A Close-Up Look at People Who Matter : A Journal of the Gang Years Motivates Him

Even on days when Manuel Velasquez leaves his black three-ringed notebook at home, its contents remain in his head--haunting reminders that his work is never done.

Inside the notebook, on pages covered with protective plastic, more than 250 neatly printed paragraphs record skeletal facts about former gang members who were killed by rival gangs. Each entry lists little more than a name, a date, a gang affiliation and a location of death.

Whether in his hands or in his head, the notebook has been the center of Velasquez’s life for nearly a decade.

As a crisis-intervention worker for Community Youth Gang Services in the Valley, an organization created in 1981 to intervene in gang activity, Velasquez, 34, cruises to known hangouts by day and talks to gang members about turning their lives around. He also gives presentations at schools, helps gang members find jobs and teaches parents to recognize signs of gang activity in their children. By night he fields phone calls: tips from gang members about a shooting, requests for advice and simple cries for help.

Each time a gang member is killed in the Valley, Velasquez enters the information in his black notebook, a task that only gets harder with time.

“It really takes a toll,” Velasquez, of Sylmar, said. “But my goal is to keep them from killing the next guy.”

Velasquez, the third in a family of six, moved with his family to Pacoima from San Fernando when he was about five years old. His parents, who had immigrated from Mexico just before he was born, often returned to San Fernando with the family to visit friends they had made while living there. As a teen-ager, Velasquez acted like a peacemaker between gangs from the traditionally rivalrous areas because he had good friends in both places.

A muralist at 14, Velasquez joined a gang for several years, but became very involved in painting murals and taking art classes, which helped him to stay out of trouble. He graduated with honors from high school and went to Cal State Northridge, undaunted by a college counselor’s comment that he would be better off as a mechanic.

In 1984, in his next-to-last semester at CSUN, he decided to take time off to earn some money. Community Youth Gang Services offered him the job and he has been working for them ever since.

Velasquez often works 14-hour days and struggles with his work even during his time off. He remembers dead gang members who were his friends, laments killings he thinks he could have prevented, and worries about the inevitable deaths to come.

“Some days I wake up and I want to quit,” Velasquez said, as he steered his car through the streets of San Fernando on a recent afternoon, past three young gang members tagging a cinder-block wall. “But then I talk to people or I get a call for help and I can’t quit,” he said. “Somebody needs to be out there.”

Because he grew up in the neighborhoods he covers, Velasquez, who is married and has two children ages 9 and 15, understands the attitudes that prevail on the streets. Getting gang members to see that another world exists outside of the one they know is one of his main goals. Another is to make them realize that retaliation is not an answer.

“These kids have not been taught how to lose,” he said. “They are not ready to accept defeat.”

But not all of his tales are about death. Velasquez has a few success stories to tell too.

Gustavo Villela used to be in a gang. From the time he was 12 or 13 years old, he hung out on the streets of Pacoima. But Velasquez counseled him, took him outside of the neighborhood and encouraged him to get involved with something other than the gang. Now 22, Villela owns a baseball card and comic book store in Sylmar.

“He’s not like your mother,” Villela said of Velasquez. “He doesn’t say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ He shows you that there’s another way to go.”

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