Waking Up to Gangs : Wanna-Bes Have Turned Into the Real Thing in Once-Sleepy San Clemente and San Juan

They did a U-turn and came up behind me as I left the (Mission Viejo) mall. When I walked up to them, one guy got out. He looked crazy, like he was stoned on crystal or something. He said he was from San Clemente and they were going to get me. There were seven inside their car and only two of us. All the doors opened, and I said to my friend, “Back me up, bro. Don’t let me down.” Then they jumped us. --Shortie of the San Juan Boys gang

The boys from San Clemente’s Varrio Chico gang were doing rata --looking for trouble--the day Shortie and his friend got jumped. When they saw him at the wheel of his “cherried-out,” low-riding ’49 Chevy with fender skirts, they knew they had one of the San Juan Boys right where they wanted him.

It’s called pay-back, Shortie explained. “And it goes both ways.

“We got them back one night and broke all the windows on three cars, slashed the tires and poured gas on one car and set it on fire,” he said.

“They know that if they’re going to come into our barrio they’re going to get jumped. We know that if we go over there, we better be prepared. . . .”

More than 200 years after Father Junipero Serra established Mission San Juan Capistrano in this peaceful, coastal valley area, a street war has broken out between two Latino groups in neighboring cities.

The vast area that was once the domain of a tranquil tribe of Indians known as the Juanenos has become the hunting grounds for carloads of young, club-wielding vatos on search-and-destroy missions against rival gang members.

At times, the violence can be random, such as the attack against Shortie. Or, when a 4-year-old girl was accidentally struck by shotgun pellets on Christmas Eve, 1989, when shots fired above the heads of rival gang members hit her on a balcony.

Last December, it became deadly. A former gang member was gunned down in a San Clemente restaurant when a beer-throwing incident escalated into a shooting. The death was San Clemente’s first gang-related homicide in its 63-year history.

“It used to be just fistfights between the guys. Now it’s led up to a murder with firearms,” said San Clemente Police Sgt. Richard Downing. “This has progressively become more violent.”

“Two to three years ago, we were looking at these guys as wanna-bes, not really belonging to a gang and not fitting the definition of a group congregated for criminal activity,” said Lt. Bob Rivas of the Orange County Sheriff’s Deparment.

Rivas, a 26-year veteran, recalled a 1988 incident that raised a lot of civic eyebrows.

“We had a major confrontation right in the middle of Camino Capistrano, right in front of the mission. They had guys with baseball bats running up to vehicles and smashing the windows out and people getting out of cars and attacking each other,” Rivas said.

Police estimate there are only about 100 gang members combined in the two communities. But Lt. Dan Martini, who is in charge of the sheriff’s patrol division that provides police protection for Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano, believes that “the seeds” for major gang activity “are here.”

Said Martini, “If we don’t do something to stop it now, then they get (gang) leaders and they become more organized.”

I took my kids to a career day at Saddleback Community College (two years ago). In the crowd were San Clemente kids who yelled taunts and threw pencils at us. Then they came down and jumped us right there in front of everyone. It was a free-for-all. The sheriff’s (deputies) were called, and they got the peace maintained enough for us to walk back to school. But as we were walking back, they jumped us again. --Robert Moore, instructor of English as a second language at Capistrano Valley High School

It wasn’t always like this. Eighteen years ago, San Juan Capistrano was still referred to as a “sleepy village.” Only 8,000 people lived here, and the majority of the Latinos who made up a small portion of the city’s population worked in the surrounding ranches and farms. When they did congregate, it was on family outings at local parks. But, said longtime residents, there were no gangs.

Then Orange County’s construction industry exploded as the countryside was leveled to make way for the new communities. Because of the demand, thousands of new jobs opened up: Carpenters, framers, roofers and drywallers were hired. Cement finishers, plumbers and landscapers came on board. Everybody, even the electricians, needed additional help, and they went to the Mexican immigrant as a source of cheap labor.

As new hotels and restaurants opened, the demand for labor continued. Many of the Latino immigrants chose to remain. Suddenly, the little village known universally as the home of the swallows, became home to 26,000 people.

Latinos now comprise 22% of San Juan Capistrano, a 178% increase over 1980. Nearly all the estimated 5,000 Latinos are crowded into the Villas, a 807-unit condominium complex that is home to the San Juan Boys gang.

Not far from Richard M. Nixon’s former western White House in San Clemente is a collection of apartments that the mostly Latino residents have dubbed San Clemente Varrio Chico (small neighborhood). The city’s Latino population, which now makes up 13% of the total, increased 130% in the past decade.

Alan Hix, who has lived in San Juan Capistrano for more than 20 years, said he remembers watching illegal aliens traveling north from Mexico jump off freight trains bound for Los Angeles as they rounded the bend into San Juan Capistrano.

“They were really gentle people looking for work, but there has been a change,” said Hix, who for eight years was principal at Serra Continuation High School in San Juan Capistrano and has counseled gang toughs.

“Today, they try and come to school wearing gang colors, such as black clothing, or the SCVC members like to wear blue bandannas. They wear tattoos, hair nets and baseball caps turned with the brim towards the back. Even the underside of the brim sometimes carries the gang’s insignia.

“We’ve prohibited the wearing of anything that identifies them as being in a gang,” Hix said as he showed a confiscated black baseball cap with the name Thumper embroidered in white.

T hey usually wear their hair really short, like a butch haircut with a hair net. I think it’s getting worse (because) the kids from Mexico keep hanging around them. They wanna be cool like those in the gang .

--A Capistrano Valley High School student

The South County high schools are seeing a more urban, streetwise newcomer.

“These kids are coming from towns and cities in Mexico where gangs rule the neighborhoods,” said Moore, the teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, where most of San Juan Capistrano’s students go.

Moore and other educators said they have observed a two- to three-year cultural transition for teen-age immigrants who team up with second-generation Latino boys to form the gangs.

“The new arrivals are like lambs. They come here knowing little of the language and keep a low profile. For them, it’s very important to work and bring money into the family. So they don’t do well in school and tend to hang out with the other Spanish-speaking students,” Moore said.

“But little by little, the gang members start in on them, teaching them the ropes. The only role models they have are these English-speaking gang members who have the (courage) to taunt police,” Moore said. “It’s a very macho thing.”

The reality is that the high school cholos are the support system for many of these children, said Nanette Thayer, an elementary school teacher at San Juan Elementary School, where 65% of the students are Latino.

“You have people caught between two cultures,” Thayer said. “And the schools are not meeting their needs.” The outspoken teacher has complained to district officials, and last May, wrote President Bush a letter outlining the local problem.

She charged in her letter that although Latinos have become the majority at two of the district’s 17 elementary schools, their needs “take second place” to those from the more affluent communities. In addition, Mexican parents are too respectful of schools and teachers to complain about the problem, she said.

“Why must we wait and watch San Juan Capistrano and other fine communities deteriorate to the point of East Los Angeles or parts of Santa Ana before we step in and meet the need?” Thayer asked.

I was interviewing at a home inside the Villas where an older brother was on probation. I noticed the youngster. It was obvious that he worshiped his older brother and would do anything for him. I asked him what he wanted to become, and he said, “I want to be a gang member.” It wasn’t a boast. He believed it, as if it was his future plan. He was in the fourth grade.

--Orange County Deputy Probation Officer Richard Washburn

The home of Ascencio and Margarita Soto is small but tidy. Eight years ago, the patriarch moved his family from Nayarit, Mexico, to San Juan Capistrano, where he is a janitor at a local store. Margarita is a housewife.

They are the parents of four girls and two boys. The are typically Mexican in that they embrace family virtues learned in their homeland. But it hasn’t been easy. While the parents have tried to push their children to do well in school, the gang culture outside the home is a constant adversary.

“It’s not easy growing up around here,” said their 17-year-old daughter, Patricia. She praised her parents for encouraging discipline. “It would have been easy for any of us to join in with the gangs.”

Just going to school in the morning can be a tightrope act. Some of the gang members look down on the book-carrying students, who, to maintain a peaceful coexistence, must at least acknowledge the gang but not necessarily become members.

“We all know who the members are because we grew up together,” she said, adding that on weekends after gang-related incidents, it’s always wise to maintain silence.

An older brother, who got married when he was 18, has since moved away and is now a tow-truck driver in Colorado.

“I would like to go to college to become a teacher,” she says proudly. “But I have to go to work for a while first to get enough money because my parents can’t afford it. Maybe in a year or so.”

Positive programs are needed to deglamorize the gang lifestyle, said Arnold Binder, a UC Irvine professor of criminology who wrote the book “Juvenile Delinquency.”

“You have gangs because members are receiving some source of satisfaction and prestige from being a member. For the new Mexican nationals, the gangs are their source of security, their subculture’s source of prestige. Although our culture defines it as bad, in their culture, it’s good,” Binder said.

When Principal Thomas R. Anthony arrived at Capistrano Valley High School five years ago, he said, he saw the problem coming.

“I grew up in Wilmington, and these kids were wearing what I considered to be gang clothing,” he said. “I instituted a dress code, and we went from an open to a closed campus.”

Anthony has also provided summer and after-school jobs for some of the San Juan Capistrano students. He wants to build a larger gymnasium and provide after-school activities to help keep his students off the streets.

H ey, they jumped some guys two nights ago near the liquor store. They stabbed his face and neck and hit the other one with a bat. Why? The gang wanted their beer. You know how the vatos are.

--One of the SJC gang members

San Clemente police and sheriff’s deputies in San Juan Capistrano have adopted tougher measures against gang members, including “anti-gang” probation. With the help of the courts, convicted gang members are given probation that prohibits them from associating with other gang members, wearing any gang insignia, and forcing them to a curfew.

In San Clemente, the city has contracted with the Irvine-based Community Service Programs to counsel youths on gangs. The program is also expected to work with residents in gang-prone areas of the city, showing them how to combat gang influence.

San Juan Capistrano is taking part in a county-created gang suppression program that teams a probation officer and a sheriff’s deputy to patrol the streets.

And, four teachers from the Capistrano Unified School District are developing a curriculum on gang awareness and prevention for students from grades four to six.

But despite the programs, violence--a stabbing one week, then two stabbings and a robbery of a newspaper delivery boy--continues to escalate. As a result, sheriff’s deputies have stepped up patrols in the Villas.

Latino residents complain that police crackdowns attack only gang symptoms and not the social causes and that they have created tension between them and police.

Martini acknowledged that on three occasions, the vehicles of his patrol deputies have been vandalized, including broken windows and slashed tires of parked patrol cars. In one instance, a rock was thrown at a radar unit while it was occupied by a deputy.

Residents said they need recreational facilities and after-school programs, especially for teen-agers. A community center has been recommended by some, while others suggest that the area north of the Villas be designated for a park.

Some Latino community leaders said they believe that San Juan Capistrano has largely ignored their community and that the schools have failed to educate their children. They point to the city’s overcrowding ordinance that targeted the Villas and resulted in pre-dawn inspection “head counts.”

“To have a housing inspector with sheriff’s deputies in tow wake people up and count how many are living in a home was an attitude straight out of Mississippi in the ‘60s,” said Carlos Negrete, a Latino attorney.

The city has a pervasive anti-Mexican bias, which the City Council has done little, if anything, to address or reduce, creating a large gap for cultural misunderstandings to occur, Negrete and other Latinos have said.

But city officials say there is no money for recreational facilities, and they deny that it is government’s function to help change how people culturally perceive others.

What has happened to San Juan Capistrano is indicative of many Southern California cities, said City Councilman Gary L. Hausdorfer, a former mayor. A housing boom creates jobs taken by low-skilled immigrants who need a place to live. While the community views growth as a mixed blessing, it fails to deal with the thousands of newcomers, many of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants, he said.

As for racism, Hausdorfer said: “It’s larger than San Juan Capistrano, it’s throughout Southern California. . . . The attitude issue has to come from the hearts and minds of the individuals. There’s nothing the city can mandate.”

Said Catalina D. Senkbeil, a community college instructor who moved to San Juan Capistrano in 1966: “These children must begin to feel like they belong here.”