“We Get All Hyped Up. We Do a Drive-by.”
A report from the front lines of the San Antonio gang wars.
norma says: my nephews were nds i would like to purchase this mazine i used to live in the alazan apache courts one of my nephews were interviewed by a writer. my nephew is in prison sinse 1994 and should be coming home soon. thank you very much. (September 16th, 2010 at 3:09am)
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The SAPD maintains that there is no proof the story is true. The ND Chicks say their initiation is to get “rolled in” with a beating from female gang members. But none deny that willing girls get passed around among male gang members. “You really don’t know who had AIDS or not,” notes Marky, who says he has participated in threesomes and has “pulled trains”—lined up with several guys to take turns having sex with one girl. “Some of them be young—we call them Little Ho’s,” he says. “Sometimes we’ll say, ‘If you want to hang out with us, you got to have sex with us.’” Marky admits that some gang members rape girls, but the victims are always drunk or on drugs, so no one would believe them if they told. He adds that his gang, Damage, does not have an auxiliary girl gang. “We just play around by calling the girls who hang with us PODs,” he says. “Property of Damage.”
JIMMY YBARRA HAS LIVED HIS entire life at the Alazan Apache Courts and the Cassiano Homes, and he knows gang life intimately. A 33-year-old ex-convict and former heroin addict, Ybarra pledged his life to helping the kids in his neighborhood after he kicked his habit five years ago. He landed his first office job in 1990, as a community education specialist for the STEPS Project for high-risk substance abusers. He also supervises youth activities at the Alazan Apache Courts.
Ybarra spends much of his free time driving around the Courts keeping tabs on the teens, passing out condoms, encouraging kids to get free HIV tests at the clinic, and trying to persuade gang members to turn their lives around the way he did. “I hang out with them and try to calm them down when they want to fight or do a drive-by,” says Ybarra. “They laugh at me and tell me I’m old or a Jesus freak, but they don’t know that I’ve been through exactly what they have. It’s just that we used to use knives and bats—now they have guns.”
As Ybarra steers his Ford Escort through the West Side’s dark streets on a Friday night in August, he points out the abandoned house where he and his buddies used to shoot up heroin. The kids trust Ybarra and run up to the car to chat or say hello. “He’s always here to help us,” says Miracle, a fifteen-year-old former gang member, as she leans into the car. Ybarra has caught up with Miracle outside a teen dance sponsored by Inner City Development, a private organization devoted to helping kids. Still sweating and out of breath from dancing, Miracle squats on the curb and munches hungrily on a Snickers bar that Ybarra has handed her from a box on the back seat. The first two buttons of her jeans are undone to make way for her growing belly—she is five months’ pregnant.
In this world, the simple rituals of adolescence—going to a party, playing basketball—can turn deadly. Miracle’s boyfriend, who is the father of her baby and a gang member who lives at the Alazan Courts, just a few blocks away, did not attend the dance. “It’s too dangerous for him,” Miracle says. “There are a lot of other gangs here.”
Ybarra notices large groups of teenage boys walking around, looking drunk and surly. He talks Miracle and two girls from the Alazan Courts into accepting a ride home.
To Ybarra, the greatest tragedy of the gang wars is that Hispanics are killing other Hispanics. “These kids don’t remember the Chicano movement of the seventies,” he says. “They’ve never been taught the importance of La Raza, brother helping brother. When you don’t have any hope for the future, you fight among yourselves for what little you got. That’s what these kids think it takes to be a man. The gang is everything to them.
“Why should they work if welfare will provide them with everything they need just to lie around on their butts all day?” Ybarra says. “The way the system is set up has not really helped these people. It has hurt them in the long run.”
A few blocks from the Alazan Courts are the Cassiano Homes, known for the huge murals—colorful renditions of Aztec gods and modern-day heroes—painted by graffiti artists on the sides of the two-story buildings. One tells the story of twelve-year-old Jose Rodriguez, Jr., who was fatally shot in 1991 when he tried to quit a West Side gang. They boy had lived with his grandmother, who is depicted weeping beside his coffin.
One group of gangs under the Black Circle—including the LA Boyz and the West Side Posse—live at the Cassiano homes, the Billa Veramendi, and the San Juan Homes. But membership in the same alliance doesn’t preclude hostilities. In an effort to bring peace, the Good Samaritan Center, a community center adjacent to the Cassiano Homes, began a gang outreach program in the after-math of the much-publicized murder of the Rodriguez boy.
The program, called Youths-in-Conflict, is headed by three former gang members with master’s degrees in social work who hold weekly war councils with gang leaders from the three housing projects in an attempt to mediate differences. Mediation may include the time-honored tradition of a fair fight—one on one. “When we can convince the YICs to allow two individuals who have a disagreement to fight each other fair and square, rather than do drive-bys on each other, we’ve saved some lives,” explains Andy Hernandez, the director of the Good Samaritan Center.
On a broader scale, a coalition of San Antonio businesses, church leaders, and community activists held a gang summit last spring to try to get warring gang leaders to lay down their arms. It had only limited success: Four gang leaders from the West Side signed a peace pact, but they already got along. And the East Side gangs shunned the summit altogether.
The Good Samaritan Center serves as a neutral ground where gang members can get assistance with court cases and probation officers, tutoring, and even a job. “These kids have closed off so many options,” says Hernandez, 63. “When you have capped [shot] somebody, you have restricted yourself to staying with your gang in the area where they are strong. When these kids try to venture out somewhere on a city bus, they have to work out elaborate routes so they can stay out of another gang’s turf in order to stay alive.”
Police say violence in the area has decreased considerably over the past few months. “We have appealed to the leaders, who are extremely intelligent,” says Hernandez. “They are the surrogate parents for the gang members: They provide food and shelter; they protect them. A lot of gang members don’t live with their own families anymore in order to protect them from drive-bys.
“We show the leaders that there are alternatives to killing each other,” Hernandez says. “We take them out of a crowd where they feel they have to prove how tough they are and show them another way.”
Gang members who end up serving time in jail as adults often graduate to the toughest gang of all—the Mexican Mafia, or “La Eme,” a prison-based gang that controls drug sales in San Antonio. Joining the Mexican Mafia is equivalent to playing in the major leagues. Drive-bys become planned executions, and drug sales and racketeering replace auto theft and vandalism. Members are recruited in prison. Young street-gang members taking their first trip to the penitentiary often choose the hard-core gang lifestyle of the Mafia for the protection it offers in jail.
Usually, though, kids involved with gangs quit long before there is any temptation to join the Mafia. The fast life is not as alluring when they have children of their own to support. In May, Marky said he planned to quit gangs altogether.
“At middle school they had some counselors go over there and tell you what lie is and what jobs are good,” he said. “They talked about being a paramedic. That’s what I want to be. I know how a bullet is, and how it comes out. I’ve seen a lot of blood.” Since then, Marky has indeed quit Damage, he says, after falling out with its leader.
There are success stories of kids who have turned their lives around and left their days of drive-by shootings and stealing behind. In August the talk at the Alazan Courts was of a gang member who had joined the Marines. Jimmy Ybarra still fondly remembers the day a year ago when a lot of the Kings, one of the biggest gangs on the West Side, dropped their colors forever. “They just up and quit!” he says. “They said, ‘We are sick of it and we won’t do it anymore.’”
Many of the ids who are involved with gangs do not fit the profile of thuggish troublemakers who don’t have the brains or patience to make it in school. They can be the bright, popular kids or members of the football team. One eighteen-year-old former Kings member says he was an honor student and a junior varsity football and basketball player at Tafolla Middle School when he joined the gang his childhood friends belonged to. His life changed for the worse. “I got kicked out of school for fighting, and they sent me to Jefferson High School. Then they kicked me out over there because they thought I was the leader of the Kings there,” he says. “Every day in high school we skipped school, watched a movie, and got stoned. Now I realize I messed up.
“All the Kings stopped because we got kids now,” he says. “I don’t want to be a bum. It’s like a cycle. We get older and we grow out of it, but then our little brothers and cousins grow into it. I wish it were over, you know? It’s not worth it.”
On a sunny afternoon, Ybarra watches the kids playing basketball at the Alazan Apache Courts. As he lights a cigarette, he notices one fifteen-year-old get in the face of another and punch him in the head three times. Ybarra jogs over to break up the fight and learns that the kid who was taking the punches had been accused by two seven-year-old boys of touching their crotches while playing. The youth meting out the punishment is an uncle of one of the little boys—and an ND gang member. The wounded teenager walks off the court without a word, and the play continues.
Ybarra looks on as gang members share the basketball with younger kids, making lay-ups and fighting for rebounds. He watches the ND grab the ball and shoot. The little boys also watch him and move closer, mimicking his style.
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