Down These Mean Streets

Ten thousand deaths, nearly all African American and Latino young men, is the body count of Los Angeles gang violence in the last two decades, but when was the last time anyone read a headline declaring, “Death Toll in Gang Conflicts Reaches 10,000, Government Proposes Peace Strategy”? Given the silence and disregard concerning these casualties, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that gang deaths are deemed lesser deaths than law-abiding ones. Some people even shrug them off as deserved.

But what if any were preventable? That’s the question that haunts the reader of James Diego Vigil’s “A Rainbow of Gangs.” Vigil, a professor of social ecology at UC Irvine, weaves personal stories with historical analysis to show the commonality of Mexican, African American, Salvadoran and Vietnamese gangs despite their ethnic differences.

Vigil describes how gang members, far from being devils incarnate, are produced by the experience of what he calls “multiple marginality.” They are from the poorest of the poor, relegated to the fringes of society beyond the usual controls of family, school and police. They are socialized on the streets.

Vigil first suggested the thesis of multiple marginality in his 1988 book “Barrio Gangs”; here, after hundreds of interviews, he demonstrates how the process crosses ethnic lines. It is a useful analytic approach suggesting that solutions lie in bringing the marginalized into the mainstream to repair the breakdowns, not in further marginalizing the youth who bear the wounds.

Vigil first tells us of Puppet, born in 1973 at L.A. County-USC Hospital, to former gang members and drug addicts. His hard life was improving until one of the many foster families he lived with left him behind. Gang life instilled in Puppet the feelings of love and power that he lacked. Today he works as a construction laborer, has matured out of the gang and has a girlfriend and a 1-year-old son.

There is Mookie, born in Texas in 1966, whose parents worked long hours at jobs that left little time for raising him. He wound up in a group home and couldn’t handle work as a parking lot attendant or a high-rise window washer. He finally became a neighborhood Crip, then was implicated--wrongly, he says--in a drug-related shooting. He is spending life in prison writing rap lyrics: “As time went on I grew more mature / Sometimes I noticed the problem but never had the cure.”

There’s Huc, born the same year as Puppet in South Vietnam. As a boat person, he clung to a floating board while watching his pregnant mother, siblings and aunt drown when he was 6. He joined a gang in Los Angeles when school conflicts taught him “you couldn’t hang by yourself.” When some Chicano kids at school tried to “mad-dog and race-talk” him, he shot at them and missed. Later he served three years in prison for robbery. His anger, he tells us, is quite simple: “I lost my whole family for me to come over here.”

Finally, there is Arturo, born with a life-threatening heart condition in wartime El Salvador, where people died and disappeared all around him, including his father. He was smuggled to L.A. for surgery at Childrens Hospital when he was 7. His mother cleaned Westside homes 14 hours a day. When bused to suburban schools, he started fights to get respect and win the best seats in the cafeteria. His uncle, a veterano in the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, made him finally feel safe, so he joined. “It just seemed like somebody was always leaving me.”

What connects these four young men is a deficit of love. The stories Vigil recounts are full of punishment and pain, and when society finally stepped into the vacuum, it was more of the same. These youth are modern untouchables; they are refugees, war victims, descendants of slaves. The schools they attend are dropout factories. The police suppress them. “The greater the economic gap between winners and losers [under the capitalist ethic],” Vigil writes, “the more structurally embedded the marginalization of large segments of the population becomes.”

Vigil humanizes instead of demonizes. For those who still wonder why they should care, Vigil offers numbers. It is estimated that there are 200,000 gang members in the Los Angeles area. In addition, 240,000 young people were hauled into Juvenile Court last year in the county. Two-thirds of the 225,000 inmates in jails and state prisons in 1999 were alleged to be gang members. Most are rearrested within three years of release, and there are hundreds of thousands more in the ranks of the at-risk population. Costs for hospitalizing the victims of gang violence run as high as $1 billion a year in county hospitals.

It’s a problem that has endured through many decades of quick fixes and press release politics. As long ago as 1942, during the Zoot Suit era, a law enforcement official declared that the police “will take them out of circulation until they realize the authorities will not tolerate gangsterism.” Just this year, a Times editorial repeated the refrain: “And now seems a good time for the city to finally stand up to the street gangs that terrorize communities, to tell them that their slow-motion mass murder must end.” Finally? Aren’t 10,000 dead bodies enough punishment to quiet the problem? Promises to “finally” crush the gang phenomenon with hard-line policies have failed for decades. We have more draconian penalties than ever before, and the greatest prison buildup in national history. Isn’t it time someone declared that the war on gangs is a hopeless quagmire and demanded an alternative? Isn’t it time to make a greater priority of ending the multiple marginalities that alienate young people of color faster than they can be locked up?

Vigil doesn’t go that far, if only because he feels “we are powerless to address changes at the macro level.” But if we are powerless, the tragic implication is that the war on gangs is a permanent feature of our society. Vigil’s proposals are moderate ones. Expand Head Start. Back Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Summer Games. Support the sheriff’s program for redirecting first-time offenders from detention to supervision by off-duty deputies. Good programs each and every one, but none will challenge marginalization.

Vigil recites the three-pronged strategy that is consensus among gang specialists: prevention for the little kids, intervention for the preteens and suppression for the 13-to 20-year-olds who engage in criminal activity. Yet he notes that “the allocation of resources and level of investment in prevention and intervention are pale in comparison to those earmarked for suppression efforts.” For example, law enforcement gets the largest share of Los Angeles’ $4-billion municipal budget. Vigil says New York City spends $8,000 per capita for public school students versus $93,000 a year for each child in the new juvenile detention center in the South Bronx. Vigil’s work may be viewed skeptically by neo-conservatives like William Bennett, James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio who have dominated discourse with calls for harsher punishment of those they call “brutally remorseless super-predators” and for the political isolation of any liberals who are “soft on crime.” Fighting gangs is good politics, to no one’s surprise, but it is not a solution.

These hard-liners seem to think that better morals and free markets will cure the 38% and 44% poverty rates among Latino and African American children. Even many gang researchers have hardened with the times. The current dean of the field, Malcolm Klein, director of the USC Social Science Institute, attacks Father Gregory Boyle, whose work for peace in the barrio is widely respected, as a misguided saint who only solidifies gang cohesion by giving homeboys too much attention.

Vigil’s stance is, instead, reminiscent of Jacob Riis, the great chronicler and photographer of how “The Other Half” lived in the New York slums at the turn of the last century. Riis wrote of the Irish, Italian and Jewish gangs that “the gang is a distemper of the slums; a friend come to tell us something is amiss in our social life.” Riis was followed by the University of Chicago’s Frederick Thrasher, who wrote in 1927 that gang subcultures arose in the cracks, or “interstices,” of urban neglect combined with the inner cracks of identity that occur in the turbulent years of adolescence. Captured by the mystique of the melting pot, most people today fantasize that the white ethnic street corner boys of yesteryear simply pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the larger truth is that those millions of Irish, Italian and Jewish homeboys rose into the middle classes through unions, political parties and the New Deal. Now instead of recognizing with Riis that something is “amiss in our social life,” many of their descendants seem to enjoy a good, nostalgic episode of “The Sopranos” before voting for anti-immigrant law-and-order politicians.

Vigil’s book is important because it comes at a time when we arerethinking our strategies about the war on gangs. This year even some of the war’s architects are moderating their views. DiIulio has regretted and retracted his rhetoric about “super-predators” as exaggerated. The man known in national police circles as the “godfather” of gang investigators, L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Wes McBride, struck a tone of unusual compassion at his retirement this spring, saying that “gang members are part of a community and should be approached as human beings, above all else.” He added: “We don’t solve the social conditions as a nation that tends to create gangs, we don’t solve illiteracy or poverty.”

Highly respected writer Luis J. Rodriguez, a former hard-core gang member, has called for an urban peace movement that includes gang members, ex-gang members, clergy and people of conscience. A team of innovative researchers at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice has broken the academic mold by organizing global conferences on the potential of street organizations to transform themselves into self-help and empowerment groups. And in an unprecedented decision, a federal immigration judge this month granted political asylum to ex-gang member Alex Sanchez so he can continue his peace work with Homies Unidos in the Pico Union barrio. Sanchez, a Salvadoran, was arrested by the LAPD and threatened with deportation; police were suspicious that an ex-gang member could convert to peaceful ways.

This month is the 10th anniversary of the gang truce in Watts after the riots of 1992. The truce decreased homicides sharply for a time and still continues to be observed as a standard of behavior by many who might otherwise be killing one another. But the head of the LAPD’s South Bureau, Deputy Chief Matthew Hunt, prophesied accurately a decade ago, that “I would like to think these [truce] gatherings will have some long-lasting effect, but if social conditions and unemployment remain the same, you will have continuing unrest and the police will have to respond to those situations.”

The failure to “rebuild L.A.” after the 1992 riots opened a vacuum for a new generation of young homeboys who never benefited from the truce since, as Vigil notes, “the pleas of gang members and reformers for social, recreation, and economic alternatives for street youth have largely gone unheeded.”

After proceeding like snails in implementing the 1992 Christopher Commission report, the LAPD continued an almost paramilitary and certainly unconstitutional war on gangs that skidded to an ugly end in the Rampart scandal.

For those still looking for solutions based on the Christopher report and the Rampart consent decree, “A Rainbow of Gangs” is a constructive nonjudgmental guide to the unfinished business of reducing the menace of too much marginality.

Unless of course this book and its countless warnings go unheeded as the crises recede from the front page and apathy crawls over us. Perhaps there is a more sinister scenario to consider: That the authorities, supported by a silent fearful majority, without conscious planning or malign intent, have instinctively accepted a quite different approach, that the price of 10,000 dead bodies every two decades is far preferable to the discomforts of sharing power and affluence with those dark-skinned citizens who stand outside the gates.