Can't Stop Won't Stop

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Can't Stop Won't Stop Page 54

by Jeff Chang


  By then, Sanchez was trying to find a way out of the gangs. He had no desire to go back to San Salvador, but hoped he might at least get a chance at a new start. But when he stepped off the plane, he stared up at a nearby hillside and saw stenciled into it four chilling letters: MS-13.

  The INS was literally exporting the American gang problem. The streets of San Salvador were now divided into warring turfs the same way they had been in Los Angeles. That was not the only source of violence and instability. After the Salvadoran civil war, shadowy right-wing vigilante squads had reorganized to launch a covert terrorist ‘social cleansing’ program. Mayra Gomez, El Salvador country specialist with Amnesty International USA, says the targets were “alleged criminals, prostitutes, street children and transvestites.” Now, like many others throughout the southern hemisphere, San Salvador was suddenly not only rife with highly armed, CIA-trained, right-wing-driven death squads, but highly armed, U.S. street-trained, criminal-minded street gangs.

  Deciding there was no future for him there and determined to get back to his newborn son, Sanchez again embarked on the long trek through Guatemala and Mexico back to El Norte. Near starvation, Sanchez crossed back across the border into Texas and made his way back to his old Los Angeles ‘hood.

  He reconciled with his family and tried to avoid his old gang hangouts, and he met Magdaleno Rose-Avila, the founder of Homies Unidos, who steered him toward peace work. Inspired by Rose-Avila’s mentoring and hoping to do better for his newborn son, Sanchez joined Homies as a volunteer, removed many of his old gang tattoos, and began to turn his life around. He was a natural leader, and people knew he was no snitch. He won youths’ respect. At one point, he prevented a bloody war with a simple three-way phone call.

  “He took the kids out of the street, and took them to a church and showed them the different kinds of opportunities they could have. They went camping, they went to parks, they did theater,” says Oscar Sanchez, Alex’s brother. “They were getting an alternative to the traditional gang life of violence.”

  Alex also began to politicize the youths. In workshops and meetings he held at the Immanuel Presbyterian church, he brought in civil rights attorneys to educate the youths on their rights with police stops. Homies Unidos’ efforts were bearing fruit in moving gang members off the streets. They partnered with a powerful new network of gang peacemakers across the city that included many veterans of the post-rebellion peace work.

  So in 1999, Rampart CRASH cops began regularly harrassing Sanchez and his youths. Police called Homies’ peace efforts a front for the creation of a “super-gang,” and increased their surveillance. “They would target everyone who came to the meetings,” says Silvia Beltran, then a legislative aide to Tom Hayden. They followed Homies members and beat them. “At one point they came and asked the church leaders if they could come and spy on the meetings that the group had,” Beltran says. “The pastor said no.”

  The cops tried to falsely pin an MS drive-by murder of an 18th Streeter on a fourteen-year-old who had been at a Homies meeting, and Sanchez agreed to testify on behalf of the teen. “At that point,” Oscar says, “the cops really started targeting him, telling him that they were gonna arrest him, that they were gonna finish Homies Unidos one by one.”

  When Hayden came to the Immanuel Presbyterian to chair a State Senate investigation into police harassment and brutality, with Sanchez as the star witness, CRASH cops stormed in and searched the crowd for Sanchez. As it happened, Alex was late, walking in after Hayden had dispensed with the cops. He stepped forward to give his testimony to a shocked panel and audience. “I told them that they saw firsthand what we go through every day,” Alex says. Before long, he understood how high the stakes were. The cops put a message on the street for him: Homies Unidos had six months to die.

  There was also the threat of INS deportation hanging over him. Special Order 40, a Los Angeles executive order, had forbidden police intervention in immigration cases. But as the riots had demonstrated, police suspended the law at will. Police and immigration officials knew that if Homies leaders were deported, they would certainly end up dead in San Salvador, either at the hands of the right-wing death squads or the gang leadership. The death squads were known to eliminate criminal deportees, peacemaker or not, and the transnational gangs were directly threatened by Homies Unidos’ peace efforts in Los Angeles and San Salvador. Five members of Homies Unidos had been deported to El Salvador—and all five were murdered, under mysterious circumstances.

  Hayden brought Homies Unidos leaders to meet with INS officials and Salvadoran government officials, including San Salvador’s mayor and police chief, to seek permanent visas, so that they could organize without fear of being deported. “[The INS] gives visas to undocumented people who are informants and spies for the police, so why not a peacemaker?” says Hayden. The San Salvador police chief confirmed that Sanchez’s life would be in grave danger if he was deported. But the INS refused.

  In January 2000, CRASH officers arrested Sanchez and turned him over to the INS, in blatant disregard of Special Order 40. Sanchez says that the police had no charges; he was arrested, simply to be handed to the INS. “I still have the pink slip [given to him at the police station] that says, ‘Deportation proceedings,’ ” Sanchez says.

  When hip-hop activists came to Los Angeles to demonstrate at the Democratic Party Convention in the middle of August 2000, Sanchez—who had spent so much of his life behind bars and was now trying now to do something positive with his life for the sake of so many others—was locked in an acrid, overheated, filthy INS Detention Facility at Terminal Island, awaiting his deportation hearing.

  Our Streets

  Two weeks before, in Philadelphia, hip-hop activists joined the network of protestors to shut down the business district on the first day of the Republican Convention. Dozens of tightly organized groups roamed through downtown intersections, waving pickets that described their causes—workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, environment, corporate globalization, prisons, racial profiling. “Whose streets?” they chanted. “Our streets!”

  On one highway offramp near the INS offices, three hundred hip-hop activists—half of them of color—faced down rows of riot cops and INS police. As the protestors and the cops stared across the divide at each other, the chant became: “This is what democracy looks like!” In the afternoon, the scene turned uglier, with horsebacked cops beating and arresting hundreds. By twilight, on the deserted Ben Franklin Parkway, a few abandoned cop cruisers sat in the middle of the street—tires deflated, paint-bomb-splattered, with FUCK THE POLICE tagged across them.

  In Los Angeles, the activists moved into an unused former swap meet building across the street from MacArthur Park, at the edge of the Rampart Division, to prepare for the Democratic National Convention and set up a “Convergence Center.” Ten cops stopped in for an impromptu warrantless search. Then they retreated to a rented apartment behind the Center, set up their surveillance equipment, and every once in a while, sent a ghetto bird to hover over the building. Although MacArthur Park was known as one of the city’s hottest drug trafficking centers, it had taken the arrival of tens of thousands of DNC protestors for the LAPD to beef up patrols in the neighborhood.

  Cops handed out jaywalking tickets. They wrote down license plate numbers of the cars in the parking lot. When a young activist posted her address on a website offering help to out-of-towners looking for housing, the cops raided her house. On Monday night, police pulled the plug in the middle of a Rage Against The Machine and Ozomatli concert outside the Staples Convention Center, setting off a mini-riot. Police fired tear gas and gave orders to disperse as kids screamed, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

  A few days later, marchers passed through the heart of the Pico-Union barrio. Dominique Nisperos, a Filipina who had just turned seventeen, was there with her crew of seven from the Central Valley town of Stockton. They were white, Black, Mexican and Chinese, all sporting black T-shirts and baggy pants,
with black bandannas to cover their faces. A little wide-eyed and a little nervous, she said, “I hope I can do a good job here.”

  Moonshine was marching also, a tall, striking, dreadlocked sixteen-year-old Black girl from New York who had hitchhiked across the country to be there. After the demonstrations she would hitchhike back north. “I want to go up to the redwoods and live there for a while,” she said. “I don’t really have any plans, that’s my only plan.” On her T-shirt, she had scrawled, “Chant Down Babylon.” A button of a bereted Huey Newton, shotgun in hand, adorned her beat-up grey backpack.

  Silvia Beltran and Oscar Sanchez were there too, holding pickets adorned with a photo of a charismatic Latino and words that read, FREE ALEX SANCHEZ. Beltran and Sanchez were marching with thousands to demonstrate at the doorstep of the Rampart Division.

  Earlier, Tom Hayden, the veteran of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago, stood on the back of a flatbed truck in MacArthur Park, and told the crowd Alex Sanchez’s story. He said that Alex had begun a hunger strike to protest the prison conditions at Terminal Island, and had organized a hundred others to join him. The crowd roared. “This is a dangerous place,” he said. “Have good heart, have no fear.”

  By now, the CRASH units had been dismantled by LAPD. But part of the Democratic platform being touted a couple of miles away at the Staples Convention Center was a proposal to hire 10,000 new prosecutors and 50,000 new police to match the 100,000 added during the Clinton-Gore administration. Even as the Street Crime Units and CRASH squads had come under fire, there was no discussion of community-based solutions. But the problem, community leaders were saying, was not that the elite police units had been taken off the streets, it was that the peacemakers like Alex Sanchez had been had off the streets.

  A month later, Sanchez was released by a federal judge. Under pressure from Hayden’s office, the U.S. Attorney dropped its illegal reentry case. The INS continued to press its bid for deportation, and in 2002, a federal judge finally granted Sanchez political asylum in 2002, allowing him to apply for citizenship status. “Now I don’t have to run anymore,” Alex said.12

  But he also was aware that while he had been locked down at Terminal Island, gang homicides had again begun to skyrocket on the streets of Los Angeles, ending ten years of steep decline. The jobs were not there. The guns and the beefs still were. A new breed of gang members was coming up. The cycle was turning again.

  No Words

  The hip-hop activists who gathered at the most poignant protest that summer week in Los Angeles were not seeking a confrontation with police. Instead they had come to peacefully dramatize their causes: women’s issues, immigrant rights, sweatshop labor, transportation policy, educational access.

  They were organized like an army. At 9 A.M, on August 15, the sun already burning hard and clear, a thousand of them, almost all of color, gathered to march at the Belmont Learning Center, a new school in the largely Latino and Filipino neighborhood just west of downtown.

  The Belmont Learning Center had become a powerful symbol in the city. Located at the eastern edge of the Rampart Division at the midpoint between Echo Park, MacArthur Park, and downtown, in an impoverished inner city area, it was a desperately needed school. Kirti Baranwal, a twenty-five-year-old sixth-grade art teacher, said, “This is a high school that was built to reduce overcrowding. The reality is we do need new schools. Since 1978, L.A. Unified built eight new schools while enrollments increased by 10,000 people per year.”

  It had become the most expensive high school ever built in the nation, at a price tag of $200 million. But Belmont had hardly been an enlightened investment into an underserved community. Millions were blown on a bizarre plan to create retail commercial development on school property. Then parents and students were horrified to learn the new school had been built over abandoned oil wells. Soil testing showed high levels of toxicity, and experts warned of methane leaks. The site might literally blow up. So tens of millions more were spent on elaborate environmental mitigation. Outraged parents and students fought to have the school closed. Now the sparkling new three-story edifice was sitting completed but unused, a monument, they said, to corporate pollution and municipal profligacy.

  “The thing is,” Baranwal said, “people of color and working class people don’t need to be given choices that aren’t really choices. If the choice is between a school on a toxic site and no school, that’s not a very good choice. Our kids deserve real options.”

  So now the youths gathered to march toward downtown to make a statement. Some wore red-shirts emblazoned with the words: “Justice For Youth.” Some sported T-shirts and banners that proclaim their affiliations: African Student Union, MEChA, Samahang Pilipino, Asian Left Forum. Others proclaimed their passions: “The Ummah,” “Freestyle Fellowship,” “Chicana Nation.”

  A flatbed truck travelling in the outer lane kept the group out of the westbound lanes and moving up the hill. It was outfitted with graffiti murals, a turntable rig, a drum and conga set, and a bass amplifier. The rappers and musicians on the truck fed a steady stream of hip-hop beats, flipping DMX’s “Ruff Ryders Anthem” into a chant that went, “Who-ooa no-ooo. Toxic schools got to go-ooo!”

  The march had been organized by a collective of Latino student organizers, environmental justice activists, teachers, parents and students. The older youths were veterans of the Proposition 187 blowouts, the younger ones were moved by Proposition 21. They were asking for schools not jails, a return of affirmative action and an end to standardized testing.

  As in Chicago 1968, the battle lines were drawn between an aging white establishment and young radicals. On Monday night at the Staples Convention Center, outgoing two-term President Bill Clinton had drawn long ovations by trumpeting the longest economic expansion since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The bloody convention protests of 1968 had also come at the end of a seven-year economic expansion during an eight-year Democratic rule.

  And again as in 1968, only one who was young or poor or of color could quarrel with Clinton’s triumphalism. Before Clinton’s speech, failed presidential candidate Bill Bradley seemed to recognize as much. “You don’t have to give up your idealism to be successful in America. You don’t have to become complacent. To the contrary, you should be outraged over the undermining of our democracy, the poverty of so many American children, the absence of health care, the shame of racism,” he said. “To all these young people who believe that America can be just, I say never give up and never never sell out.”

  As the march proceeded toward the Ronald Reagan State Building, twenty cop cars drew up behind them, and black vans disgorged black-clad riot cops, armed with a rubber bullet guns, a baker’s dozen of silver tear-gas cannisters hanging from their shoulder vests. They ran alongside the march, stopped in baton-ready formation, and as the marchers continued down the street, they would break and jog ahead to the next block to reassemble.

  The march moved forward, passing in front of a war memorial. The rappers on the flatbed truck were freestyling over a fat bass line and drum snap, tumbling sheets of words throwing off history’s weight. Four young women began to dance, and spontaneous movement rippled up and down the march line. Now the chant was a joyous, middle-finger salute to the cops: “This is how we protest—nonviolent!” When they arrived in front of the State Building, these daughters and sons of the revolution—to whom so much had been given, from whom so much had been stolen—stopped and turned to face the offices above.

  They united in a single defiant gesture. They stopped the march. They stopped the music. They bowed their heads, and against a granite sky in the filling silence of the midday city, a thousand proud fists rose into the air.

  Tomorrow is the question.

  Democratic Convention, 2000.

  Photo © Peter Holderness

  Appendix

  Words, Images and Sounds: A Selected Resource Guide

  LOOP 1. Babylon Is Burning: 1968–1977.

  1. Necropolis
: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment.

  Word

  Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

  Caro, Robert. The Power Broker. New York: Knopf, 1974.

  Cowan, Paul. “On a Very Tense Frontier: Street-Fighting in the Bronx.” In The Village Voice, June 22, 1972.

  DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.

  Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx. Robert Jensen, project curator. New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1980.

  Jackson, Reggie, with Mike Lupica. Reggie: The Autobiography. New York: Villard, 1984.

  Jonnes, Jill. “We’re Still Here”: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. Reprinted in 2003 as South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. New York City: Fordham University Press, 2002.

  Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

  Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997.

  The South Bronx: A Plan for Revitalization. Report prepared by the Office of the Mayor, Office of the Bronx Borough President, Department of City Planning, Office of Economic Development, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Housing Preservation and Development. December 1977.

  Wallace, Deborah and Rodrick. A Plague on Your Houses. New York: Verso Books, 1998.

  Vergara, Camilo José. The New American Ghetto. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

  Image

  CBS Reports: The Fire Next Door. Aired March 22, 1977. Viewable at the Museum of Television and Radio.

  The Jeffersons. “Blackout.” Jack Shea, director, Richard B. Eckhaus, writer. Aired January 21, 1978. Viewable at the Museum of Television and Radio.

 

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