Jumped In

by Jorja Leap

  I am exhausted by this commentary. Is anything in gang life simple? It’s also becoming clear that the sheer volume of material gang members are required to master far exceeds the information in lecture notes and readings required for my graduate course in juvenile justice. The information is subtle and intricate. It constantly shifts and changes as gangs subdivide and new neighborhood sets form. On top of this, very little is written down. Every gang member is required to memorize all relevant knowledge, including at least part of the bookkeeping for drug deals. Some degree of brainpower is required to function successfully in a neighborhood.

  Removing a tattoo is one of the major signs that someone has decided to leave gang life. It is also a commitment of enormous proportions, and no one takes it lightly. Because of this, several gang-intervention agencies offer free tattoo-removal services before developing or providing any additional programs. The gangbanger who gets rid of his or her tattoos also leaves behind their former self, denouncing ties that are emotional as well as physical. It’s a scary move—the child is leaving their family behind and beginning a new life. With tattoo removal, there is always loss. Along with this emotional weight, the physical process of tattoo removal is not for the fainthearted.

  I learned this early on, watching a two-hundred-pound homie blink rapidly while breaking into a sweat during a removal session at Homeboy Industries. Typically, the black or dark-colored inks are easiest to remove and go away completely. I inwardly cringe when I see someone with colored inks and elaborate designs.

  “That’s gonna fuckin’ hurt,” one homie explained to another homie, eying the multicolored FLORENCIA-13 adorning his neck, while they both awaited treatment.

  Once in the treatment room, wearing goggles, I watch while Victor Perez, the volunteer physician, works with a heavy laser gun balanced on his shoulders, ready to blow away the shrapnel of a wayward identity. “By getting rid of this tattoo,” he reassures the Florencia homie, “You’re gonna feel better about yourself.” When he is finished, Victor introduces me to Rosa, who tells me, “I decided to get rid of all my tattoos the day my four-year-old told me she was gonna get tattoos just like mine.”

  The next person who comes for tattoo removal is Carlos, whose right cheek is adorned with wedding invitation–style calligraphy spelling out the words Fuck Your Hood. I wonder who has RSVP’d during his eight-year sojourn in prison and why he would wear profanity on his face. Other tattoos are easier to understand: The names of children. The date of death of an adored mother. Homies constantly ask me if I have kids and if I have a man. When I tell them I do, they ask why I don’t have any tattoos. I shrug and try to think how I can explain that, right now, I can barely handle my name change. For twenty-four years, I had possessed one last name—my first husband’s—and built an identity around it. This was my tattoo. I wish I could have laser treatments for that. Both Shannon and Mark had assumed I would change my last name. I had acquiesced, but it still felt strange.

  After Carlos finishes, I sit on the floor outside a classroom at Homeboy Industries next to a thin, silent homie whose facial expression clearly warns, Don’t come near me. Of course, this acts as an instant invitation. I find out that his name is Luis, and while I work to disarm him, asking him questions and telling him about myself, I notice that there are tattoos on his eyelids. For several minutes I try to imagine what it’s like to get that soft, nearly translucent skin tattooed. But while one part of my brain feels pain, another part is slowly making out the letters. One eyelid says FUCK and the other says YOU. I am breathless with the suggestion, with its location, and with the mechanics of its removal. Later in the day we check in. Luis has found out that the tattoos cannot be removed. The risk of damage to his eyes is too great.

  “At least,” I weakly console him, “it doesn’t say the name of your gang.”

  “But how I am going to tell my little girl?” he asks.

  I have no answer for him. His eyelids fall somewhere outside the entire etiquette of tattoo removal, which is surprisingly straightforward. Sleeves—tattoos that extend from the shoulder to the wrist—along with other prime locales for gang tattoos (the neck, the head, the cheeks) must be removed by laser if they are gang-oriented. If you have a tattoo on your skull, it is easier to simply grow your hair. Longer hair invariably serves as an announcement that you’re no longer active. Neighborhood loyalty is communicated through the practice of daily head-shaving. This accentuates the fierce look of the individual, and tattoos stand out dramatically against the baldness of the skull. Rarely are tattoos removed from the chest or upper legs, because they can be easily hidden with clothing. The chest is a particularly painful region. And other body parts can be left alone.

  “I knew a guy who had tattoos on his dick,” Patrice, a former gang member, tells me. “Can you imagine having tattoo removal there?” She and I both start giggling when she confides this. “I never got tattoos. DeShawn wanted me to—he wanted me to get a tattoo and I told him fuck you. No way. And now he’s back in jail. What would I do if I had his name tattooed on my breasts or—” She hesitates, leans in, and whispers, “—On my pussy like he wanted.” I know DeShawn has caught a murder charge and that he’s probably guilty. I had seen him the week before in South LA near Athens Park, and he told me he was on the run.

  While Patrice’s account makes me squeamish, what really bothered me were the facial tattoos. “They get them on the face to look menacing or scary,” Fabian tells me. But he adds, “There might be other reasons, I don’t know.” It takes several months and painstaking discussion to uncover the stories of five different men—all with extensive tattoos on their faces—who finally admit they were sexually abused by a male adult when they were children. It’s as if they were trying to make visible the stigma they felt. This is not a large enough research sample to satisfy the rigorous methodologists at UCLA. But I am now even more disturbed when I see someone with his face tattooed.

  Then there are “the lips.” Maniac had already cautioned me, “Don’t ever ask a black homie ’bout the lips—they don’t have the lips.” He was right—I had first noticed the striking design on Latinos from the neighborhoods. The lips invariably appeared on someone’s neck, and the first few times I saw them I was convinced that they were actually red lipstick marks. Fabian had explained that the red lips were the sign of a “significant other.” Another homie, just back from a long lockup, told me the lips were a symbol of “the last kiss of my lady before I go to prison.” Other gang members scoffed at this and insisted that the lips formed the shape of the number 13, which signified the thirteen letters (and one space) in “Mexican Mafia,” or M being the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Felipe Mendez, a former gangbanger I had befriended, told me, “They mean someone’s a player.” But I preferred the idea of the last kiss—it was romantic and tragic and one of the rare examples of men exhibiting the kind of erotic passion typically associated with women.

  But tattoos were dangerous in a different way. When arresting and booking an alleged gang member, law enforcement officers routinely insist that each suspect strip down so that all body parts can be photographed. I have sat through far too many court trials where the damning, oversized photographs of gang tattoos were paraded before judge and jury. They are the embodiment of the idea that you just can’t leave the gang—and they seal the deal in the minds of onlookers. Most of the time, the impression left by these photographs is dead-on.

  But one day in court I knew that the person whose tattoos were being displayed had left the neighborhood. The US attorney was gazing intently at a photo that she then held up for everyone in the courtroom to see—a naked chest with an enormous tattoo of MS-13.

  “Alex Sanchez kept the tattoo of MS-13 on his chest, close to his heart. He has never left the gang,” she insisted. “He was still affiliated, still active; in fact, he was a shot caller and he would never remove this tattoo.”

  I knew—along with almost everyone else in court—that this was not the truth. Alex S
anchez had endured a series of painful treatments to remove tattoos from his head and neck. His attorney countered, “The tattoo is over the cardiac region. To use laser treatments in this area is painful and extremely dangerous.”

  No one was looking at either attorney. We were all looking at Alex.

  I had been on close terms with Alex Sanchez for several years while he established and built up Homies Unidos—a gang-intervention agency that worked with the neighborhoods operating in Central Los Angeles, primarily MS-13. Alex’s curriculum vitae was a wonder to behold. He had been an active member of MS-13 and had been extradited once to El Salvador for a parole violation, successfully fighting a second attempted extradition. He had renounced all gang ties and had been granted political asylum once it was revealed that he had been systematically harassed by the LAPD. Now he was fifteen years out of the neighborhood and a strong candidate for the California Peace Prize. His agency received grant funding from the City of Los Angeles and the California Wellness Foundation.

  I had been working with Julio Marcial, a Wellness Foundation project officer who grew up in the Pacoima barrio, avoided the neighborhood, got a college education, and wore a suit and tie but never forgot who he was. He asked me to evaluate Homies Unidos and I agreed—but I had my Trojan horse, my ulterior motive. I wanted to hang out with the guys trying to leave MS-13. I was finishing my evaluation plan and called Alex to talk about it. He laughed and said, “I’ve got to go switch out a transmission with my brother-in-law. The one in my car isn’t working. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  I didn’t hear from him in the morning, but this did not strike me as odd. Time was fluid in gangs, as in community-based organizations. Midday I got a text from Celeste Fremon that read, “Alex Sanchez WTF?” Celeste was a successful freelance journalist who was “present at the creation,” covering gangs in general, and East Los Angeles and Greg Boyle in particular, for over twenty years. She was completely plugged into the Los Angeles gang community. Celeste knew I was away—on a working vacation in New York—and if she was texting me, it wasn’t good. Three phone calls later I learned that Alex had been arrested under the RICO statute, charged with racketeering and conspiracy to murder and was being held in federal detention, unable to see anyone but his lawyer. All I could think was, ‘Not Alex.’

  Even before I started working on the evaluation, Alex and I had spent a lot of time together appearing on panels, attempting to answer the unanswerable questions: “How Can We Stop Gang Violence?” or “What Intervention Strategy Works Best?” Our names were listed as “gang intervention” speakers and constantly recycled both locally and nationally. I also visited Alex at Homies Unidos, checking in with him while I interviewed homies in Rampart Division—one of the least understood, most gang-impacted areas of Los Angeles.

  Rampart was a strange hybrid of community activism, gang violence, and police brutality. It was part of my personal history. I had been baptized, rather unsuccessfully, at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral—right in the heart of what urban planners called “the Byzantine-Latino corridor.” It was also an area Mark knew well—he had served as a captain in the notorious Rampart Division of the LAPD, site of some of the worst police corruption in recent times. But most of us knew it as the Bermuda Triangle of Los Angeles—everything disappeared into Rampart. It was where Nora Ephron rhapsodized that you could order the best pastrami sandwich in America. Most of California organized labor had offices in the area, as did Constance Rice’s highly effective civil rights law group, the Advancement Project. The streets were alive in Rampart—with families, children, and activity around the clock. There were vendors selling chorizos, fake social security cards, and “real” passports. It was also a great place to buy crystal meth and to order a hit. Or so I had been told.

  Alex had set up shop right in the middle of Rampart—down on Olympic Boulevard—in a crowded warren of offices where Homies Unidos offered tattoo-removal services and parenting classes. Running the agency and lecturing in public, Alex was chronically overworked and overscheduled. If he had time to be active in MS-13 in the midst of all these never-ending activities, he was a much better professional than I. Taking a break after a morning spent with homies, I met Alex and his colleague, Susan Cruz, for lunch, and while we ate Korean barbecue, they talked about their days in MS-13. They described it as a horrible experience that taught them what really needed to be done to stop the violence. Now they just needed enough funding to help. We spent most of lunch discussing what was required on federal grant applications. At the end, we touched on what was going on in the streets.

  “MS-13 is warring with 18th Street. It’s getting more and more violent,” Alex told me. He and Susan also talked with me about the changes in the streets, insisting that there was a new generation, a younger generation, without limits, without hope. After lunch, I went out to talk with two homies from MS-13 and it was clear that Alex and Susan were right. I spent several days after that with one youngster, Luis, who shared a birth date with Shannon. He had dropped out of middle school and was thinking about going back. He had not been jumped into a gang “yet.”

  I asked him what he did every day, and he was evasive. “A few things,” he would say and then tell me he had to leave soon, could I kick him down with a few bucks? While I obliged him, I kept wondering, Where is the prevention program for this guy? He talked a little bit too much about the older homie who was his friend, and I let him ramble until he revealed himself. He was my daughter’s age. And he had a mentor. The mentor was teaching him about crystal meth. I saw Luis two more times. The second time he showed me his MS tattoo and told me he had been jumped into the gang.

  “It’s a family, miss,” he explained, using the unfailing politesse of every Hispanic gang member I had ever known. “My mother is gone, my father I never know. I know this. I know my neighborhood. MS-13 Normandie clique.” One week later Luis was dead.

  I needed to see Papa, my therapist. The losses were beginning to pile up. I was having nightmares—there were too many homies who died before their lives had begun. The next time I am with Alex, speaking at yet another gang conference, we talk about Luis. I confess that Mark and I have had problems and we are both in therapy. “He needs it, I need it, I guess we all need it,” I told Alex. “I can’t be married to anyone from the LAPD without both of us going to therapy.”

  “I know,” he told me. “I go as much as I can. I wanna be a good husband and father. Thank God I have Kaiser.” We sounded like two middle-class suburbanites discussing our relationship issues. Half an hour later, I listened to Alex speaking, unprepared for what he would say.

  “I go to see a psychiatrist for my PTSD and my rage. I need it,” he announced, unabashed, in front of five hundred people at UCLA. “This is the hidden cost of gang membership. I do it because I want to protect my children from this madness and I want to find out who I am. We all need therapy.”

  Now, months later in court, listening to the case against Alex, all I could do was snort when the US attorney, a Sarah Jessica Parker clone wearing a diamond big enough to cut open a dictionary, talked about the “double life of Alex Sanchez.”

  So there was Alex Sanchez, in a white federal detention jumpsuit with 110 letters of support from law enforcement and academics and community leaders and Latina mothers. There was $1.2 million in the bank as guarantee for bail and, in a breathtaking moment, the political activist Tom Hayden coming forth and offering up his home as collateral for bail. After his marriage to Jane Fonda ended, Hayden had moved to Mandeville Canyon, living in this house with his wife, Barbara, and their enchanting son, Liam. He wrote a book on gang intervention entitled Street Wars, and was constantly sending e-mails decrying George W. Bush’s tactics in Washington and the LAPD’s tactics locally.

  “Same old Tom,” my husband would mutter. “Always complaining about the LAPD.”

  I thought about the man Shannon was learning about in US History that semester—the young activist and anti-war protestor who aut
hored the Port Huron Statement. I was ready to start berating Mark when I remembered that just a few months earlier, both he and I had been to Tom Hayden’s house as part of a small group talking with Virginia congressman Bobby Scott about the Youth Promise Act and its future in the federal government. Alex had been there.

  Now there was a crisis. If Alex Sanchez could get into this much trouble because of past associations and alleged phone conversations, after devoting himself to gang intervention and violence prevention, what is the future for gang members who simply want to leave their neighborhoods? I keep thinking of Chino, tattooed up and down his arms, who is illiterate and undocumented and can barely care for himself let alone his infant daughter. What chance does Chino have if someone of Alex’s stature and sophistication falls?

  After the bail hearing, I walk over to Homeboy Industries—a few blocks from the federal courthouse. I talk to Joanna while she is having a tattoo-removal treatment. Victor Perez is working on the multicolored tattoo of her gang name, Dark Eyes, and another tattoo that says, LOVE MY HOOD FOREVER.

  “This hurts like a motherfucker—I’m never gonna get another fuckin’ tattoo again,” Joanna says with a laugh. But I am far away, remembering the gang lieutenant who insisted, “They get their tattoos removed so when they go to court and you bring out the pictures, they can say, It’s not me! Then after their case is settled, they go out and get new tattoos.” This did not make a lot of sense to me. I had not heard of homies getting “re-tattooed” after they endured the pain of multiple laser treatments.

  There were too many outsiders who believed the idea of “once a gang member, always a gang member.” The people who made this their mantra wore uniforms and carried guns. Some of them were school administrators who presented kids with an “opportunity transfer” off their campuses at the slightest sign of trouble. Some of them wore robes and listened to complaints and then were perfectly capable of throwing someone back in jail for failing to fill out the proper form. A lot of them were probation officers who obsessively followed their caseload, watching and waiting for someone to do something wrong rather than applying a calculus of intent and accident.