COLUMN ONE : Trying to Dodge the Cross-Fire : In the Pico-Aliso projects, residents struggle to stay clear of gangs and the trouble they bring. Often, people feel caught in the middle of friendships, family ties and the law of the streets.

Boyle Heights homeboys call Raul Diaz an Other .

It means Diaz is one of a handful of young men who can walk freely through the territories of eight gangs that rule the Pico-Aliso projects, where the murder toll is higher than any housing project in California.

Diaz, 20, dreams of becoming a grade school teacher and owning a large house with a swimming pool. He belongs to no gang but commands his own brand of respect: He is a junior college student in a world where more youths flee gunfire than make it through high school.

Already this year, the Pico-Aliso projects have seen six gang-related murders, five this summer.

Pico-Aliso, which houses 1,200 families, is commonly dismissed as a “war zone.” But a war zone creates more than warriors. There are Others, as well as those who live in fear and struggle to keep their equilibrium. It’s a tight-knit community, where neighbors host dinners to raise money for families of the dead. Everyone is intertwined; everyone is at risk.

Juan Carlos’ Angst

Juan Carlos Esparza, 19, of Pico Gardens--one of three adjoining projects that make up the complex--is also an Other. He believes that by being an Other he can win over some of the kids who look in awe upon gang members’ flashy Cadillacs. But in recent months he has felt less sure of himself.

In the world of the streets there is no shame in being an Other. It’s not like being a wimp. Like most Others, Esparza doesn’t don traditional gang attire: white T-shirts or white undershirts, white socks pulled up over the shins, pressed shorts worn five sizes too big and belted. Instead, he wears T-shirts of different colors, stripes, or football jerseys. The dress code of the Others is forged in reality: Dress like a gang member and you’ll be harassed like one.

Esparza, 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, is a gentle-eyed bear of a man who says high school football kept him out of a gang. He vented his frustrations on the field.

“I took so much anger from here, from the projects,” he said. “When you can’t let anger out, it hurts.”

Some days, he used to run to Montebello, about 12 miles round trip. It helped him feel like he could breathe. It helped him feel hopeful. He stopped running and playing football last year when he felt he could ease his emotions by simply talking or listening to music.

An older friend, David Isiah, used to tease Esparza about this, tell him he was getting lazy. Isiah was like a big brother. He had left the projects for college in Northern California. Isiah told Esparza that college was weird at first because it was so quiet--no noise from the freeway or gunshots in the night.

Isiah, who played receiver for Sonoma State, predicted that one day he and Esparza would face each other in a football game. Then, Isiah warned, he was going to hit his friend so hard that he’d knock his shoes off. Esparza would roll his eyes. Riiight.

But at 4 p.m. last April 11, Isiah held a handgun to his chest. Despairing over his finances, he pulled the trigger and killed himself before his college roommate came home. Isiah, then 23, had never mentioned money worries; he made college life seem fun.

Esparza could not understand what had gone wrong. For two weeks he cried every night and could not sleep. He was attending junior college, intending to transfer to a four-year school next year, just as Isiah had. Was it futile to follow Isiah’s footsteps?

“I couldn’t accept his death,” Esparza said.

He grew more fearful of guns. At the sound of gunfire, he started diving for cover.

There are three kinds of youths in Pico-Aliso: Others, like Esparza; gang members; and those who dodge the gang but live in anxiety, never walking across the projects, never hanging out.

Esparza knows gang members all around the projects and the homeboys look at him with pride. He’s a football player, they say. He is an Other. They do not want him messed up in their business. It doesn’t mean that he won’t ever get shot at--just that he won’t be shot on purpose.

He works three afternoons a week as a counselor with children, ages 7 to 16. With them he feels safe, needed. At evening socials, he dances gracefully with the youngsters, towering over them. He wants to help those who have so far resisted the pull of gangs, to show them that Others have fun too.

Bobby’s Guilt

Bobby Guerrero, 13, of Aliso Village is one of those kids. At times, Bobby has been pressured to join a gang.

Last fall at Dolores Mission School, one of his classmates, Joseph Torres, also 13, told Bobby he would have to join The Mob Crew because their school was in TMC territory. Joseph didn’t belong to TMC but an older brother did, and with the bravado of a tough kid Joseph liked to boast.

Upset, Bobby told his mother. When his sister, Lleana, found out, she was furious. A member of the East L.A. 13 Dukes, she was adamant that her brother not be bullied.

Lleana, 20, nicknamed “Nana,” barged onto the school playground like a renegade tank. “Which one of you is Joseph?” she demanded. Most of the boys slunk away. One boy steadfastly answered, “I am.”

Nana gave Joseph a piece of her mind, words shooting like bullets. “I just wanted to scare him so he wouldn’t be scaring other kids,” she said later.

Then she told Joseph’s teacher that the boy had tried to pressure her brother into joining a gang. Because of this and other discipline problems, Joseph was given the choice of leaving school or being expelled. He left.

Bobby and Nana’s mother, Sophia Guerrero, 51, has lived in the projects for 21 years, raising two sons and three daughters in a two-bedroom apartment for which she pays $175 a month. She works two part-time jobs, sewing dresses and distributing information about free pregnancy tests at a hospital.

When her oldest son, now 22, was growing up, Guerrero walked him to school daily, believing that she was protecting him from gangs. She thought he was an eager student because he insisted on leaving long before the start of class. After being escorted to school, however, the boy ducked out to a friend’s house, where he changed to gang regalia, she later learned.

Ever since, Guerrero has vowed not to lose her younger son to gangs. She prays for Bobby. She knows a gang member cannot safely walk from his family’s apartment to a store, church or school in enemy territory. So she tests him, asking him to walk her across the project, from one gang territory into another. If he ever declines, she will know he joined a gang and can no longer walk freely.

So when Bobby told her about his classmate’s threats, his mother was shaken. But she forgot the incident.

Until June.

At 8:30 a.m. June 6, Joseph--who had transferred to another school but was not in class that day--was playing with his family’s cat, Midnight. He and his brothers, Mikey Garcia, 18, and Alex Garcia, 16, hovered outside the family’s ground-floor apartment in the Aliso Extension.

Their mother, Bernardina Leyva, had worried about their safety when she went to work at the school cafeteria. Only the day before, a 14-year-old suspected of being a member of Cuatro Flats, a rival of TMC, had been shot and killed. On the street, some said Alex was involved in the shooting.

Leyva, 38, had grown up in the Cuatro Flats territory of the projects and had belonged to the gang. Her brother, now in jail, is still a member. But she knew her connections would mean little in a gang war. She had taken her family to spend the previous night at a cousin’s house.

Shortly before 9 a.m., two gunmen, their faces masked by bandannas, darted around the corner from Leyva’s apartment. Nine shots were fired. The brothers staggered into their home. Mikey was untouched. Alex was shot in the back as he turned to go into the apartment. Joseph was shot in the neck.

Ambulances sped Joseph and Alex to separate hospitals. Alex was discharged after three days, having suffered no permanent physical injury.

Joseph died within hours.

“Here I was trying to be protective and it happened anyway,” Leyva said softly, brown eyes brimming with tears. “I am still afraid. Where am I going to go? Why wait and have another one of my kids shot? Everybody who lives here with kids has fear. I wake up in fear; I go to sleep in fear. Nothing but sadness here.”

In Aliso Village, Bobby was racked with guilt when he learned of Joseph’s death.

It was the logic of a 13-year-old: If Bobby had not told his mother, and if she had not told his sister, then perhaps Joseph would not have left school. And if Joseph hadn’t left school, then he might have been safe.

“Joseph could have been in school and he would have just heard the gunshots,” Bobby insisted.

Bobby dreamed of Joseph after his death. Joseph called to him, speaking from heaven. “I’m all right,” Joseph told Bobby. “It’s not your fault. Don’t cry.”

Alex dreamed about Joseph too. But in his dreams, Joseph was angry, his face lined with rage. “I’m very mad at you,” he told Alex. “Very mad.”

Alex usually awakened from this dream disoriented, uncertain whether Joseph was alive or dead. Perhaps he’d send the youngster to the store to get soda--their morning ritual. Then he would remember and feel the weight of death. If I hadn’t joined TMC, Alex would reason with himself, Joseph might be alive today.

Older brother Mikey tries to reassure Alex that Joseph’s death was not his fault.

“It’s no one’s fault but the person who shot him,” said Mikey, who dropped out after the 11th grade.

Before Joseph’s death, some people thought Mikey, who was not aligned with a gang, might become an Other. But Joseph’s death has filled Mikey with rage. Over his left breast there is now a tattoo emblazoned in ornate script: “My Dear Homeboy Joseph.” Like Alex, he wants revenge.

“I am always mad. I just have a lot more hate in me,” Mikey said. “I want retaliation. . . . It’s something I feel I have to do. I want the people who were involved. It might be wrong. I know nothing I can say or do will bring my brother back.”

Mikey and Alex live warily, believing that Cuatro Flats has put a high bounty on their heads because the gang wants to kill the brothers before they get a chance for revenge.

Mikey shares his brother’s belief that neither will live beyond what they call “twentysomething.”

“I ain’t never going to be nothing,” said Mikey. “There’s no way out. I try to be strong and keep my head straight. But at times I feel: Why? Why live? Why care? We are going to die anyway in the projects.”

Daisy Sleeps in Fear

Since Joseph’s death, 9-year-old Daisy Munoz, who lives next door, no longer sleeps in her upper bunk bed. She is too afraid of stray bullets. Joseph was her friend. She can’t quite figure out why gangs kill kids. So every night she settles on the floor by the shiny red bunk bed with a large rag doll with braids of yellow yarn whom she calls Pocahontas. Her sister, 11-year-old Myra, sleeps on the lower bunk.

Daisy often plays on the roof of the project, looking out for Cuatro Flats. The little girl knows when gang members are carrying guns and when it’s a “psyche”--a bluff to scare the other side. When she sees the real thing, she flings herself down the stairs and warns her mother and sister to retreat into their home.

One recent afternoon, Daisy sprinted down the block after gunshots were fired. There, on the corner by Moon’s Market, lay her other next-door neighbor, Chewy, 19, his limbs akimbo in a pool of blood. It seemed to Daisy that the bullet wounds spewed blood like small volcanoes in his chest and legs. Though hit by 15 bullets, Chewy did not die. Daisy is sorry she ran to the body so fast because she cannot erase the bloody image of the fallen man.

Daisy’s mother, Socorro, fearful because her family lives in an apartment sandwiched between two families who have TMC members, has asked the city Housing Authority to move her family to another project. The Pico-Aliso projects, built in the early 1940s and ‘50s, when the federal government believed this was the solution to low-income housing, is now the largest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi, a place where half the neighbors are on welfare and the average annual income is $10,000.

“I worry for the safety of my daughters,” Daisy’s mother said tearfully. “I can’t sleep when I think about it. I come in to check the children. We live here because we don’t have the resources to leave.”

Not everybody wants to leave. Raul Diaz’s mother, Lupe, says this is a place where people leave doors ajar when they are home and when you ask a neighbor for two eggs she will give you four.

“When we pass neighborhoods with good houses, to me, it seems like a very lonely life--everybody is separated by yards and fences,” said Lupe, 55, who has lived here for 31 years and earns $6 an hour part-time cleaning a church. “Here, neighbors are friends. I have a feeling--maybe it’s not true--that if I go to another neighborhood, it would not be the same.”

Marlon on the Edge

In the balmy days after Joseph’s death, Juan Carlos Esparza, one of the Others, hung out with both gang members and his own “casual guys,” taking care to shy away from clusters of gang members that grew too dense, or “deep.”

Esparza, who lived across the projects from Joseph, did not know the boy well, but his murder would soon come to haunt him.

Often, Esparza kicked back on the stoop of his mother’s apartment with Marlon Tovar, 22, a member of Cuatro Flats. They would sit on Esparza’s front steps, where a large, almost unwieldy, rosebush flourishes. It is the bush that Esparza planted as a little boy with his mother.

Tovar liked to smell the roses, white splashed with red. Esparza liked to tell him to stop getting into the flowers. Funny thing was that Esparza had never really smelled those roses until Tovar had started coming around.

Tovar wanted to become a stuntman. His street name, “Flew,” came from his remarkable leaps from trees and low buildings. He had an infectious laugh and liked to dance, so he and Esparza went to clubs together. Tovar liked soft rock. He’d flip his boom box to the Wave, an FM radio station known for New Age music.

“Man, why don’t you turn it off?” Esparza recalled telling Tovar. Tovar always made him listen.

Esparza tried to talk to Tovar about leaving the gang, but the credo of the streets--once a gang member, always a gang member--kept getting in the way. Besides, Tovar told him, he wasn’t in the gang for the glamour of violence, but for the money he earned selling rock cocaine.

Fifteen days after Joseph’s death at the hands of Cuatro Flats, the rival TMC took revenge. Tovar was gunned down. Not because he did it, police and neighbors said, but just because he was around, and was a member of the gang.

Tovar’s death hit Esparza hard, coming only two months after his role model, David Isiah, had killed himself. Despite all the shootings in the projects, this was the first time a friend of Esparza had been hit.

“I never had anybody die so close to me,” he said.

Raul Diaz, the Other who dreams of a college degree and a big house, heard about Tovar’s death as he stood in a telephone booth outside a small Utah town, talking to a Boyle Heights priest.

Diaz had enrolled in a summer firefighter school program that paid him $260 a week. He was exhilarated to leave the projects. He had never been away from his mother.

“I was jamming,” he recalled.

But as the only Latino, he was uncomfortable from the beginning. He had never been in such a small town and he didn’t like to party, which made him feel even more alienated from his group, who were lodged in primitive cabins with no phones or electricity.

On his second day, as Diaz walked to town in search of junk food, a truck with white men pulled up. They swore at him. “Get . . . out of here, you Mexican!” they yelled.

Diaz kept walking. He bought some doughnuts. He told no one in the program about the incident.

He heard about Tovar’s death at the end of his first week. It compounded his anxiety about being away. A week later, he dropped out of the program and hitchhiked to Salt Lake City and flew to Los Angeles. “I got homesick; I’m not lying to nobody,” he said.

Diaz, the youngest of a family of eight boys, welcomed the sight of the squat buildings, littered by occasional graffiti and pulsing with the bass of outdoor boom-box music. It was good to be home.

Quickly, he made sure to be seen, not merely by Cuatro Flats, which rules his area, but elsewhere. Others, especially, have to circulate to maintain diplomatic immunity; stop going into one territory and they will think you have joined a gang.

When a 15-year-old Cuatro Flats member scrawled graffiti on a community mural painted by Diaz and the rest of the Others, Diaz pounced.

“We never disrespected you ,” he chastised the youth. The red graffiti was removed.

The gang also had scrawled graffiti on the front door of Diaz’s neighbor. But Diaz’s own door, only inches away, was untouched.

Diaz explained it with one word.

“Respect,” he said. “Here, it is all about respect.”