L.A.’S CHICANO GANGS : The Off-Kilter Lives of Three Gang Members: Gears Don’t Mesh

Behind the bravado, behind the scowl, behind the knives and bullets, there are lives whose gears don’t mesh, secret insecurities, parents who won’t or can’t play their role. There is always something off kilter in a gang member’s life. Here are the stories of three:

With one exception, Dana Hicks fits the prototype of the traditional Chicano gang member, a guy who, at 23, is old enough to be wrestling with the real world but will never be too old to be “down” for his neighborhood. His big body is heavily tattooed with proclamations of love for his gang--18th Street--and his girlfriend, with whom he lives in Montebello.

He works for a painting contractor. He saves Friday nights for hanging out with his homeboys, saves Saturday nights for going out with his girlfriend and Sundays for outings with her and her three children.

The exception here is that Dana Hicks isn’t a Chicano. He’s black, one of a handful of blacks who have joined Chicano gangs as increased migration of Chicanos into traditionally black South Los Angeles has brought the two cultures into more frequent contact. It is not unusual to see ad hoc alliances between gangs of different races or to see younger Chicanos proclaiming themselves Bloods or Crips.

Dana Hicks calls himself “black with a Chicano heart” to the degree that “somewhere inside of me I don’t like blacks anymore.” He speaks with a pronounced, entirely convincing Mexican accent.

He grew up in Southwest Los Angeles being shoved around and said he sought out a Chicano gang because he sensed that there were more rules to live by. “Black gangs would see you with your mom and beat you up anyway. You don’t do that from a Chicano gang; you have respect, a certain amount of respect you give people.”

Lino Avitia, a slender 18-year-old with a low-key demeanor, belongs to a gang in Wilmington. He joined out of sadness.

“A couple years ago one of my friends got killed,” said Avitia. “He drowned in a pool. He was on PCP. He dove in the shallow end, hit his head. I was down, upset.”

He felt empty. He found what he needed in the East Side Wilmas.

After he joined, he was shot at, stabbed in the neck, hit in the head with a golf club and thrown into Juvenile Hall for five months last year for drunkenly throwing a bottle at some Long Beach gang members. He has used PCP a few times (“You’re a different person”) but not crack. He’s afraid of that. “Not for me. There’s no hope in that. That’ll get you nowhere.”

Avitia was one of more than 100 gang members from opposing sides in Wilmington who began informal peace talks two months ago. He wants to hang out, but he’s worried about being shot. His mother worries too. Gloria Avitia, 38, went through a gang phase as a girl growing up in a San Pedro housing project, but by the time she was Lino’s age she was out of it. She married a man who had avoided gangs.

“There’s been a lot of heartache,” she said. “But you can’t lock your kids up. The choice is his. You gotta get out of that stage. A lot of his friends are working.” She knows her son is trying to get construction work through some of his pals. “To me, that’s a step. Get ‘em good and tired so when they come home at night they go to sleep.”

Miguel, a 16-year-old gang member from Lynwood, may get out of it someday, but when you sit in a room with Miguel and his parents and a counselor in South Los Angeles, you sense the boy and the adults moving away from each other.

“He was supposed to come to a prayer meeting,” Miguel’s mother said. “But he went out. He and his friends got into a horrible accident.” A van crashed in a beach parking lot. The boys had a gun and were afraid of being caught, so they left the van and fled.

“You better check yourself out, man,” the counselor, a beefy man, told Miguel.

Miguel (not his real name) says he hangs out with about 10 gang members. His mother complains that he misses too much school.

Miguel winces. His mother envelopes him. A psychotherapist who works with gang members calls this “enmeshment,” an overburdened mother, lacking a supportive husband or bringing up children alone, worries so much about her son that she suffocates him, unwittingly pushing the boy to join a gang. The gang becomes a surrogate family.

“Every conversation,” Miguel complained, “she’ll talk about God or praying.”

“You’ll wish for that someday,” the counselor said.

“I feel he has a lot of hurt and anger because of his father,” the mother said. “Herman drinks a lot and he doesn’t always remember what he does, he curses at the children. I can just see by his actions the hurt he (Miguel) has toward him. He loves his father, but he is not getting any love or attention from his father.”

Miguel’s father, a welder with tattooed arms, has problems of his own. His son is a mess-up and so, in some ways, is he. How does a man talk about this?

“Look, I know that he has to step out,” the father said. “But I’m afraid something might happen. . . . Miguel, he’s a homeboy, you know? No, not really. He’s not been in the gang five, six years. But his friends have to call each other that. But why, 16 years old? Why do you want to start doing that?

“Maybe it’s my fault. Miguel probably says to himself, ‘There’s nothing to do. My dad don’t want to have nothing to do with me.’ I have things in my mind all day I think about, the way things are. . . . I’m not doing good right now, as far as trying to make things better. . . . I got a drinking problem, I like to drink. I ask myself why.

“You come home every day, eat, look at TV, go to bed. A man’s life, whatever you do, you get burned out. You want to look for something different. I get tired. I love my children, my family. But I say the heck with it, I’m gone. What should I do? I go to a park, get me a six-pack, sit down away from everybody, and I drink and I drink and I say, ‘Why the hell do I have to do this?’

“I was young, I had my little rough times, I was on probation. But if he should ever go to jail . . . going to jail takes a lot away from you. Within myself I say, ‘Oh, it’d be all over.’ ”