Remove a ‘Luxury’ and Watch Street Gangs Grow

We’ve all seen movies like “The Bad News Bears,” where losers with questionable talent come together and end up winning the Championship. The mythic victory of the team with the least talent but the most heart is not limited to the movies: I played for such a team while I was growing up in Los Angeles.

We lived in Echo Park, a part of L.A. that became known after the movie “Mi Vida Loca--My Crazy Life” about girl gangs in Los Angeles. I went to Mayberry Street Elementary School. The school was predominantly Latino and Asian-Amencan, with a few whites like myself.

One of my best memories of that time is the many afternoons spent playing baseball, basketball and football with all of my friends after school, on the Mayberry playground, under the watchful eye of a coach named Gonzalo Manrique.

Gonzalo, then about 30, ran the after-school program for Mayberry in the mid-1980s. Gonzalo had grown up in L.A. and had done the gang thing for a while. All of us kids respected Gonzalo. He was a great athlete despite being only 5-feet-7. He got along well with everyone in the neighborhood. He wasn’t judgmental, probably because he knew what life was like for the kids at Mayberry. Our team name was the Park Bums and our logo was a picture of a bum sitting on a park bench with a basketball or a bat and glove.

The thing I loved most about Gonzalo was how inclusive he was. He encouraged everyone to play on his teams. Our teams were always made up of fat, skinny, short and slow kids. It didn’t matter how much physical talent you brought to the game, you were welcome on Gonzalo’s team. We would play sports year round, from after school till dark. And sure enough, every year, no matter what the sport, the team that ended up in first place was the Park Bums .

We were so proud to beat the rich kids’ teams, with their fancy uniforms and parents who would come to the games with their video cameras. None of our parents could come to the games and we only had our logo T-shirts for uniforms.

Although those were good times, the Hollywood-style story doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. In 1984 the after-school program that Gonzalo ran was cut due to money problems. Gonzalo ended up getting another job at a school at Eagle Rock.

At this point, I was in the 8th grade and I started getting into trouble, smoking pot and ditching school. My parents were already tired of living in L.A. and when I started to get into trouble they decided to move to Santa Cruz. I was fortunate to have parents who could pick up and leave, but what happened to the rest of my friends who went to Mayberry Elementary and King Jr. High?

My old friends continued to hang out at Mayberry after school. But now that Gonzalo and his positive influence were gone, the hanging out turned into tagging walls and a new gang culture developed among the same kids who previously had channeled their energy into sports.

I was amazed at how fast things changed. I was living in Santa Cruz and would call down to L.A. and hear about how big the Mayberry St. Gang had become. I would hear about one friend who was in jail for attacking a teacher, another for stabbing someone and a third who was killed by another gang. I would get a call from my best friend’s dad telling me that myu friend was going to spend Christmas in jail because he had been arrested for driving the getaway car in an armed robbery. This same friend now has a tattooed cross on his leg with another friend’s name on it and R.I P.

What is my point? The amount of money it costs to keep open an after-school program is miniscule compared to the many costs of letting city kids fend for themselves, get into trouble and end up in jail. We are building more and more prisons and at the same time being told that we have no money for schools, job training or after-school programs.

When are we going to realize that building more jails is not going to make our society safer? We need to take that money and invest it in programs and people like Gonzalo Manrique who can keep kids from getting into crime in the first place.