Angry Citizen Stands Up Against Gangs : Melissa Albidrez, Community Activist

Melissa Albidrez remembers the piercing sounds of gunshots in her neighborhood the night after a 17-year-old gang member was killed.

“They are coming around to get retaliation,” she surmised.

But perhaps more frightening to Albidrez than the gunfire was that no one seemed to care that a human life had been lost. She could see that this urban warfare also was desensitizing her 15-year-old son.

“This is not a game,” she said angrily. “This is not playing GI Joe in the back yard. This is real. This is life.”

Albidrez spoke before the City Council, urging members to pay more attention to the increasing gang problem. And the council responded recently by naming her to an eight-member drug and gang prevention committee that is studying the issue.

“I want the kids and the gang members to understand that I am not against them,” the 33-year-old mother of three said. “How can I be against them? I grew up in the same neighborhood. I went through what they are going through.”

Feeling lonely after her grandmother’s death, Albidrez left the Catholic girls high school she had attended for two years to join her neighborhood friends in public school in Placentia.

Out of step with her peers, Albidrez said she “play acted” her role in a gang. She got into fights, she said, but nothing serious. Guns and knives were rarely used, she added.

There was another key difference, Albidrez said. Growing up, she learned to be proud of her culture, of her neighborhood and of herself--taking particular pride in her ability to earn wages through federally funded summer job programs.

And without jobs or other programs, Albidrez said, the teens have nothing to do “but to hang out on the streets. They have no choices, no options.”

Albidrez married after finishing high school and worked odd jobs until four years ago, when she took a job at a discount store where she now holds a management position. Her community activism began about six years ago, she said, when she attended a council meeting to oppose a redevelopment plan that she feared would wipe out her neighborhood.

A few months later, Albidrez spoke in the council chambers for the first time to oppose an apartment building being proposed for her block.

“I was trembling, my voice was probably shaking, I was terrified,” she said of the experience. But she and her neighbors won that fight.

Albidrez soon became involved in other issues. She argued for sidewalks and improvements at public swimming pools in the poorer sections of the city. Albidrez also participated in Neighborhood Watch, coordinated an anti-graffiti program and was named to the city’s Traffic and Safety Commission.

Albidrez said she is thinking of running for City Council, but her priority is trying to keep the gang influence out of her city and her home. While she believes that her son is not a gang member, she knows the peer pressure he faces.

“I think he’s trying,” she added, “but it’s a power struggle.”