“You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark”

On the streets of southwest Houston, violent gangs are out of control, dealing drugs, robbing businesses, and protecting their turf at all costs. For one longtime member, each day comes down to two simple questions: Will I have to kill? Will I be killed?

by Skip Hollandsworth

December 2006

(Page 3 of 5)

Swinglesville began changing complexions in the early eighties for two reasons: A state law banned owners of apartment complexes from renting only to adults with no children, and the oil bust caused Houston’s economy to collapse. The young singles who lost their jobs moved away, and there were no new groups of young singles arriving to replace them. Rents plummeted, and poorer families began moving in.

It wasn’t long before the gangs also began appearing at the apartment complexes. Black gangs such as the Braeswood Boys and 59 Bounty Hunters were formed in the mostly African American apartment complexes at the edge of the neighborhood. In the heart of the neighborhood were the Latino gangs. A group of males formed a gang called the Dark Angels and then renamed themselves the Southwest Cholos. One former member and some friends who didn’t like the way the Southwest Cholos were treating them started La Primera, choosing white as their color purely to set themselves off from the Cholos’ black. A group of teenagers of Central American descent, who had heard about an existing gang in the immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles called Mara Salvatrucha, began calling themselves the Houston Mara Salvatruchans. Other teenagers and young men started chapters of gangs, like Brown and Proud, that already existed in low-income neighborhoods in other parts of the city, and even others started chapters of gangs, like the Latin Kings, that their fathers had belonged to when they were kids.

Some gangs lasted, some did not. But there was never a shortage of recruits. “The neighborhood contained all the elements to create this huge gang culture,” says Charles Rotramel, the director of Youth Advocates, one of the few nonprofit organizations in the city that focuses on gang intervention. “For one thing, it was densely populated”—there are at least 100,000 residents packed into those apartments; some families have as many as eight people living in a two-bedroom apartment—“and there were no amenities at all for the kids because the entire community had been built for single adults who wanted to live it up. There were only a couple of schools, which immediately became overcrowded. There were only a couple of parks that I don’t even think had playgrounds. There were no youth athletic programs, no community centers, no Boy Scouts, no youth programs at churches—nothing. These kids were completely alienated.”

The kids were alienated for reasons other than just geography. “It’s a familiar story,” says Rotramel. “Usually, their fathers were gone, many of them in prison. The mothers were uninvolved in their lives either because they were working day and night for minimum wage or because they were dealing with their own problems—often drugs and alcohol—and they were simply too broken-down to care. Some of the kids had extended family members watching over them, but, as almost always happens, those family members had their own burdens. So it wasn’t long before you’d drive the streets of southwest Houston and see a lot of kids just hanging around. They were skipping school. They had no money, or what money they had was taken away from them by bigger kids or from neighborhood thugs, who also beat them up. And that’s where a gang came in. In this world, the gang provided them status and a sense of belonging. It provided them everything they could not find anywhere else.”

IN MANY WAYS, Alex is the classic gangbanger case study. He was born in 1985, shortly after his parents moved to Houston from El Salvador and ended up in one of the southwest apartment complexes. According to Alex, his parents’ marriage was stormy, and he often found himself alone, a barrio latchkey kid. “I was the smallest little f—er for my age in the hood,” he says. “So I knew I had to learn to box or I wasn’t going to make it.”

He apparently became an outstanding boxer (“boxer” is slang for “street fighter”)—so much so, he says, that he was sent off to a juvenile detention facility at the age of eight because some boy from another apartment complex had shouted, “F— you, you El Salvadoran chicken,” and Alex had gone after him with a metal rod.

He said he learned one very important lesson at the detention center: “Don’t back away from anyone. If you want to talk shit to me, I’m going to talk shit back. And if you want to hit me, you better think twice, because I’m going to fight dirty. There were a bunch of vatos at juvenile detention who would come up to me and say I would be a perfect boxer for their gang.”

He says he was sent to juvenile detention a second time for attacking a man who had hit his mother, and when he got out, he began hanging out on the southwest Houston streets with older members of Mara Salvatrucha. “I did everything I could to impress them,” he says. “I heard stories about their OGs [“Original Gangsters,” a term for leaders of the gang] and the crimes they did. I heard about the drive-bys against the gangs that hated us. The OGs were my heroes.”

Just after his eleventh birthday, a group of OGs led him behind a dumpster at one of the apartment complexes. They took off their shirts and proceeded to beat him for a minute or two. It was Alex’s initiation into Mara Salvatrucha—a process that the gangbangers call “clicking in.” Alex was not allowed to fight back or make any kind of sound. At the end of the beating, the OGs pulled him to his feet and hugged him.

“You’re one of us now,” they said. “You’re a homito.” A homeboy.

“And how did that make you feel?” I ask.

“Man, I was part of a family. I had someone always watching my back. That meant a lot to me. I’d never known what that felt like. For me, MS was the most important thing in my life. I lived for the gang, and I was going to die for the gang.”

Alex turned his room into a shrine to Mara Salvatrucha. He put the flag of El Salvador on one wall. On another wall, he put up a poster showing an angry young man, his body covered in tattoos, throwing down one of the MS-13 gang signs: His fingers twisted so that his right hand was in the shape of an M and his left hand in the shape of an S. Alex went through the neighborhood spray-painting “MS-13” on walls, and when he got a little money together, he bought his gang clothes.

For years, southwest Houston gangbangers, regardless of what gang they belong to, have been buying their clothes at the very same stores. They buy their Dickies pants either at a particular neighborhood grocery store or a nearby uniform shop. They buy their bandannas at a dollar store in the neighborhood, and they buy their cloth belts from a flea market at the intersection of Highway 59 and Westpark. At the Sharpstown Center, a nearby mall that has a notice on the front door that reads “Weapons Not Permitted on Premises,” they buy what they call Gangster Nikes: black or colored Nikes with white stripes. And while they are at the mall, they head down to the jewelry stores, usually Jewelry Dog USA or TV Jewelry, to check out the crosses and rosaries.

“I love being down with the blue,” he says of the clothes he wears. “All I do is talk blue. If I see a homeboy, he says, ‘Wassup, niggah?’ And I say, ‘Just blue rag hangin’, or ‘It’s going blue,’ or ‘Just throwing down the MS.’”

(For reasons I could never quite understand, all the Hispanic gangbangers greet a fellow homeboy by calling him “niggah.”)

“And if you see someone wearing another rag?” I ask.

“It’s an insult, a slap across my face. And when they drive past our apartment complex, where we do our chillin’, that’s f—ed, trying to make mess with us in our hood.”

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