A New Beat : Yes, they wear baggy clothes and have club names. But they aren’t gang members. These days, party crews do battle with dance moves.

Used to be a tough racket, being in a party crew.

Most of the kids just wanted to organize parties in peace. But when the doors opened, there was always some gangbanger there trying to start something. “This party is on my turf,” he would say, “so I get in free.”

Then the home hoedown would descend into chaos as fists flew and girls squealed. Sometimes, shots were fired. Sometimes, innocent kids died.

That was a few years ago. Now the warring goes on, but the weapons are break-dancing sneakers, the skills involve dancing and the term “getting smoked” is reserved for the losers on the dance floor.

“We haven’t had many problems for the last couple years,” says Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Joe Guzman. “Luckily party crews gravitated away from a lot of the pitfalls of ganghood.”

Party crews--groups of mostly Latino youths--have gone from quasi-gangs to nonviolent “alternatives to gangs,” as editor Marty Beat of Street Beat magazine puts it. There are now an estimated 500 party crews in California--including crews that tutor students and crews that do food drives for the destitute. But mostly crews put on legitimate parties at nightclubs and “battle” using dance moves.

Some even say crews are a good thing in a world where joining a group--gangs, posses and tag crews--is seen as the thing to do.

“Party crews can be as positive as baseball teams,” says Dan Gaither, director of Project HOPE (Helping Our People Excel), a nonprofit group that helps high-risk kids avoid gang life. “It’s a good alternative,” he says, “if it’s done responsibly.”

That still might be hard for outsiders to believe. After all, there’s all these brown-skinned high school kids shuffling in low-crotch Girbaud jeans and calling out such club names as Latin Madness, Thievz Uv Virginity and Perfect Modern Sluts (PMS for short).

A gang by any other name?

There was a time when party crews flirted with gangsterism, packing arms, claiming turf and even throwing gang signs to show pride for their group. Law enforcement viewed them as a growing threat (“You see a lot of hard-core gang members . . . at these parties,” one officer said). Schools banned crew-claiming clothes such as baseball hats with clique initials.

But something changed. Crews abandoned house parties, “undergrounds” and “ditch parties” (school-time house parties) as their reason for being. “Now it’s about night clubs,” says 18-year-old Chavo Alvarez of Azusa, who calls his crew Freak Show (and calls himself college-bound).

That much is evident at Dee-Lite, a 5-month-old Friday-night club put on by a couple of post-high school crews known as Operation X and Family Kreationz--each of which claims a dozen or so girls and guys as members. They rent out a clubhouse at an El Monte rodeo ring, bring in top deejays and charge $7 to $10 to devotees of dancing.

An elbow-worn bar displays canned beer for those old enough and able to prove it with an ID. Three pyramids of speakers shout out Richter-scale bass. And wooden planks rock to the stomping of 600 teens and twentysomethings.

With eight security guards and two off-duty officers on the scene, there’s rarely any fighting (although a spate recently erupted between two girls who were flirting with the same guy). “It’s a lot safer doing this stuff than doing house parties,” says organizer Kyle Brandon, 19, of Pico Rivera.

The crowd is young but not entirely blockheaded. As one group of men encourages six women grinding on stage to “take it off,” another chants, “Keep it on--keep it on.” Nearby, the crowd makes way for a battle as Alvarez, in a yellow ski cap, drops into break-dance formation and does a backspin (yes, breaking is back). “Most girls like it,” Alvarez says. “You get their attention by dancing.”

In between dance contests, God’s Children crew member Eddie (Energizer) Gutierrez adds: “Taggers have their art. We have our dancing. We paint pictures on the dance floor. We don’t need to start a fight. If there’s a beef, we just dance it off.”

House parties have been around as long as there have been roofs. But according to Beat, party crews--largely a Southwestern phenomenon (though there are crews in New York City)--may have began in the late ‘70s. The term “party crews,” he says, didn’t come into vogue until the late ‘80s.

“It’s a natural sociological setup,” says Paige R. Penland, Street Beat assistant editor. “You hang out with your friends.”

In the early days, kids proudly held for-profit house parties, promoting the events by passing out glossy flyers. If the party went well, the spoils were a little cash, bragging rights and a rep. Gangs soon saw the crews as competition and sought free entrance to parties in their neighborhoods. “Gangsters would show up and say, ‘I’m in for free--this is my territory,’ ” Beat says. “And then there was violence.”

The bloodshed peaked around 1993 as crews responded by becoming more like gangs.

“It got crazy,” says former crew member Joey Rodriguez, now a promoter for KPWR-FM (105.9). “Even the dancing crews were packing guns. . . . I knew of crews where you had to get jumped in [beat up by members in order to join], which is the same as a gang.”

Beat says it got to the point a few years back where police would come to his office to scan his photos of crews in search of murder suspects. “I didn’t want to be a mug-shot magazine,” he says.

In January, 1993, Jaime Casillas, a 20-year-old member of a crew called the Terribles, was shot to death by an acquaintance in Los Angeles. In June, Alejandro Lopez, 16, was stabbed to death at a party-crew bash in Anaheim. And in early ‘94, crew member Frank Isaac Martinez was gunned down as he stood outside a party in Compton. He was 14.

“The police told me Frank was a gang member because he was in a party crew,” says Martinez’s mother, Danayne Ashorn. “I don’t have anything against party crews. . . . I really think what crews are about is dancing and having fun.”

Today, the violence has subsided. Crews backed away from house parties to get away from the bloodshed. “Small parties don’t work anymore,” says Gilbert Garcia of God’s Children. “People get violent too easy.”

“We haven’t had any problems with party crews in some time,” says Anaheim Police Lt. Vince Howard.

Street Beat, with a California-centered circulation of 50,000, has become the crews’ bible. The staffers would like to take some credit for the transition: “We said crews aren’t gangs and shouldn’t act like gangs,” says general manager Pebo Rodriguez.

More peaceful crews are now spreading from Texas to Hawaii. There’s a crew in Ventura County that tutors kids and recruits gang members to get them away from violence. There are religious crews, Asian crews and Anglo crews. The fastest-growing segment on the crew scene, Beat says, are all-girl crews (with such names as Sexy Life, Foolish Little Girls and Cosmic Groove).

Some of the older, more successful crews--Operation X and Family Kreationz, for example--run their own nightclubs (Operation X also runs a club Downtown called Sweet Sundays). “If we can provide a safe place for people to have fun,” says 21-year-old Derek Alvarado of Operation X, “then more power to us.”

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Banding Together to Escape the Real World

* “I am here to escape from a cold, hard world,” says Frank Beltran, 25. During his decade-plus of gangbanging, Beltran says he was shot three times and stabbed once. Now he’s ready to hang it up in favor of club life. “I’m tired of the gang scene, of always looking over my shoulder. I’m trying to get a change of scenery and move on with my life.”

* “All these people are like lost souls,” says 16-year-old Billy Brown, a member of Operation X. “They’re looking for something to hold on to. It’s better than having them on the streets. . . . You’re not going to end up anywhere in a gang. School’s my future.”

* “I don’t like house parties at all,” says Fahar Farmanesh, a 17-year-old member of a crew called Underground Madness. “They end up in a lot of fights. . . . We go to clubs together, we don’t go to house parties.”