Tchaikovsky and the Gang

The Latino kid with the knife tattoo kicks his Puma sneaker high in the gymnasium sky.

One (boom!) after another (bam!), the shirtless, sweaty teen-age dancers follow in the footsteps of their fellow homeboy (gang member). All 20 punch knees, slap hands, stretch hamstrings and slam heels on the foul line of a B-ball court that’s thick with body odor and Salvadoran catcalls.

A boom box erupts with music so loud and linda that these guys pump oxygen from raw lungs as if their lives depended on each move.

But, no, this music isn’t funk or rap or salsa or disco, but a Tchaikovsky cello adagio.

Cello adagio? Tchaikovsky? The graffiti-stained walls of this mid-Wilshire neighborhood don’t imply the presence of lily-white kids who get off on classical music, let alone classical ballet.

But these youths don’t care about the non-macho implications of dancing. They’re psyched for their production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” which is scheduled to take place at El Centro Wilshire Family Center, adjacent to the First Baptist Church, 760 S. Westmoreland Ave., beginning Friday. With the 20 guys from the street, a few principal dancers from the Long Beach Ballet and a dozen young girls from Beverly Hills, it promises to be one of the most unusual versions of that ballet ever.

But what are these tough-acting, street-wise kids, doing in a production of the Imperial Russian 19th-Century ballet “The Sleeping Beauty?”

It’s a question that baffles everyone who comes into contact with the “Leeward Locos,” the 100 or so youths who live in the neighborhood two blocks south of Wilshire and Vermont, considered by some to be gang members. They are refugees from El Salvador, knit together loosely in a city-wide group affiliation called Mara Savatrucha, which they translate as “Salvadorans with spirit.” Some Los Angeles Police Dept. members translate it as “criminally inclined gang member.”

Even church officials say they never expected dozens of teen-agers to come streaming through the center’s door last January, shyly watching as Long Beach ballerina Helena Ross taught arabesques to local preteen girls. But they did. And now 20 to 40 Latino young men, mostly between the ages of 14 and 22, perform their warm-up karate exercises three to five times a week with all the seriousness associated with a professional dance company.

A Trip to the Joffrey

William Moran brags that he’s going to be “un ballerino muy famoso.”

“Trucha, simone? (Cool, huh?),” he asks, plieing as if he were a balletomane by birth.

Maybe he should have been. Moran’s dance fire had a few embers thrown into it on May 22 when he and 20 friends went to the chandeliered Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center. There, they witnessed the Joffrey Ballet’s Diaghilev evening, a crash course in 20th-Century European art that, with the company’s athleticism, destroyed the youths’ negative take on dance.

“Those guys were so macho,” exclaims Edwin Saravia, 22. “Man, they could shake it. I wish I could be like them.”

“ ‘Petrushka’ was my favorite,” says Victor Lara, 17. “That puppet danced from the heart and soul to get his girl.”

“No, you’re wrong,” yells Oscar Sanabria, 19, “the other two pieces (“Rite of Spring” and “Afternoon of a Faun”) were better. They were like gang banging (street talk for street fighting).

Hurt Feelings

But the banter hides hurt feelings. Although the ballet tickets were free, the young men ended up paying a painful psychic price for them.

According to center administrator Maria Ross (Helena’s mother), the Joffrey was “more than happy” to offer 100 complimentary tickets to underprivileged youths aspiring to dance when she requested them.

But when Maria Ross mentioned that some of the dancers were a part of Mara Savatrucha, a dance company representative called the police.

The report wasn’t glowing. Joffrey officials, worried about having what the police deemed “the most mindlessly violent gang in the city” at the Music Center, politely informed Ross that the tickets wouldn’t be honored.

Helena Ross, during a lull in a recent rehearsal at the gym, claims that only bad publicity from local newspaper and TV coverage “forced the Joffrey to change its mind.” The center later received 20 tickets, in contrast to the initial 100 promised.

“It was an ignorant decision that shows how little people understand gangs,” explains Ross, who says “the boys’ biggest concern was how to get a dress shirt and if the company’s dance steps would look as exciting as the ones they were learning.”

Suddenly an alley door bursts open and a dozen young men charge out onto the gym floor that’s filled with the deafening echo of a hundred sneakers smacking the dance floor so hard it could crack.

“One, two, three, four,” shouts Helena Ross at the top of her lungs. With each count, dancers Moran, Victor Lara, Oscar Sanabria and Edwin Saravia snap into near-perfect back flips.

Only once does a young man fall flat on his back, instead of landing on his feet as he was taught.

He looks physically and mentally wounded and jets from the rehearsal arena before the others can spot tears trailing lines down his cheeks.

Robert Lobo, who is wheelchair-bound, revs into fourth gear over to the dejected campanero before he leaves the center and, as Lobo says, “gets in a fight.”

Although Lobo is paralyzed from hips down, and his legs have atrophied, his role as “speedy Gonzalez” in the ballet is said to be central.

“Me gusta la musica classica,” Lobo says, showing off his virtuosity in maneuvering his wheelchair into dizzying circles and risky wheelies. “Pero la historia es trucha.”

Lobo explains that he has learned to love classical music, but it’s the story of the ballet that appeals to him the most.

Helena Ross sees some heavy-handed irony in that confession. This European story ballet boasts a Czarist formalism that is wildly alien to these street kids. But an element of the tale rings all too true to her.

“These kids are playing Carabosse and Carabosse’s retinue,” Ross says, referring to the fact that Carabosse is the famously wicked bad sport who crashes the palace party in honor of Aurora’s christening.

“You see, these kids have been left out from the middle-class party in our society and in their native country,” Ross says. So we’re doing the best we can to re-invite them. You call it art. I call it humanity.”

The police call it naive.

According to Sgt. Tom Jones of the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, these local street toughs are said to be the most “ruthlessly violent in the city.”

“I don’t believe the center is helpful to the community,” says Jones, who said that he has never visited the center.

Commanding officer of the Rampart area, Capt. Bayan Lewis, says that “we’ve had a hard time explaining to the dedicated dance teachers that the gang members may make good dancers but that doesn’t mean that when they leave her place they are not selling dope or committing drive-by shootings or armed robbery with a deadly weapon. Anyone, and I repeat, anyone, who admits to being a Mara Savatrucha is criminally inclined.”

Lewis believes that anyone on the dance floor who is an avowed Mara Savatrucha member is criminally inclined. “It means he is violent and is a drug runner and the last thing on his mind at night is practicing his dance steps.”

But Lewis says there is a place for the center in “helping to cure the socioeconomic ills of this community. . . . I don’t discount that the center can help some youths who are not yet M.S. members.”

Graffiti and Bullets

Mara Savatrucha. According to members, it’s the proud calling card of street-wise teen-agers who fled a war-torn El Salvador looking for a better world. By all accounts, their experiences thus far haven’t met their expectations.

So instead, out of paralyzing boredom and retribution for the prejudice they often attract, they “tag,” or spray paint, Mara Savatrucha or M.S . all over church and shopping center walls as reminders to other roaming gangs that they have suicidally stepped onto enemy turf.

Mara Savatrucha.

Just the mention of those two words strikes terror in the faces of nearby Wilshire Boulevard merchants who say they are sick of violence. Several store managers recounted horror stories of shoot-outs and chronic burglaries. Petrified of retribution, they asked for anonymity.

Mara Savatrucha.

According to several families who live in the neighborhood, those words signify the breakdown of social order, “Clockwork Orange”-L.A. style.

One mother, who lost a son to gang war, described these youths as “drug runners and mariguanos who carry deadly weapons the way other kids carry baseball cards.” She begged not to be identified.

Oscar Sanabria listens quietly and patiently to the resentful reports. He had just previously sported a gee-whiz grin when complimented on his virtuosic side kicks. Now he looks troubled.

He searches the eyes of his interviewer for an answer, and finding none, closes his own, as if searching his soul for the elusive truth.

“ Mara means group,” he says. “ Sava is short for Salvadoran. Trucha means a cool person. So if you’re a Mara Savatrucha, you’re cool and so are your homeboys.”

Does cool mean bad ?

“We can be bad,” he says. “But not that bad.”

He says he’d like to tell his story.

“Before the center was here, was open, I used to stay all the time on the streets, write on the wall, steal. Everyday I looked to get in a fight. I used to wait for yellow school buses and when they would come I would throw bottles at the windows or tires. I don’t know why I did those things. I just did. I used to walk up to old people and throw my fists up at their faces, acting like I would hit them. I never did, but they screamed, ‘Ay, yi, ay,’ and that was funny. See my wrists. These are where the cops put the handcuffs. They thought I sold drugs, but I never sold drugs. Never.

“I never thought I could dance and now I would like to study some more moves. Don’t tell Helena, but I am hoping to get a really big part in the production. I don’t know why, man, but I feel so good here, so secure. But the cops don’t see nothing. When they see me on the street they spit and say, ‘Mara Savatrucha pig. Scum.’ They hate us. Even the cops that are Mexican, they hate us. They say, ‘California belonged to Mexico. We have rights. You don’t. Go back to your lousy country.’ I am scared of them.

“The ballet was the best time in my life. I loved it. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like one day I gonna be somebody. I never seen so many smiling and beautiful people. And the people in the balcony, they recognized us from the news. It was like being a movie star.”

The ‘Center Mascot’

William Moran has already decided that it’s a ballerino he wants to be and adds that if it had not been for the center, he would be “living on the streets.” Why? “My house is so crazy and noisy,” he answers. “I can’t stand it.”

Sadly for Moran, he can’t participate in the production because his mother is sending him back to El Salvador before the opening. According to Moran, his mother is trying to arrange amnesty for him and is worried that he might get picked up during the frequent police crackdowns on gangs. Moran wants to come back to the States and go to dance school. “When I become a pro,” he says, “I’m gonna come back and show the steps to my homeboys.”

Roberto Lobo overhears those comments and cheers Moran’s loyalty. Lobo is the avowed “center mascot.” He regularly escorts visitors, elderly neighborhood residents and local kids safely from the center to Wilshire and Vermont avenues, just two blocks away.

“Robert would make a good village elder,” says Faith (Blondie) Palermo, events coordinator at the city-financed center and neighborhood den mother. Of Italian origin, Palermo was born in the South Bronx and speaks fluent Spanish. She acts as local translator for guys like Robert who sprinkle their English with local Spanish lingo.

Why does Robert always smile? What is he hiding?

He answers by lifting his atrophied right foot. He lets it drop and it slams against the foot pedals on the wheelchair.

According to Lobo, he is paralyzed from the waist down due to a gunshot in the back sustained last year as he ran from the police, who were pursuing him because they thought he had stolen a car.

“I used to drink,” he says. “A lot. And the police would say, ‘Hey, winy.’ Now, since the accident, I never drink. And they still say, ‘Hey winy.’ Whenever we have a gang sweep, they make me get out of my wheelchair and fall to the floor with all the others.

“They hate me. And I don’t do nothing now. I just sit in a wheelchair all day and they still hate me.

“I liked the ballet. If I hadn’t had the accident, maybe I try that stuff. I am glad the center is here. I feel safe here. Without the center, I’d probably be dead.”

Support for the Center

According to almost everyone but the police (senior citizens in the area, businessmen, L.A. City Councilman Nate Holden and the gang members themselves), the center serves a vital and stabilizing function in the community.

Jim Hopkins, associate minister of First Baptist Church, which owns and operates the center, can’t “actually say whether or not the center reduces crime (in the neighborhood, but) it doesn’t add to it.” The center, he said, “might serve as a preventive force for younger dudes who are not criminally inclined.”

Former center director Carmelo Alvarez believes that the Police Department wants the center closed. In February, the Police Department escalated its CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) program and Alvarez observed “confusion between keeping the peace and unconscious racism. . . . I have great respect for the police. But when I saw that they didn’t for me, I saw my whole career go down the drain. I had no choice but to leave the center.”

A $20,000 grant from the City of Los Angeles, which provided operating costs for the center and a part-time director, ran out in May. The church is keeping the center afloat, opening the doors just three days a week as opposed to the previous six.

According to Palermo and Ross, no additional support is in the offing. Palermo is worried that the young men will be left to their own devices during the “hottest months when the police crack down the most.”

As this article was being prepared, the story surrounding the continuation of center financing was changing. When contacted, Councilman Holden pledged to do all he could “to see to it that the center remained open.”

Church representative Hopkins scoffed at reports of closure. “We are simply not going the government-funding route and are funding the center ourselves,” he answered. “We want a more Christian-oriented program.” He emphasized the new policy would not restrict the Leeward Locos from attendance.

No Place Else to Go

To understand what kind of refuge the center offers these young men, it helps to watch as the last remaining gang members exit the center doors at 7:30 p.m. when Maria Ross begs them to stop rehearsing and go home.

But they don’t go home.

Sanabria decides whether to see Blondie Palermo or “kick back.” As he walks the dirty pavements of his “hood,” or neighborhood, he curls up his lip and tenses his body, keeping his eyes half-closed in preparation for a stare-down with a potentially unfriendly passer-by.

But this dramatic show is completely wasted on Palermo. She cuts through his affected bitterness with a hug.

“Blondie,” yells Sanabria, entering her office. “ Tengo hambre . (I’m hungry).”

“Baby,” Palermo yells back. “I just made sandwiches. What do you want me to do? Put them in your mouth and eat them for you?”

She manages the building she lives in on Leeward Avenue, down the block from the center. The lawns around the complex are well-kept; the interior plush enough to double for a middle-class condominium.

Palermo laughs at an observer’s bemused look. Nearly all of the 30 center youths can be spotted in her building. Transformed from artists to custodians, they’re sweeping floors, mopping and even filing papers when Palermo is preoccupied.

“These kids have no place to go,” she says. “They live in one-room shacks with a dozen other relatives. So I let them help me.”

Troubled Rehearsal

Fast-forward to the week before performances. The adult principals from the Long Beach Ballet, the dancers from Beverly Hills, the young girls from the neighborhood and the Leeward Locos meet to rehearse their parts together.

But something is wrong. Most of the boys were missing.

Reports in Spanish of massive arrests and deportation fill the room. Palermo later explains to a visitor that the “LAPD pulled 10 guys off the street and had an Immigration official in the Rampart Division waiting for them. Immigration couldn’t do anything with the guys who had amnesty papers, but four didn’t and are missing now.”

(A few days later, Captain Lewis confirms reports of deportation, assisted by LAPD gang sweeps. He explains that, “four of the young men in question were arrested--two on drug possession, two on the basis of warrants we already had out for them.” All four were deported.)

Comments Maria Ross: “I am just a stupid gringo from an upper-middle class background. But I feel if the neighborhood is abandoned to the LAPD to handle it as they will, there’ll be no hope for ever handling the gang problem.”

First Baptist Church Deacon Vance Smith, agrees, adding that, “until you develop mutual respect between the youths and the police, the situation will worsen. We are not against police protection; we only ask for humane dialogue.”

By the middle of last week, some of the older teens trickle into rehearsals, defying parents who, according to Maria Ross, “are frightened that the center makes the boys targets for the police.” Helena Ross asks some of the pre-teen boys to fill in the spots for the four missing youths. And the rehearsal resume.

Professional dancers perform fouette turns while the streets youths dodge them with Karate steps that could pass for pas de chats.

The music is loud and Victor Lara smiles.

“Man,” he says, running in place so as to keep his body warm, “this is just like the Joffrey.”

“The Sleeping Beauty” is scheduled to be performed Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and next Sunday at 2 p.m.