Longtime Rivals, Immigrants Blur Gang Battle Lines : Violence: Central American youths add an element of intercultural conflict among Latinos. The groups include more teen-agers willing to kill, experts say.

It has been a crazy year, Conejo says.

About a month ago, the 15-year-old gang member from Pacoima dodged shots fired at him near his school by San Fernando gang members in a car, a skirmish that was part of a longtime rivalry that heated up again this winter.

At a wake several weeks later, Conejo stared into the coffin of Alejandro Penaloza, a 14-year-old from North Hollywood who was gunned down outside Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks.

And the next night, an initially peaceful fund-raising party that Conejo’s gang organized to pay for Penaloza’s funeral ended in a free-for-all among members of several different gangs, with police and counselors from Community Youth Gang Services interceding just as the guns came out.

“It’s getting crazier,” said Conejo, a genial fast-talker with close-cropped hair whose street name means rabbit.

“I sweat it every time I go to school,” he said. “I’m always watching out.”

The first six months of 1991 have been particularly bloody in the San Fernando Valley, according to police. The number of suspected gang-related slayings so far--21--is almost twice the 12 recorded during the first six months of 1990. The Foothill Division, which traditionally has the most gang-related crime among the five Valley stations, has experienced 11 suspected gang killings, compared with eight in all of 1990.

There are several explanations, according to police, counselors and gang members. Longtime murderous rivalries between northeast Valley Chicano gangs have spilled across traditional neighborhood borders. Newer gangs dominated by Mexican and Central American immigrants add an element of intercultural conflict among Latinos. And the growing number of gang members includes more teen-agers willing to kill to make a name for themselves, experts said.

“It’s like we’re putting out one fire after another,” said Detective William Humphry of the Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang unit, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH), as he cruised the streets of the East Valley on a recent Friday night. “The boundaries are becoming very fluid. Gang members are more mobile. Gangs that have been very quiet, all of a sudden they’re involved in a shooting. Things go crazy. It goes in cycles.”

As the sun went down, the rhythm of the streets picked up. Youths in black jackets, hair nets and low-slung pants took up positions at phone booths on Van Nuys Boulevard. Buick Regals, mini-trucks and other cars favored by gang members passed with stereos pounding out rap anthems.

Calls sputtered faster from Humphry’s radio. He sped from Van Nuys--where five Salvadoran gang members had just administered a vicious beating with baseball bats to a shirtless, heavily tattooed youth passing through from Burbank--to the confrontation at the party for Penaloza’s family. But because of the volume of calls flooding patrol officers, he and other CRASH officers also had to respond to a homicide scene and an altercation between neighbors, neither involving gangs.

A comparison with other police patrol areas in Los Angeles shows the Valley is no suburban oasis, though its overall number of gang-related crimes remains much lower. As of the beginning of May, the Police Department’s West Bureau had 18 suspected gang homicides, South Bureau had 22 homicides and Central Bureau had 35, according to police statistics.

The Valley’s 61 gangs include white, black, Latino, Asian and multiethnic groups, but most of this year’s homicides have involved Latino gangs, police said.

Anti-gang officers usually intensify their vigilance as the hot nights of summer approach. This year, the bloodshed started early with a series of drive-by shootings and retaliations in the northeast Valley. An epic rivalry there between Pacoima and San Fernando youths dates back to 1940s gangs with names such as Polvos, a Spanish reference to the dusty unpaved roads of the time, and Raneros, named after the frogs ( ranas ) in the marsh that used to exist where a shopping center now stands at the San Fernando border.

This year’s hostilities grew out of an unusual alliance between members of a longtime Chicano gang from San Fernando and a relatively new, North Hollywood-based gang that includes Central American- and Mexican-born members, according to police and gang members.

Late last year, the two gangs agreed to join forces against the numerically larger group of gangs that claim Pacoima as turf and often band together against outsiders, though they also fight among themselves, a gang expert said.

“You have improbable situations and non-traditional combatants,” said Capt. Tim McBride, commander of Foothill Division. “It is a continually changing field. Just when you think you know what the turf is and who the players are, it changes.”

The result has been wild nights such as Jan. 12, when police say three Pacoima gang members climbed into a van belonging to one of their fathers and sped south on the Golden State Freeway. They allegedly fired shotgun blasts at random into a passing car on the freeway, wounding two men, then went marauding. They fired at gang members outside a liquor store in Sun Valley and killed a bystander, 18-year-old Francisco Cuellar, instead.

An adult and two juveniles have been charged with murder.

Police responded with a series of raids and arrests in March that appeared to dampen the conflict between the Pacoima and San Fernando-North Hollywood factions, Humphry said. They continue hitting trouble spots with CRASH investigators and motorcycle officers from a unit called Traffic Against Gangs, while officers in the year-old Jeopardy unit work on keeping youths out of gangs.

But the danger persists, as demonstrated by an after-school shooting at Sylmar Park Thursday that wounded a 14-year-old girl. Police said they believed a Pacoima-based gang was involved.

And the involvement of new players in the old rivalry has complicated gang problems in the East Valley, police and gang members said.

For example, Conejo and his homeboys go on periodic forays into North Hollywood to leave their placazos (graffiti), and rivals from that neighborhood respond in kind.

“That’s real rare,” said Robert Lopez, a 23-year-old former gang member from San Fernando. “That’s recent. You never used to see them guys tagging in those neighborhoods. . . . There are more danger zones now. It’s like the Panorama City mall, you get guys showing up there from all over. It’s right in the middle of the area. Even if a guy’s not looking for trouble, he might not be there to kick up dust or whatever, he’ll still find it.”

Lopez was interviewed at his apartment. He sat cradling his sleeping baby daughter, Evangelina, over his shoulder, patting her occasionally, as he told stories about shootings and how his gang elected its officers by members fighting among themselves until one man remained standing.

The birth of his daughter spurred him to abandon gang life, Lopez said. He now finds sporadic construction jobs through friends. As he gets older, Lopez said, the cycle repeats itself: He believes young gang members today are crazier than ever. His father, a gang member in the 1950s, regarded him the same way.

“They don’t care who you’re with,” he said, referring to a recent shooting in which a youth he knows was wounded and his father killed as they sat in a car at a fast-food stand. “They don’t know what’s up. You got 13- or 14-year-olds carrying guns.”

And gangs that were not considered much of a threat in the past, such as a gang that favors ‘50s-style haircuts and clothes, have become more dangerous, Lopez said.

“They just used to be somebody to beat up on a Friday and Saturday night,” he said. “Now they’re bigger, they carry guns, they’re wilder.”

The glorification of recklessness produces incidents such as the daylight drive-by that killed 14-year-old Penaloza, a reputed member of a citywide Chicano gang, according to Manuel Velazquez, a counselor for Community Youth Gang Services. Police say the alleged 18-year-old shooter drove to Van Nuys and gunned down another gang member hours later. He is still at large.

“It’s like it’s not just who you kill anymore, it’s how you go about it,” Velazquez said.

The suspected killer in that case, which was unrelated to fighting earlier in the year between Pacoima gangs and the San Fernando-North Hollywood alliance, reportedly belongs to a violent Salvadoran gang that has expanded to the Valley from the Central City in recent years, according to police and experts.

Intra-cultural tensions among Latinos are a catalyst for conflict, Velazquez said. The gangs split along subtle lines, experts said: Those who were born in this country and those who were not, those from Central America and those from Mexico, even those who are recent immigrants and those who immigrated earlier.

One Pacoima gang, for example, consists of newly arrived teen-agers from Mexico.

“They jump them in two weeks after they get here,” said a rival gang member named Spike.

Spike was born in Guatemala and speaks English with a marked accent. He and his homeboys in a Pacoima gang alternated rapidly between Spanish and English as they were searched and questioned by CRASH detectives one night recently.

But Spike and the others have been here long enough to look down on more recent arrivals. New, often impoverished immigrant youths form gangs partly in reaction to rejection and harassment from other gang members, who ridicule them as rancheros (hicks) or “border brothers,” according to Velazquez and Frank, a former gang member from San Fernando.

“If they wanna join the gang and they’re real border-brother looking, you might tell them, ‘Yeah, uh, we’re not accepting applications right now,’ ” Frank said with a chuckle.

The cultural melange produces odd variations. Experts said some immigrant gang members are more likely to affect the talk, musical tastes and mannerisms of black gangs than of Chicano gangs. “They call them blaxicans,” Lopez said.

The pressures of life in a new country can make immigrant gang members more prone to violence, especially Central Americans who have survived civil wars, experts said.

“They’re the crazy ones,” Lopez said. “They gotta prove themselves. They’re the ones who aren’t scared to load a bunch of guys into a van and drive up to a party, open the doors and start blasting.”

Central American families sometimes suffer from a deep generation gap because parents and children immigrated at different times to escape the dangers of war, according to Grant High School Assistant Principal Fran Ramirez, who counsels immigrant students and their families. Some youths were sent to live with relatives or a parent who remarried; a few came on their own. Even after families reunite, the hardship of life in the United States keeps parents and children apart, she said.

“The parents are just surviving,” Ramirez said. “They are working 12 and 14 hours a day. They don’t know what’s going on. The lack of communication between parents and children is really a problem.”

Some Central American parents are suspicious of the outside world, whether other families or school officials, because of the treacherous political climate of their home countries, she said. The same mentality makes the gang members more secretive and less likely to broadcast their allegiance than Mexican-American gang members, she said.

“When something comes down, it happens fast, guerrilla-style,” she said. “They are very tight-lipped. They don’t identify themselves as gang members.”

Luis, a 19-year-old Salvadoran who came to Los Angeles when he was 11, said he started hanging around with gang members five months after he arrived.

“It was about putting the Salvadoran name up, defending ourselves,” said the husky youth, who wore a heavy-metal band logo on the back of his jeans jacket. His father works as a mechanic and his mother at a factory.

“Salvadorans and Mexicans, they don’t get along. They don’t mix,” Luis said.

Oscar, a 17-year-old Guatemalan, said a gang in his neighborhood looked down on him because he did not speak English and his skin color was dark. So he and other immigrant youths ended up forming their own gang.

“It started as a deejay club” that staged dance parties, he said. “They were cool, all they spoke was Spanish. There were Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Colombians.”

Oscar and Luis will graduate next month from an East Valley high school where Central American students are the largest Latino group. The two seniors are bused to the Valley from central Los Angeles. They say they are no longer gang members, though they remain friendly with gang members in their neighborhoods and school and will back them in a fight.

Both students have searing childhood memories of violence. When Oscar was 6, he saw a man get machine-gunned outside a drugstore in Guatemala City. When Luis was 6, his cousin was killed by soldiers; he has received counseling because he has recurring nightmares about decapitated corpses in the streets.

“Imagine seeing that stuff when you’re 6 years old,” Oscar said. “And how would it be like if you came to a new country to a new school, where you don’t know anybody, and somebody kicked your butt every week? It’s just like over there. The Contras or somebody get you there; the gangs get you here.”

The self-protective growth of the newer gangs has ironic consequences, Ramirez said. In checking the records of several members of a Salvadoran gang who claimed to be from El Salvador, she discovered they were actually of Mexican origin.

“They made a decision to join, so they lied,” she said.

Two events have helped Luis distance himself from gang life, he said. One was the shock and anger of his parents, who first learned he was involved when he was arrested after a fight at school. Also, he became disillusioned when his gang drifted away from the heavy-metal music and fashions he likes to the cholo look of other gangs--he felt the group was losing its Salvadoran identity.

Luis is glad to have made it through high school. And he is surprised at how rapidly gang activity has worsened in the Valley since he started high school four years ago.

“The first year I was here I told my dad about how quiet it was,” he said. “We wanted to move to the Valley. But now I told him, ‘Forget it. It’s just the same.’ ”

Gang-Related Homicides in the Valley 1990 gang-related homicides in Foothill Division: 8 1991 suspected gang-related homicides in Foothill Division, first six months: 11 * suspected Source: LAPD Valley Bureau CRASH unit

A Glossary of Gang Terms La jura--Police. Quete--Gun. Placazos--Graffiti slogans or “tags.” Sweat (him)--Harass, demand someone’s gang allegiance. Sweat (it)--Worry about, be wary of rival gang members. Border brothers, rancheros--Insults for recent immigrants, meaning hicks. Frio, or Cool--Cigarette dipped in PCP liquid. Que rifa, ese?; Que barrio, homes?--Typical gang challenges meaning Where are you from, what gang are you with? Blaxicans--Latino gang members who affect talk and mannerisms of black gang members. Throwing rat, or throwing rata--Squealing to the cops.