by Dan Slater
The poorest areas of Laredo—the west side, home to Martin High; south-central, home to Lazteca; and the south side, home to the absolute worst ghetto, Santo Niño—were all bound by geography: the river and the border. After the city’s population doubled during the 1990s, to nearly 250,000, real estate, still controlled by the oldest and wealthiest Laredo families—the Martins, Brunis, Killams, Walkers, and Longorias—remained some of the highest priced in Texas, which helped keep the middle class lean and locked the poor out of land ownership.
In addition to the official ghettos in central and south Laredo—Lazteca, Siete Viejo, Cantaranas, the Heights, Santo Niño—Laredo was ringed by communities, or camps, called “colonias.” After World War II, developers began using agriculturally valueless land to create these unincorporated subdivisions without infrastructure or utilities, then sold the properties to immigrants who made low payments but didn’t receive title until they made the final payment.
There were no members-at-large on the city council, no one representing politically significant voting blocks. Each neighborhood, rather, was a ward with its own councilman. The councilman would build a community center, or maybe improve a playground, then get reelected again and again on a hundred votes. Not even the mayor could propose a city-wide ordinance.
“Almost everyone here’s Hispanic, and even the handful of gringos are assimilated,” said Ray Keck, the president of Texas A&M International University. The gringo son of European immigrants, Keck grew up just north of Laredo, went to Princeton University, married a Hispanic woman from Laredo, and then taught at the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut. “Since there’s little ethnic tension, there’s an easier, more natural system of subjugation, and the social classes tend to stagnate.”
Every school in Laredo has a colonia affiliated with it, and the colonia kids are bused in. Whenever crime becomes a political issue, local media blame the colonias, depicting them as havens of depravity and filth. Never mind that Laredo’s biggest criminal families often came from the upper classes on the fancy north side. La Gaby knew it, same as Robert and Ronnie Garcia knew it. When a kid from United North or Alexander High got in trouble, you never heard about it, because his parents were related to attorneys and judges. The wealthy walked away with a lecture while the average José sat in the county jail.
In the Laredo Independent School District—which contained Martin, Nixon, and Cigarroa high schools—97 percent of students were considered “economically disadvantaged,” and the other 3 percent just didn’t fill out the paperwork. At Martin, the principal acknowledged that he fostered two groups: those who would go into the drug business, and those who would chase them. Cops, agents, lawyers, judges, court workers, probation officers; not to mention diesel mechanics, truck yard owners, and warehouses that stored seized contraband for the government—the list of jobs created by drug prohibition was long.
But everyone, it seemed, was mixed up in something. Laredo’s council members lived on kickbacks. Judges favored dealers who supported their campaigns. The bail business was the biggest hustle of all. Bondsmen often split their money with prosecutors who helped recover seized vehicles and get their clients deals. For a fee, a corrections officer at the Webb County jail helped arrestees get their bail lowered. The corrections officer’s son was Laredo’s district attorney, though the DA was never implicated in the scheme.
On its high knoll—surrounded by coconut-less palm trees; adjacent to a huge port and a prized smuggling corridor—Lazteca, also known as the Devil’s Corner, was magnificently positioned for a jack of black-market trades. Immigrants. Narcotics. Cars. Weapons. Cash. Here, in Underworld University, a brave and resourceful boy was a useful thing.
ONE NIGHT, DURING THE SUMMER between Gabriel’s freshman and sophomore year, the Sieteros were throwing a party when the girlfriend of the gang’s leader screamed from a seated position on the ground. When people came to help her up, she said she’d been hit in the face by “a short kid” who was drunk.
Twelve years old and still under five feet, Rosalio Reta worried that his given name sounded girlish. A fan of The Simpsons, he’d recently changed it to Bartolomeo. Friends and family now called him Bart.
Bart’s large family was typical of Laredo’s poor. His father, a construction worker, and his mother, a beautician, both born in Mexico, earned a combined $400 a week and received $1,200 a month in food stamps. The second of eight children—four boys, four girls—Bart was born in Houston. He lived across the street from the Cardonas and attended J. C. Martin Elementary until second grade, when his family’s house burned down. The Reta family moved one neighborhood north, to Siete Viejo, where their dilapidated wood-frame mobile home lacked windows and doors. In the bedroom that Bart shared with his siblings, his favorite item was a Navy SEAL poster he stole from a local recruitment center. At night, when the family fell asleep together while watching TV, Bart would leave and walk to a nearby housing project where Sietero gang members gathered to smoke weed, drink beer, and play basketball beneath the twenty-four-hour safety lights.
Bart ventured out on these nights because he wanted to live his own life. He was tired of not having what he needed, of forgoing dinner on some nights so that his little sisters and brothers could have more food. To have something, he learned, you had to work for it. He was willing to work. He joined the Sieteros, and became a favorite of the gang’s leader.
But now, at the party, Bart chugged Presidente brandy in the backyard when that same leader approached him, pulled out a gun, and put the barrel to Bart’s head. Disrespecting a gang leader’s girlfriend was grounds for a beating; hitting her in the face could warrant something worse. Some of the Sieteros discussed taking Bart to a nearby field and shooting him. One gang member said killing Bart wouldn’t be smart because the girls at the party would tell on them.
Gabriel stood nearby, waiting for an opportunity to intervene on behalf of his childhood friend, the tough kid who always played football with the bigger boys and just wanted to fit in. Several gang members began to beat Bart, who tried to fight back but couldn’t. Gabriel eventually broke it up, and dragged Bart away.
After that evening, Gabriel and Bart began to distance themselves from the Sieteros and spend more time with each other. While they walked near Gabriel’s house in Lazteca one evening, Movida did a drive-by.
Gabriel had been shot at twice before; he would hear the bullets whistle past and imagine The Matrix, imagine that if he only raised his hand here, extended it there, he might just catch one. He would feel a chill, a tremble, and then battle mode entered. But this time he was hit on the back and head with shotgun fragments. Getting shot, he now discovered, was different than getting shot at. He didn’t feel the tiny fragments when they entered. Just burning and cold drips. Then humiliation, a tingle of rage on his lips, the unbearable feeling that someone had the upper hand.
TWO TEENS SHOT IN DRIVE-BY, wrote the Laredo Morning Times.
The cops recovered casings from the scene and said the investigation was ongoing. Investigation my ass, Gabriel thought after getting out of the hospital. When he retaliated, shooting one of his rivals in the leg, it was a big turning point for the fifteen-year-old. He became known as a vato de huevos, someone who had the balls to pull the trigger, a gatillero. Most important, he now fought his own fights. People felt safe in his presence. His friends wanted to be around him. When absent from a gathering, people asked after his whereabouts. The respect was intoxicating. He started to carry a gun.
His body changed. His bronzed, hairless chest was still concave, but his shoulders now popped. His lips grew plush; his nose straight and strong; his hands hard. He traded the Ricky Martin pompadour for the newer hairstyle, the Eminem fade.
Like any teenage boy developing a posture and attitude toward the world—a man’s personality—cultural models imparted to him life’s bitter realities and the noble ways of coping. In the shack next to his mother’s house at 207 Lincoln, Gabriel and Luis watched Blood In,
Blood Out, a movie about teen relatives from East Los Angeles, repeatedly. After the movie’s characters get in a lethal fight with a rival gang, their paths diverge. Paco goes to the military and becomes a cop. Miklo goes to prison and becomes a gang leader. Gabriel understood the message of Paco: You can come from the hood and still make something of your life. But he identified most with Miklo. The heroic way the character stays true to his code and becomes the leader of his gang—“the baddest man in prison”—was an appealing fantasy.
On the wall of the shack, Gabriel scribbled lyrics and poetry by Tupac Shakur. He took off his shirt, smoked weed, and listened to “Hit ’Em Up,” “Still Ballin’,” and “Hail Mary”—songs about street life and getting revenge. Tupac wrote his best songs in prison, lived the life he rhapsodized, battled dirty cops, and survived assailants. Gabriel danced and shadowboxed with the music.
Five shots couldn’t drop me—I took it and smiled . . .
“Turn that Two-pack shit off!” La Gaby would yell from across the dirt driveway, but Gabriel ignored her. As he moved around spinning, punching the air—his jeans sagging below the waistband of his plaid Tommy Hilfiger boxers—ideas sprang into his mind; principles crystallized into code. It was about being en la punta del cañón, at the front of the barrel.
Be the guy who goes first!
Die for the homies!
Gabriel’s close friends frequented the shack. The boys—Gabriel, Bart, and another close friend named Wences Tovar, known as Tucan for his mighty nose—plus a cast of associated homies from Lazteca and Siete Viejo traded issues of Vibe magazine, and followed every twist of hip-hop’s East Coast–West Coast beef. Reading about the homicidal music mogul Suge Knight and the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, they saw their own habitat reflected in that celebrated ether. The music wasn’t just called gangsta rap. It was real.
Even more so when Carlos Coy—aka South Park Mexican, a Houston local—hit it big with songs like “Thug Girl” and “Illegal Amigos.” South Park Mexican, wrote the Houston Press, “was a hero to the shaven-headed brown kids in baggy print shirts and jeans, those sons of yard men, road builders, roofers and dishwashers, the youths caught between two cultures but not particularly valued by either.” SPM became a conduit for their rage and despair, but also for their dreams. He rapped for all the crazy muthafuckas. He let them know he’d been lost and needed help just like them. That’s why those who followed him were the sickest, most ill people in this world, because that’s who SPM wanted to help and change. He dropped outta high school cause he was tired of selling crack to your homeboy’s mom, and feeling like a worthless wetback. As a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old high school freshman, SPM also worried about going to jail for statutory rape.
Gabriel and Luis used the shack to entertain female friends. On the outside of the shack, facing Lincoln Street, they hung a poster of a curvy Chicana lusting over a bottle of Bud Light.
When sophomore year started, a truant officer found rolling papers and a bullet in Gabriel’s pocket. It would be the last day he set foot in Martin High.
5
Overachieving Bitch
Ronnie Garcia continued to struggle in Laredo. The city was rotten with domestic violence, and she didn’t need to be a cop to see it. After working as a receptionist at the medical office for several years, she took a new job as an administrator and recruiter at Texas A&M International University—known as TAMIU, Tammy U. Ronnie’s close friend there was the mother of Trey’s best friend. The woman wanted to switch careers, and had just passed her nursing test when she told her husband she was going out to celebrate. He said no. She went out anyway. He met her in the front yard that night and slit her throat, killing her.
The father got life in prison. The eight-year-old son, Trey’s friend, moved between his grandmother’s house and the Garcias’ new house in Los Presidentes. On the first Christmas after his mother’s murder, they were opening presents when the boy broke down. Ronnie held him for hours at a stretch. But it was hard to know what to do. She called her own parents in Arizona. “Robert’s never home!” she complained. “This boy is inconsolable!” “Oh quit it, you little overachieving bitch,” her father would say, using their private rough language but not meaning it unkindly. “Slow down, honey. You can’t be everything to everyone.”
Through tumult, an unwavering ethic yoked Robert and Ronnie to one another in a way that could alienate them from the crowd, particularly Robert’s crowd. From speeding tickets to arrests, Laredo cops bent the rules and traded favors with the powerful. Robert didn’t play such games. Ronnie appreciated his rectitude, even if it limited their social life to a tiny circle of cops and federal agents.
At DEA, all the narcotics and cash and cars in the evidence room could finance a second agency. Temptation lurked, as it did at many of Laredo’s law-enforcement agencies, and Robert never knew which of his colleagues would fall. An agent might stay clean, but when his kids grew up and he needed extra money, he skimmed cash off a bust. When the money was counted, the arrested doper would say, “No, there was more there than that.” But the doper was a criminal, so the agent got away with it. And that was the first step toward ruin, because if the agent got away with skimming money once, then he did it again. He might wriggle out the second time, too. It was always that third time when he found himself talking to a prosecutor and bidding his colleagues farewell. It could be an agent from a legacy law enforcement family, or a father-son scheme. It could be an old partner, someone you thought you knew like the back of your hand. But then if you looked at the back of your hand every five years, it changed.
The Garcias’ thinking: The system isn’t fair but opportunity exists. Don’t be a freeloader. Serve the community and it’ll serve you. Get a job, suck it up. Get another job. Educate yourself. Keep moving. There was nothing political or ideological about it. Their guiding principle, rather, was a self-made couple’s intolerance for laziness.
The Garcias weren’t religious. Nor did they worship money. Respect and power, Robert had learned, were arbitrary and elusive. If the work didn’t drive you, there was no point. He didn’t hate guns but he didn’t like them, either. Ever since Jesse’s suicide he had no interest in them. He would rather cook than hunt, rather weld a new smoker for Sunday barbecues than customize a car. In his garage-turned-man-cave/office, he stood behind the bar and entertained friends with football on the big screen and music on the old jukebox.
On weekends, Robert spent as much time as possible with the boys. He and Trey wrestled in the morning. Eric, the stepson, resented their closeness. At thirteen, Eric had walked into Robert and Ronnie’s bedroom and asked if he could change his last name to Garcia. Before Ronnie could answer, Robert said no. When Eric turned eighteen, Robert said, he could do whatever he wanted.
“You’re being a fuckin’ asshole,” Ronnie told him.
Maybe so. But a name, in Robert’s mind, didn’t matter. It was how you brought them up that mattered. As the oldest son among his own siblings, Robert never called his father—Robert Sr.—“Dad.” He called him Beto, short for Roberto. This formalness had nothing to do with a lack of affection. It was about respect. If you wanted to raise a baby, treat him like a child. If you wanted the kid to work with you, to help look out for the family, treat him like a man. Sentimentality, in Robert’s mind, wasn’t a prerequisite for good parenting.
For this reason, Robert intimidated Eric and Trey. He didn’t tell them much, or show emotion. But he had his ways of caring. While they worked on projects together, Robert asked the boys questions about school and life. The three of them tiled the bathroom, and built a wall around the house. In the front yard they planted trees and flowers, and installed a sprinkler system. In back they built a deck, an outdoor bar, and a new shed. Trey was the athlete. But Eric, the gringo, learned Spanish better than his Mexican brother, and became a better craftsman. “You don’t need to know how to do everything,” Robert would tell them. “Just know what’s involved in doing it,
so you know how much to pay someone else. Otherwise you pay too much.”
To those neighbors crowding around them in the subdivision, Robert and his boys were a marvel of discipline. When neighbors alluded to hopes of doing similar projects on their houses, Robert would say: “You buy the materials. We’ll come over and do it.”
Since he sent Laredo youth to jail on a daily basis, he brought a special vigilance to fathering. In this regard, Ronnie adapted her husband’s style. Together they micromanaged where other parents trusted. They had to know who the boys would be with, where they were going. Cell phone numbers for friends and parents. Pickup and drop-off times. Trey complied. The younger boy was like his father, couldn’t tell a lie if he wanted to. Eric, now in high school, was different.
“Where you going, Eric?”
“Out.”
“With?”
“Friends.”
“When you comin’ back?”
“At some point.”
As a white kid attending one of Laredo’s tougher schools, United South, Eric struggled more than his parents realized. His English classes were taught in Spanish. Boys dressed in baggy jeans and Scarface T-shirts, flashed gang signs, and didn’t give a shit. Eric, not a naturally aggressive kid, was bullied, and this made him angry. Robert taught the boys to remain calm in the face of aggression, to fight only when forced, but it wasn’t so simple.
Eric’s best friend became a father at thirteen. Seventh graders drove their parents’ trucks to school. Eric certainly didn’t wish to imitate all the debauchery he saw around him, but he envied the liberties enjoyed by his ungoverned classmates. To Eric, it was as if no one in Laredo were watching, except for his own dad, Little Hitler.