their faces. One woman has taken in a relative whose husband was murdered by a teen-ager this month.

“This block is right out of a New York ghetto,” said Officer Steve Lasiter, who patrolled it for three years.

“There’s repeated gunfire and a lot of heroin business going on,” gang unit Officer Norm Sorenson said. A special Metro Unit--responding to landlord complaints of gang intimidation--recently made 16 arrests in one week, mostly for narcotics.

But to the Mexican families who pack most of its small apartments, Henderson Avenue in the west-central city is the better life. To them, the gangs are just a dangerous nuisance.

Mercedes Soto, 33, and nearly her whole family--brothers, sisters and cousins--abandoned the outskirts of Guadalajara and now live in five apartments on Henderson’s 1400 block.

At least one member of each household has a job, she said. Most make about $150 a week. Rent starts at $350 a month.

“It’s a good street because there’s a lot of Mexicans,” said Soto, who sells candies, chips and vegetables to children who call her apartment the “Candy House.”

Across the street, Delia Rodriguez, 34, lives with her husband and five sons. Her window screens are ripped and chunks of ceiling stucco are falling, but she says she hopes for nothing more.

“At least we don’t starve here,” she said. Her dream is that her sons “will be good boys” and not join the gangs.

Jose Ramirez, a bright ninth-grader at nearby Washington Junior High, hopes that his family, area residents for a decade, will be granted amnesty as illegal immigrants and that he will find a job.

“I’ll buy my mom a house. She’s always working. She says she’s never known the word lazy . If I earn as much as she does, I’ll tell her, ‘I’ll work and you stay home,’ so when I come in the house she’ll be there,” he says.

Jose and 13 relatives, most from the Mexican farming village of Jacona, live in a two-bedroom apartment. All four parents work, Jose says, and now it is his turn to get a job.

Although its gang problems are worse than most, Henderson Avenue is like many other streets in western Long Beach south of Pacific Coast Highway, where large, low-income Latino families have moved during the last decade.

Since 1980, the city’s population has swelled by 45,000; about half of the new arrivals have been Latino, according to state and city estimates. Of Long Beach’s 75,000 Latinos, perhaps 30,000 are immigrants, community leaders estimate.

“Mostly they’re Mexican nationals working to try to get their piece of the American pie. They’re not the ones causing the problems,” said Sorenson, who usually cruises Henderson once a day, gathering intelligence on gangs.

Some of the troublemakers live in Henderson’s battered apartments. They are members of three cliques of the Eastside Longo gang--the young Crazy Rascals, the older Lonely Boys and the oldest and most hardened, the Barrio Viejo (old town) gang, Sorenson said.

Most Henderson families lead simple lives. The men work long hours as janitors and in restaurants, factories and construction. Some women also work, often in factories or building maintenance, but most say they stay home with their youngest children. Older children either walk to nearby schools or are bused to distant classrooms that are less crowded.

“These are families with a very low level of education and self-esteem, and they live in a state of fear because so many of them are here illegally,” said Armando Vazquez-Ramos, director of a downtown Latino center.

That often means that the immigrants do not complain to police or other city departments and are reluctant to pursue their legal rights, city and community officials said.

Vazquez-Ramos, whose Centro de la Raza processes amnesty claims, said he knows many families that have been in the United States continually since 1982 and qualify for legal residence, but who have returned to Mexico as jobs dried up. After years of living in fear of immigration agents, they so distrust the government that they will not apply for amnesty, he said.

That fear apparently carries over into day-to-day life on Henderson Avenue. Porches crawl with cockroaches, but Ray Liddicoat, the city’s chief building inspector, said he cannot remember the last complaint his office received from the street.

“These people are afraid, and the (apartment) owners are taking full advantage of that,” Liddicoat said. Latino immigrants are sometimes gouged for exorbitant rent paid per person per day, he said.

A Henderson Avenue property manager said, however, that the apartments are in constant need of repair, mostly because of teen-age vandalism. “We replace front doors, and they get kicked in. We replace windows, and they get kicked out. We have handymen who won’t go into that area because they’re afraid” of gangs, said Richard Tracy of Berro Management.

Many immigrant parents also avoid direct contact with schools, although this reluctance stems mostly from their own lack of education and inability to speak English, educators say.

Some Latino parents are unable to help their children even with primary-grade homework, said Long Beach Unified School District researcher Leslie Reese, who surveyed parents at a West Long Beach elementary school.

“They were very conscientious about bringing their children to school, but most of them felt that . . . they weren’t able to help their kids,” Reese said.

As a result, by their teen-age years, many Latino immigrants have had little success in school and have begun considering dropping out. Struggles with language, pressure to earn money for their families and a realization that they cannot afford college lead to the same conclusion, teacher Victor Hernandez said.

“They have shorter goals. They want to go to high school and to get a job. . . . And they feel so alienated by their situation with immigration,” said Hernandez, who teaches students who speak only limited English at Washington Junior High.

Six or seven of his ninth-graders last year simply went to work rather than report for high school classes this fall, Hernandez said.

An immigrant counselor for the school district, Ronald Reese, said he recently met two Latino youngsters who had been in the United States for seven years but had never previously attended school because their families needed them to work full time.

“Apparently their families finally got to the point of economic stability, so they could come to school,” he said.

School district officials say Latinos drop out of high school at a lower rate than white students, but they also say they do not know how many immigrant children leave school after junior high or never enroll at all.

Latinos, most of whom are in the elementary grades, made up about 25% of the district’s students last year but only 13.8% of its graduates. Nearly half of Long Beach’s 16,000 Latino students were in special classes for limited English speakers last year.

Two weeks ago, on the first day of school, 12-year-old Arturo Diaz, his cousin, Cristina, 9, and a half- dozen of their brothers and sisters were lounging on their front stoop in the warm sun of the late afternoon.

Arturo, a sweet-faced boy who is small for his age, held the hand of his 1-year-old sister and talked about himself and his street.

“The teachers always ask me what I want to be. I always put down a policeman. I don’t know what else to put,” he said.

Arturo says he is not sure what his mother does for a living, but his stepfather “does something” for a company that has to do with computers. People on their street don’t talk about their jobs, he said.

“But some of them get (cardboard) boxes and sell them. And some of them get cans,” he said, pointing to two battered pickup trucks filled with such refuse.

Arturo, Cristina and their friends say they do not much care for life on Henderson Avenue. The gang members, whom they call cholos , color nearly everything that happens.

“It’s not OK here, because there’s a whole bunch of cholos and writing” on the buildings, Arturo says.

Cristina, who was explaining a school workbook to younger children, said, “We don’t like to go a whole lot outside, because the cholos come, smoking marijuana and all that.” Arturo added, “They steal the car stereos. . . . There’s about 50 gangs.”

Juan, 14, who said he was once a “gangster,” stopped to talk. “They pointed a shotgun at me. A Westsider in a car. I just ducked down.” In another incident, a 42-year-old “was stabbed in the ribs by a Eastside cholo ,” he said.

“I used to be in a gang. Then I jumped out. Too many problems. The cops, they go to my house and say I stole something. They say I’m a gangster,” Juan said.

Melchor Rodriguez, 12, a Little League all-star, says Henderson Avenue is the “worst gangster street.” The gangs fight “because they hate each other. They don’t get along,” he said. Nobody can offer a better explanation.

Javier Perez, Melchor’s friend, said later, almost under his breath, that he really would like Henderson Avenue to be less crowded.

“What I want is that the street will be lonely,” he said.