An American Family
It was 1914. The Mexican Revolution had turned their world upside down. They made a momentous decision, a decision millions had made before them. They would move to America, to begin a new life.
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Cecil had taken a job at Sommers Drug Store as a delivery boy. (On his first delivery he hit the pharmacist’s car with his motorcycle. Always the extrovert, he was popular in school. He had the appetite of a zopilote, a buzzard, and managed to be first in line each Wednesday for the enchiladas. Occasionally he was given licks with a paddle for excessive fidgeting—jumping around, talking organizing—but they were nothing compared to his memory of Cecilio’s battery cable. In 1946, after a year and a half at Sidney Lanier High, Cecil and a group of friends quit school and joined the Navy.
Richard graduated from Lanier High and entered San Antonio College the year Cecil set sail for the Caribbean on his destroyer. On November 16, 1950, five months after the beginning of the Korean War, Richard joined the Air Force to become a pilot, thus continuing his lifelong love affair with aircraft. During the war he was stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, where he studied navigation after washing out of pilot training. He would stay in the service for twenty years, almost all of that time in the Strategic Air Command.
That Old Gang of Mine
As the years went by, Cecilio could feel the changes in his family. Mama Rose had learned in school to speak, write, and read English, but he had not. This knowledge increased her importance in the household far beyond the strictly maternal role of women in the village. It meant that she, not he, was the emissary to downtown San Antonio, the purchaser, the interpreter of laws and forms, the person who dealt with city officials. To make extra money, she began working in the house as a seamstress, and during the pecan season she organized a group of women to shell pecans in the back yard. Cecilio would hand over his money, and Rose would draw up the family budget. A family pattern had changed in one generation. Families of Pedro’s generation mostly kept to the old customs, because they provided a familiar comfort in a strange land: the extended family close by, retaining the Mexican language, food, religious rituals, and child-rearing customs. Such concepts as coed schools and freedom for young daughters were directly opposed to every precept of moral, upright living brought by the first-generation male from Mexico. In barrio homes like Cecilio and Rose Martínez’s one could find all degrees of adjustment to the new or clinging to the old, but each family, some faintly, some pronouncedly, had embraced America.
In World War II, battalions of sons and husbands left the West Side to fight for an America most knew little about. Their departure loosened some of the strongest bonds to the old village life. Almost overnight, bars and dime-a-dance halls opened along Guadalupe and El Paso streets, filled with part-time pimps, raunchy music, and soldiers lured to the West Side by barrack tales of easy women. During these fevered years the layers of innocence and isolation were peeled away from El West Side like the skin of an onion.
For the first time, women left their young children with an older son or daughter and went to seek the good times on Guadalupe. The promise of escape beckoned them, a short hitchhike to an illusionary heaven far away from the cramped apartments, poverty, demanding children, and loneliness. The ancianos, the elders, noted what was happening and clucked their tongues: “She is going around loose, like a burro without a rope. She is queen of the cattle bins. She says she has a good family, but her house is filthy.” A verse of a corrido, a ballad about barrio life sung at the time by conjunto bands, told of the momentous change:
Even my old woman has changed on me—
She wears a bobtailed dress of silk,
Goes about painted like a piñata,
And goes all night to the dancing hall.
I’m going back to Michoacán—
As a parting memory I leave the old woman
To see if someone else wants to burden himself.
There were always flowers in the barrio during the forties, flowers for funerals and from lovers, flowers to help the ones left behind to forget the war, and flowers for the husbands and sons who disappeared, leaving only their names on headstones. Since ancient times, flowers had held religious meaning for Latinos, symbolizing the passing of life: from the seed which is nothing, comes the resurrection, the flower. The old life, the seed, must die for the new life to come.
The boys too young to go to war went to work racking balls in pool halls, selling newspapers, shining shoes, setting pins in bowling alleys, or selling flowers at San Fernando Cemetery, wiping the cans clean and reselling them to florists. For them, also, the street life became an escape and a search for identity. In the tradition-laden barrio the riptide of change was eroding the foundations of the family, which was the foundation of the barrio itself.
One of the results of this wartime upheaval, of the loosening of family ties and the absence of fathers, was the emergence of gangs on the West Side: kids with hard dead looks, thin mustaches, and pointed tangerine shoes, street-wise kids who had grown into manhood with pompadours and arms engraved with scars or tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of serpents, skulls, or the pachuco cross with three dots representing the Holy Trinity. Idleness seemed to strop their anger. Each gang had its own slang, rules, nicknames, and girlfriends. There were complex rituals and alliances: the Espiga gang warred with the Riverside boys, and the Red Light and Cassiano gangs had a temporary truce with the Lake gang that claimed Elmendorf Lake as its turf. The oldest barrio gangs—the Alto and Ghost Town groups—had many subgroups, like the San Patricio Alley boys and the Roy’s Drive In crowd.
Each gang fought to be the most feared. Each established its own territory, using a railroad track, creek, street, or park as its particular border. The Tripa gang headquartered near the packinghouses, the Las Palmas gang at the shopping center of the same name, and the El Con gang at a grocery store on El Paso Street that had a huge ice cream cone sign. Barrio residents had only to read the walls to learn what gang held that turf and who its leaders were. First would appear a member’s name or nickname; then the gang name itself, sometimes with C/S for con safos (the same to you) or rifan (the best or the toughest); and then thirteen dots, the letter M, or C13M (all referring to marijuana, M being the thirteenth letter of the alphabet). This gang graffiti would appear on the walls of rest rooms, bus stops, schools, housing projects, phone booths, dance halls, and neighborhood garages.
There was no specific type of gang member. They were young men from thirteen to twenty-one who hungered for status and recognition or wanted to prove themselves as men in the same way their older brothers had. Usually they drifted together naturally, seeking the support that their schools, homes, and churches had failed to provide. They gathered to drink, steal, fight, vandalize, and buy drugs. They were curbstone experts on sex (“She’s bowlegged; I bet she’s done it already”). They embodied the celebrated Mexican machismo in which sex was viewed as aggression, but behind this attitude usually lurked feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, and insufficiency. The favorite weapon of the gangs was the switchblade knife; it was much more macho than a pistol because you had to face your enemy up close, perhaps to catch his blood, or he yours. In rumbles, gang members fought with bicycle chains, clubs, baseball bats, weighted pool cues, and zip guns.
Only the kids trafficking in narcotics used guns in the early days of the gangs. They would deliver a rubber-band-wrapped bundle of 25 marijuana joints to the Cinco de Mayo or Villa Rosa Bar to be sold for $5; or a “finger stall,” a balloon, prophylactic, or rubber finger-protector filled with heroin. Heroin was the preferred drug to sell: it was more lucrative and easier to get rid of in case of trouble. They sold all four colors: gray, white, brown, and pinkish. Brown caused an intense itching sensation at first. White had the longest-lasting effect. But an old shot-in-the-arm junkie who was coming down—eyes watering, yawning, nose running—who brought out his eyedropper and needle and, if not a tablespoon, a soda-pop bottle cap, who never had his piece of cotton filter and had to scrape a small amount of fiber from the tongue of his shoe—he preferred the gray. It hit the bloodstream with the flash-bang of a skyrocket, and suddenly the body no longer felt it had death’s fingerprints all over it. More than anything else, drugs ate away at the foundation of the barrio. They were the solvent, the seducer, the escape, the destroyer of the old ways.
In the fifties the “scorpions,” men feared for their sting and aggressive behavior, moved in and took over the heroin market. Edged out of the drug trade, kids nicknamed gasofas soon discovered a new craze, sniffing gas and lighter fluid. Others turned to shoplifting, fencing their goods at pawnshops along Commerce, Laredo, and Zarzamora streets.
While gangs occasionally warred over narcotics dealings, the main battles were territorial. The Dot and Circle gangs fought over Concepción Swimming Pool near the missions; second-generation Alto and Ghost Town gang members fought for control of Cassiano Park, and half a dozen gangs vied for the Elmendorf Lake turf. Gangs controlled whole neighborhoods. Playgrounds and school dances became battlegrounds. Boys wouldn’t date girls from certain neighborhoods for fear of being beaten, or if they did, they called ahead and told their girlfriends to have the door open. Neighborhood newcomers were harassed and often beaten if they refused to join the gang. Churches couldn’t hold night meetings. Darkness literally descended upon the barrio as the gangs continually knocked out the streetlights.
Who was to blame? Some in the community blamed the public housing authorities; the housing officials blamed the older barrio residents for tolerating the gangs; school authorities blamed the community centers for pampering the gang members; the centers blamed the schools for adding to the gangs’ numbers by expelling troublesome students. The police blamed the housing managers because most of their calls came from the projects; and the tenants of the projects blamed the police for using excessive force, the housing managers for being dictators, and the rest of the barrio for not minding its own business.
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