by Jorja Leap
There is defiance in Ronny and there is fear.
“I can say it now—the blacks in jail are crazy. We take on whoever is there. And someone—a non-affiliate—doesn’t get to avoid this. A lot of them get their ass whupped—dudes look at them like they their bitch. If a non-affiliate gets into a fight with a gang member—another gang member jumps in, that’s the way the blacks operate. The Latinos—the Sureños—structure it a little bit better—most Southsiders don’t fight in jail, but the blacks fight all day long. I always think, this is trainin’ for us—we know that a race war could pop off at any given time, we need to get fear into other people. And you gotta be tough in county jail ’cuz if you go to prison it’s gonna follow you—it’s like your ghetto report card. You got your reputation—and you see that same OG dude that you was disrespectin’ when you come to prison and it’s like damn, where are my homies at now? You gotta remember, LA only has two county jails but California has thirty-six prisons. I have dreams about prison, they’re nightmares.”
Whatever his nightmares, after his first trip to jail, Ronny became a frequent guest of the county—a side effect of his new enterprise: drug dealing.
“Y’know in the hood, this is how we make money—you wanna get yourself established, start a business, buy a house—then you gotta do a drug deal. So I got out of jail, I decided to do some dealin’, save some money. But every time I started to be productive, I would get arrested. I know what to expect. It’s a breeze—I got rank, I’m not a nobody. Everything’s cool. But then jail is still jail—I’m gettin’ disrespected by the deputies—they strip-search me whenever they feel like it. For the life, we live—jail is inevitable—and we learn. The older homies in jail schooled me. ‘I expected more out of you,’ they would say. I was held accountable to act in a certain way. I grew in jail.”
Ronny’s role models are gangbangers. His family is a hood. His mentors are older homies in county jail. This all sounds overdetermined. But of course, there is more. While he is locked up in county jail, he learns that his mother has lung cancer. He reacts with love and fear—the two go round and round in Ronny’s head and he is frozen.
“We had prayer circles in jail. All races invited, blacks, Hispanics, read a few Bible Scriptures, pray for people who are sick, pray for people going to court in the morning. Everyone in jail respected the prayer circle—there’s no talkin’ loud, you can’t flush the toilet during prayer circle. I liked it. I tried to pray for my mother,” he tells me, “but still, nothin’ comes out. Nothin’ comes out—even now.”
Tears trail down his cheeks. This is the only time I have seen Ronny cry—when he talks about his mother. She died three months after he was released from jail.
“She was so young when she got sick and she was sober for six years. She was only fifty-four when she died,” Ronny says quietly.
I am not surprised. My age. I know there is a part of Ronny that relates to me like a mother. Calling. Checking in. Asking for help.
Ronny never visited his mother in the hospital, adding to the credit line of trauma. Her death starts him on a downward spiral.
“I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t think—I kept havin’ flashbacks—I wanted to leave the hood but I didn’t know what to do.”
Ronny is dealing with unfinished business. Most of the men and women trying to leave gang life experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Public health experts estimate that probably 80 percent of gang members on the streets suffer with some form of PTSD. Ronny was no exception. His daily dose of violence, grief, abandonment, and loss would test anyone. But instead of going to a therapist, Ronny returns to the street, gangbanging after another one of his cousins is shot and killed.
“I was close to Tyrell and we lost him. I didn’t know how to control myself. I pretty much didn’t care anymore. I really hadn’t gotten over my mom’s death either. It was drugs and guns then—doin’ them, sellin’ them. It was just crazy shit going on—shoot-outs, stayin’ up for days gettin’ high, back and forth, me and these dudes against the dudes who killed my cousin. I was sleepin’ with one eye open. I did everything you could imagine, and I finally got caught and wound up in prison for a year. Destiny, my girlfriend, went to drug-treatment program. We both had to clean up or we would die.” Ronny believes the arrest saved his life.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he tells me. “That day or the next day—I coulda done something that woulda killed me or put me away for life. I felt I was rescued from myself. I remember in jail, waitin’ for the prison bus to come in. When it did, the prison guard made us strip buck naked, put us in these paper suits, I was sittin’ on the bus and thinkin’, ‘Damn, I am really going to prison.’ On the bus, everybody’s talkin’, people eatin’ their food. I didn’t want nobody to think I was worried. I am with people who got fifty years, sixty years, life without the possibility of the parole. Then we pulled up to the prison, and it looked like a big-ass private military base. They strip-searched us, gave us prison clothes, and it’s like, God, I’m really in prison. And anything can happen, your life can be taken, gunshots, prison riot, you look on the wall and see big signs that say, ‘No Warning Shots.’ That was an eye-opener.”
Ronny does easy time. He lives in a dorm and watches cable TV.
“I was learnin’. Everything in prison is based off politics and it’s petty. It’s about control and keeping the violence down. But I tried to stay out of trouble. When it was over I knew, I wasn’t gonna go back. And I gotta be careful ’cuz when I get out of prison, my PO tells me I’m on a gang injunction. I never knew it. I’m fucked.”
Being served with a gang injunction is a rite of passage for so many of the people I know. It is the cornerstone of the “suppression” approach to gang violence and about as far from community-based gang intervention as you can get. The injunction process begins when the court issues a restraining order that prohibits specific gang members from congregating. Congregating is said to involve three or more gang members (there’s that magic number) in a given place at a given time. Law enforcement insists that this is a sound public-safety strategy to end gang activity in communities, enabling citizens to “enjoy quality of life.”
The City of Los Angeles took gang injunctions for a test run in the mid-1980s, with the first official injunction being served against the Playboy Gangster Crips. Despite legal challenges and concerns about mistaken identities, by the time I am hanging out in different parts of Los Angeles, gang injunctions are in full throttle, with sixty-five injunctions having been served on fifty neighborhoods. The injunctions name names—identifying people who are members of specific gangs and decreeing that they cannot congregate in public places. Additionally, these individuals are not allowed to carry lethal weapons, including screwdrivers and pocketknives. The name of anyone served with a gang injunction is placed on the CalGang database, where it lives on in perpetuity. There is no way out. In Los Angeles, where eleven thousand names appear on the database as supposedly “known” gang members, exactly three people have managed to have their names deleted. I am only half-joking when I tell people that my name probably appears in the database.
It is Kafka in the hood. There is no way out. And there is no way to know when and if you have been actually served with an injunction. Instead, most homies learn they have been named on an injunction when police or FBI raid different gang hot spots or once they’ve been locked up. Ronny was no exception. He was lucky his parole officer told him.
“I don’t know why they’re usin’ these injunctions. The injunctions don’t do nothin’ except make the hood stronger.”
Ronny is not alone in this opinion. I strongly doubt the usefulness of gang injunctions, and I am in good company. No less than the US Department of Justice and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention have found that although injunctions may have some effect on gang activity in small towns, their impact on established gangs in large cities is zip, nada, nothing. Even Mark has told me that, while the
LAPD “officially” supports injunctions, he is part of a small group of commanders and deputy chiefs who disagree.
“We all know that the injunctions don’t do a thing,” Mark remarks when I tell him what Ronny said. “Ronny is right—injunctions may actually backfire and make the gang more coherent. They don’t make things better. You can bet they probably make things worse by strengthening the ties between gang members—you drive them underground and they have to conspire to get together. And what’s worse, it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” I smile when Mark says this. For once we are on the same side.
This is a good thing, because by this time I am being called up by public radio and asked to comment on “the effectiveness of gang injunctions.” A local news program contacts me, and before you can say “research evidence,” I am miked up and blithely denouncing gang injunctions. Two days later I am taken out to the woodshed by a City Hall functionary because I am not allowed to make such comments while serving as the mayor’s gang advisor.
“We need to all be on the same page,” the enraged deputy mayor tells me. “The mayor supports gang injunctions.” There is speculation that the mayor, mulling over a run for governor of California, is trying mightily to distance himself as far as possible from his ACLU roots. I feel like I am starring in season five of The Wire and life is imitating art to a point of insanity. While I love the people I meet in City Hall, I am ready to go back to UCLA—and life as a gang anthropologist in the streets—when my one-year appointment ends.
Once I exit the Mayor’s Office, the ACLU asks me to work as an expert witness on gang injunctions. They have filed a class action suit against the City of Santa Ana. When I see the area designated as the target of the injunction, I cannot stop laughing. It is a lovely suburban neighborhood that includes antiques shops and the Chapman University campus. Peter Bibring, the ACLU attorney handling the case, is amused by my reaction.
“A lot of people think gang injunctions really are the first step toward gentrification. They want to kick the gangs out to drive prices up,” he tells me while convincing me that the ACLU has a strong case. “We can use your help.”
I have to declare a side. The trouble is, I’ve been invited to work as the senior gang policy advisor for Lee Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County. I don’t know how I am going to do this. But when I voice my concerns, Baca tells me I have a right to my own opinion. “I don’t want you to be a yes-man,” he reassures me. I couldn’t care less that he’s using the wrong gender. Baca possesses true integrity.
I begin imagining what Ronny would say to Lee Baca about the impact of injunctions. It’s a fantasy I keep to myself later that evening in Nickerson Gardens. Ronny spins out stories of what he did when he was young. He tells me he doesn’t know if he will live more than five more years. He accepts this life as his fate. He waits.
Eleven. Teardrops
Why wasn’t anyone ever there to tell me not to do this, not to go into the gang, not to bang, not to get a tattoo?
—Natalie Flores
I keep thinking about Mario. In the feature film running in my brain, I see the signs that he hadn’t left his neighborhood. The biggest sign, the one I should never have missed, was his refusal to remove his tattoos. Mario’s ready excuse was that he just hadn’t gotten around to it—he hadn’t found the time. But in retrospect I realized it was more than that. The tattoo is the covenant, the pledge of life and loyalty to the neighborhood. Some look crude, betraying their street or prison-made origins. Others are more complicated, rendered in multiple colors. Almost everyone I know in this world has them, and no one talks very much about them.
In anthropology, the decoration and piercing of the body is a big deal. There’s even a scholarly journal, Ornament, devoted to tattoos and body piercing. But I always felt that the act of getting a tattoo represented a meeting of art and masochism. The pain and permanence scared me. Under ideal “professional” conditions “in a street parlor,” the modern process of tattooing is sterile and involves electricity and speed. The electric tattoo machine works by infusing an area of the skin with ink using a bar of needles. The needles are electronically driven in and out of the skin anywhere from 50 to 150 times a second with what is hoped will be a minimum of pain. When tattoos are more crudely made with hand-held needles, whether in the hood or in the prison system, the tattooing process, called “pinning,” is excruciating, and the end product often crude. Homemade tattoos were “born” in prison and progressed beyond pinning. Inmates, ever innovative, would put together prison-made tattoo machines from everything available: strings from guitar class, ink from art class, smuggled needles, and the motor from a Sony Walkman to power the process.
The first tattoo I had ever seen looked very crude indeed, small block letters appearing on the lower arm of our next-door neighbor, Dora Kaufmann. She gave me books and told me stories about Auschwitz. At eight years old, I connected tattoos to something dark and evil. The gang tattoos I later saw—machetes dripping blood and death’s heads with gang names written underneath them—did nothing to dispel these feelings.
I first learned about tattoos from Fabian Debora, a former gangbanger who used to buy drugs from his earnings as a tattoo artist. Fabian has graduated from the neighborhood in many ways. He is now an extremely talented artist whose paintings have been shown in art galleries. His artistic sensibilities are apparent as he talks to me about tattoos.
“Tattoos send a message,” Fabian begins over Chinese food at Paul’s Kitchen in downtown LA. “They may tell what side of Los Angeles you are from or the story of your life. Some homies get tattoos for the art form, some do it for rank, sometimes it happens at a party, some do it in prison.”
Fabian has a sleeve—a full tattoo—down his left forearm. He tells me that it is his autobiography—portraying the struggles of his life, with his inner child, with death. The words “I’ve tried” and “Fuck love” are all portrayed, along with death watching over him. There is a clown with a gun, trying to commit suicide, and a female clown. His right arm bears no tattoos. “These are the two parts of my life,” Fabian explains.
There are other tattoos Fabian has had removed: the huge “eyebuster” with the letters LA that adorned his neck and the small teardrop near the corner of his eye. The teardrop tattoo is universal among Hispanic and African American gangs, and I ask Fabian about its meaning.
“The principle behind the teardrop is to symbolize pain.” Fabian speaks carefully. “Three definitions come with the teardrop: you have lost someone close to you, you have hurt someone crucial to you, or you have spent time in jail or prison. You get a teardrop for each term served. Sometimes homies have tears running down their cheek—that means much time served.”
Fabian cautions me that there are obvious tattoos you cannot get. I learn that only when you have acquired a certain rank within the neighborhood is it appropriate to have a tattoo on your stomach or chest. He adds that black gang members have a totally different system. “Their symbols are different. And they don’t use Spanish; they might use Swahili.”
I wanted to know more about tattoos in the black neighborhoods, so I offered a veteran African American gangbanger, Maniac, lunch in exchange for a little street education. He turns down the meal, but we meet in Leimert Park on a sunny afternoon, where Maniac checks out the area around him carefully before talking.
“Every neighborhood has a tattoo,” he begins. His voice is soft and the words come out in a sing-song rhythm; I am listening to Mr. Rogers on crack. Every neighborhood works out its own symbol or group of letters, incorporating the gang name into the design. The name is intertwined with skulls or crosses or swords or eagles. “Florencia” most often appears written out in block letters—preferably across the neck—usually followed by “13.” The Bloods also focus on a body location, spelling their name out on the knuckles of the right hand. 18th Street sticks to basics—the number 18 says it all.
“Once you get tagged—tattooed—that means you’re commit
ted,” Maniac tells me. “It means you’re committed to the neighborhood until you die. It’s the same for every hood. This way we’re all alike. You see the tattoo—it means you’re not a wannabe. It means you’ve been put up.”
Tattoos are the gang’s universal language—and the rules are identical whether you are black or brown. Part of being active in a neighborhood means getting your gang’s name tattooed in as many body locations as humanly possible. The tattoo needs to be visible, announcing affiliations and loyalties. In addition to this, however, certain symbols are shared between all the neighborhoods—black and brown. And none is more notorious than the teardrop.
“Every time you go to prison, you get a teardrop, y’know, the teardrops you see goin’ down from the corner of the eye,” Maniac says deliberately. “But you gotta look close to get it. It always means death, like a brother has died. If it’s empty inside it means that someone you love has been killed. Or it can mean that you got the tattoo because you’ve done a murder. If the tear is filled in, it means that the person—like a brother—died but it wasn’t because of a murder. Maybe it was a car crash. Maybe they OD’d. If the top of the tear is empty but the bottom is full, it means retaliation. You got someone. But mostly the tear means you killed someone. A tear for every murder. If you get the tattoo while you are in prison, that means you murdered someone while you were incarcerated.”