Breaking Ties That Bind : Gangs: Four former members recall the difficulties they overcame in getting away to start new and independent lives.

Why do young men and women join groups of apparently aimless, often angry and violent neighborhood youths? Because for many, the penalty for not becoming a “homeboy” or “homegirl” can mean anything from ostracism to death. And it is not an alliance one simply walks away from when one has had enough. The bonds are often blood bonds and such disloyalty is often considered the greatest sin.

The consequences of this passion can be tragic. There were more homicides in Orange County that were attributed to gangs by May of this year than in all of 1989.

But it is possible to leave that frightful world and succeed, sometimes grandly. Here are four people who have done it:

When 33-year-old Gus Frias goes to visit the friends of his youth, he knows exactly where to find them--close together on the same Montebello hillside, their likenesses, etched in gray marble, staring up at him from their gravestones.

There’s Miguel Garcia, the leader of the old neighborhood who saved his life several times, and the brothers Ronnie and Bobby Figueroa, and Frias’ best friend of all, Paul Guerrero.

They were victims of what Frias calls “the madness,” the deadly cycle of internecine warfare in the gritty East Los Angeles barrio of Maravilla. They weren’t gangsters, says Frias. They hadn’t banded together with criminal intentions. They became an identifiable group because they came from the same barrio and they were engulfed by ancient blood feuds between rival families and neighborhoods.

“It’s like a fraternity,” he says. “Fraternities at universities are formed for the purpose of giving support, guidance, identity to every single brother and when a brother needs something, you have all these other brothers who come to the rescue. In the barrio, it’s the same thing, but it’s taken a step further in that all of us are willing to give our lives for each other.”

And, he says, you never truly stop being a homeboy, even if you get a pair of degrees from USC, even if you become a cop or an author, even if you become a teacher or a community activist. Even if you become a national finalist for a White House Fellowship.

Frias has done all that. Today he is the manager of Operation Safe Schools, a program against drugs and gangs that is affiliated with the Orange County Department of Education. He also teaches a course at UC Irvine intended to instruct educators about gangs.

He also used to pack a gun to school and became known as an “arsenal man” in his barrio, one who always knew how to obtain weapons. He was a homeboy, he says, because he had to be, because it was the only way to survive.

“You live in those projects,” he says, “and automatically you have to learn to survive. You’re bred to believe that you’re not going to become a victim. If that meant packing a gun to school, so be it.”

He never shot anyone. Instead, he says, he became more and more horrified as, one by one, his friends were cut down around him.

His family, he says, had instilled strong positive values in him, but when his best friend was shot to death during Frias’ junior year in high school, he began to look for a way out.

“The majority of my friends were killed,” he says, “and that was enough to make me think. I was losing my childhood friends to the madness.”

Also, one of his teachers at Garfield High School convinced him that he had the potential to go on to college. He became the school’s student body president and later was accepted not only at USC, but at Harvard and Stanford. He chose USC, where he was offered work-study scholarships and fellowships, because it was close to his barrio.

He made high grades at USC, where he found the academic challenge did not compare to the challenge of growing up as an “arsenal man” in the barrio.

“What were the consequences for failing at USC, a letter grade of F?” he said. “The consequence for failing in the barrio was death.”

With his bachelor’s degree in political science and his master’s degree in public administration, he took jobs first as a special assistant to the West Covina chief of police and later as an area adjutant in the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He expects that his current job with the Orange County Department of Education will not satisfy him forever. He says he wants to be elected to national public office someday.

“I’m a dreamer,” says Frias, “and a person who dreams, fights like hell for the rest of his life to achieve them. I think the best of me is yet to come.”

Still, his past occasionally dogs him. Shortly after he completed his autobiographical book, “Barrio Warriors,” in the early 1980s, he says he was threatened with death by veteranos-- Maravilla locals whom Frias called “adult thugs who perpetuate the self-destruction”--because he had heaped scorn on them, and they felt he had made public “things that were considered secret, part of the nether world.”

Shots have been fired at his car and his house, he says, and two years ago, on his way to make a presentation at a school, he was struck by a car in front of his house in what he says was a deliberate attempt on his life. He spent 36 hours in intensive care as a result.

“It comes with the territory,” he says.

Frias says such events have not slowed him. He continues to move forward, but always takes the time to look back, to visit his many friends who lie in Resurrection Cemetery, to remember that he is still a homeboy.

“The cemetery tends to remind us a lot of what life is about,” he says, looking around the hill. “We’re here temporarily. We have to learn how to live and survive, to make the best of our days, to help our brothers and sisters who are lost and confused. I wish I could do more.”

DOROTHY CASTILLO

She started out as the kid who was different. She was the one the neighborhood girls taunted, insulted, beat up almost daily.

She didn’t become one of them because she didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like the hard-edged world of the girls in the gang jackets with the beehive hair and false eyelashes and double layers of white eye shadow who hung out on the corner at night and cruised the streets with their boyfriends in the hardscrabble Fullerton barrio known as Fullerton Toker’s Town, or FTT.

But in junior high school, you can only take so much of being ostracized, only suffer so many beatings. So, when she was 12 years old, Dorothy Castillo gave in and joined a group of girls who called themselves the Emeralds.

“I had unbelievable peer pressure,” says Castillo, now 36, a college student and a field representative for the Women in Community Services Job Corps, which is federally funded through the Department of Labor and provides free job training for the economically disadvantaged. “It’s so intense that it actually changes your whole life. The kids follow you to school, they make fun of you, they push you when you’re walking, they call you names. And they don’t just get to you, they get to your family, your sisters, your brothers.

“It’s like you don’t even know you’re in class sometimes because you’re so worried about what they’re going to do to you next. And when you live in their area, it makes it worse. You have to claim that area or else.”

But when she put on the jacket and met the gang on the corner at night (she often had to sneak out of her parents’ house to do it), everything changed. She had shown her solidarity with her neighbors, with her barrio.

Meanwhile, her supervision at home was minimal. Her father worked days, her mother nights. She cut classes often to hang out with her friends. Her grades plummeted.

But during her last two years of high school, Castillo grew apart from the Emeralds and disassociated herself with the group. And she suddenly became worse than invisible. She was not only shunned completely by her former friends, as well as by a second, similar group of girls (who once again began jeering and beating her regularly), but no one at the entire school would speak to her.

Her isolation ended--and, she realizes now, her life’s direction began to shift--near the end of her high school years in 1971, when she got into a fight with a girl who had insulted her family. The police broke up the fight and took her home to face her parents. It was, she says, the first time her parents had any idea she had been involved with gang members.

But, she says, “it was the first time I got recognition. I’d shown that I wasn’t going to take anything anymore and I started getting respect. These kids can torment you to the point where you just explode.”

Still, when the opportunity to escape the barrio came, in the form of a marriage proposal from a Marine stationed at El Toro (where she worked in food service), she took it and moved to Anaheim. She had a daughter and a son, but the marriage failed after five years. She and the children moved back with her parents in FTT.

She was older, wiser and tougher, however, and decided to go back to school at Fullerton College. She took classes in criminal justice and got As.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I couldn’t believe I was intelligent. I never thought I could do it before.”

She married a second time, and had another daughter, but after two years that marriage also failed.

She took a job counseling with the now-defunct Turning Point Gang Project in Orange County and decided to make a career in the field of human services, in particular counseling the parents of present or potential gang members. She is working toward her degree in human services at Rancho Santiago College.

In recent years, Castillo has seen family history repeat itself. Her oldest daughter, now 16, had felt the relentless pressure to ally herself with Fullerton gang life since she was a child. The fact that her mother was counseling gangs in Anaheim, considered by several Fullerton gang members to be disloyal to her home barrio, only caused the insults and beatings to increase, and the Castillo house was the target of incessant harassing and threatening phone calls. And Castillo’s daughter, in her early teens, began to take on the mantle of local gang members.

Castillo and her children have since moved to western Orange County and severed ties with the gangs. She makes a point of spending time with her children and knowing about their activities and friends and, through her job, wants to make sure that other parents do the same.

“I felt what I had to go through was something that I had to learn in order to help people now,” she says. “If I can beat what I went through, and what my daughter went through, I can help other parents.”

AMADOR CORONA

Sitting in his Santa Ana law office, Amador Corona can’t help thinking of the film “Stand and Deliver” when he recalls his high school years in the early 1970s.

Corona had allied himself with a gang (the members thought of it as a club) called Thee Uniters in the west Santa Ana barrio known as Silver Acres. He partied with them on weekends, cruised in their cars, wore their colors, drank with them in local parks.

But he had always made good grades in school, and his gang status didn’t change that.

“One thing that I was fortunate about,” says Corona, 35, who practices criminal and personal injury law and has a second office in Corona, “was that school was easy for me all along. Even though I was in a gang, I was still getting As. I was taking college prep courses with this club jacket on and that looked unusual to a lot of teachers. They’d say, ‘Are you sure you’re supposed to be in this class?’ The jacket implied something to them that was generally negative. They thought I belonged in wood shop or something like that.”

But, like the intelligent but overlooked high school students in “Stand and Deliver,” Corona belonged on the honor roll. Officials at UC Irvine thought so too, and accepted him as an undergraduate biology student.

This was all but unheard of in his circle of friends.

“There was a cross section of guys,” Corona says. “You had the ones who were the tough guys always looking for trouble, then you had the other guys who were only interested in going to parties and looking for girls. There were guys who were interested in cars. For me, it was the parties and the cars.

“Some of us individually would get in trouble with the law for drinking or fighting, but our rivalries with other gangs were more in terms of who was the best dressed or the best dancers. We were small and we never would have survived if we would have tried to be the toughest. There were certainly neighborhoods where we weren’t welcome.”

He didn’t feel particularly welcome at UCI either. He lived on campus, and the life there was unlike any he had known.

“I felt like I was on an island out there,” he says.

It didn’t help that he had chosen a major for which, he later realized, he was unsuited. His grades in biology were mediocre and, he says, one academic counselor suggested that he should leave the university.

Instead, he changed his major to social ecology, and obtained his bachelor’s degree. Then UCLA accepted him into its law school. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college.

During his college years, he became gradually disassociated from his old gang.

“It was kind of like in a marriage where your interests change and you’re no longer compatible,” he says. “Part of it was the opportunity to see a different part of the world and a different lifestyle. That’s what I think a lot of people in gangs and who live in barrios could benefit from.”

For other members of the old gang, such a vision never materialized. Corona remembers one member who became a chiropractor, and others who now drive trucks or work in construction, but he also remembers several who “got into alcohol and never got out of that, and others who have been in and out of jail.”

For Corona, however, meeting the challenge of living in two worlds propelled him to success.

“What I liked,” he says, “was being able to show the teachers that what they originally thought about Mexicans was probably wrong and what they thought about club or gang members wasn’t necessarily true. With me, they couldn’t say that all gang members were drive-by shooters or drug dealers.”

STEPHANIE LOPEZ

Everybody expected Stephanie Lopez to fail and, for the better part of her young life, she obliged them.

Her alcoholic stepfather beat her. Her mother repeatedly told her she was stupid. So did her teachers in Las Vegas, N.M. One of them actually assigned her to an arbitrary group of supposedly slow students he called “the dumb bunnies.”

“You’re stupid at home, you’re stupid at school, you’re an outcast, you’re one of the dumb bunnies, so you say, ‘All right,’ ” says Lopez. “You have to have some friends and one of mine was the bottle. I was drunk every weekend. I was an alcoholic by the time I was in junior high.”

She also identified herself with the gang that claimed Las Vegas’ Camp Street as its territory. She took a street name that she often sprayed on walls and buildings: La Snoopy.

“They called me that,” she says, “because I always wanted to know everything. When I sprayed it on a wall, that was me, that was my identity.”

It was a small way to chip away at the deep sense of alienation from the academic and social world around her, where if you were Latino, “people’s expectations were that you would dig ditches or work at a sewing machine or raise a family. The schools would socialize you to fail. High school was an incredible racist experience.”

Today, La Snoopy, she of the inquisitive mind, is 38, lives in Irvine, has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in speech communications from Cal State Fullerton, a second master’s degree in comparative cultures from UC Irvine, and is working at UCI toward her Ph.D. in the same subject.

But while she was in high school, her grades seldom rose above Ds, she says. She hung out with the gang, ratted her hair, got into fights where knives and razors bristled, “did defiant, malicious things.” She became known as a girl who would never back down when playing “chicken” in a car. Once, while she was driving drunk, her car and another crashed at an intersection. She was ordered to report to a probation officer for a year after that.

One New Year’s Eve Lopez nearly died after passing out drunk and being taken to a local hospital.

Then she discovered chess.

“When I was making bad grades in high school,” she says, “there was a Chicano counselor who taught me the game. He really cared. He showed me that I wasn’t stupid.”

She quickly became the state junior chess champion.

That success, in part, inspired her to attend the University of New Mexico after high school. However, “even though I was highly intelligent, I hadn’t been given the skills I needed to survive (in college),” she says, “and I fell flat on my face the first time out.”

She moved to Southern California, where she thought she would have a better chance at a job. She began working in a drugstore.

Then, in 1979, a friend urged her to try for a degree a second time, at Cerritos College. This time, more worldly wise, she began making straight As and obtained an AA degree in fashion. While at Cerritos, however, she competed on the debate team with such success that she was offered a debate scholarship to Cal State Fullerton, where she worked for her speech communication degrees. After four years at UCI, she is nearing completion of her doctorate studies. She intends to teach courses in comparative cultures at the university level.

She has earned scholarships throughout her college career.

Now, she is trying to make sure other Latino youths are inspired to do the same. She has been working with various community service projects in the Orange County barrios since she was an undergraduate at Cal State Fullerton. In 1985, she proposed the idea of a summer camp, funded by private businesses, where barrio youths could learn, among other things, that there are alternatives to gangs and a life without self-esteem. The first Camp Escalera (Spanish for ladder) was held last summer at Cal State Fullerton.

“I want to leave something behind that will make a difference,” she says. “We have to make a moral investment in our system of education and build bridges rather than walls. These people aren’t lazy, they’ve just been socialized to poverty. I tell them that there’s much more power in a library than there is in a .45 automatic.”