Always Running (3 page)

In East L.A. and in schools like Chicago’s Clemente were some of the nation’s highest drop-out rates. Youth unemployment hovered around 75 percent in the most neglected areas. And what of those who did everything right, got all the good grades and followed the “rules”? Camila, for example, had been an A student at Garfield High School (site of the 1988 movie
Stand and Deliver
) and was active in school affairs. But after we married, she applied for work and was told she didn’t know enough to get a basic 9 to 5 office job. She even had to go back to some classes to make up for the lack of schooling she received despite being one of the best students at Garfield! The fact the L.A. schools now give “warranties” only underscores the point.

With little productive to do, drug selling becomes a lucrative means of survival. A 10-year-old in Humboldt Park can make $80-$100 a day as a lookout for local dealers. The drug trade is business. It’s capitalism: Cutthroat, profit-motivated and expedient. Also, the values which drive gangs are linked to the control of markets, in a way similar to what has created borders between nations. In communities with limited resources like Humboldt Park and East L.A., sophisticated survival structures evolved, including gangs, out of the bone and sinew tossed up by this environment.

After Ramiro ran away, he failed to return home for another two weeks. I was so angry at him for leaving, I bought locks to keep him out. I kept a vigil at home to catch him should he sneak in to eat. But then I remembered what I had been through. I recalled how many institutions and people had failed my son—and now he was expected to rise above all this! Soon I spent every night he was gone driving around the streets, talking to the “boys” in their street-corner domains, making daily calls to the police. I placed handwritten notes in the basement which said it was okay for him to come back. I left food for him to get to. Suddenly every teenage Latino male looked like Ramiro.

With the help of some of his friends, I finally found Ramiro in a rundown barrio hovel and convinced him to come home. He agreed to obtain help in getting through some deep emotional and psychological problems—stemming in large part from an unstable childhood, including abuse he sustained as a kid from his stepfathers, one who was an alcoholic and another who regularly beat him. And I could not remove myself from being struck by the hammerhead of responsibility. A key factor was my relative lack of involvement in Ramiro’s life as I became increasingly active in politics and writing.

Although the best way to deal with one’s own children is to help construct the conditions that will ensure the free and healthy development of all, it’s also true you can’t be for all children if you can’t be for your own.

By mid-1991, Ramiro had undergone a few months in a psychiatric hospital and various counseling and family sessions that also involved bringing his mother in from L.A. We implemented an educational and employment plan, worked out with school officials, teachers and social workers (everyone who had dealings with him had to be involved, to get them on “our side” so to speak). I also learned a parent cannot just turn over a child to a school, a court, or hospital without stepping in at various times to insure his or her best interests are being met. My aim was to help Ramiro get through his teen-age years with a sense of empowerment and esteem, with what I call complete literacy: The ability to participate competently and confidently in any level of society one chooses.

There is an aspect of suicide in young people whose options have been cut off. They stand on street corners, flashing hand signs, inviting the bullets. It’s either
la torcida
or death: A warrior’s path, when even self-preservation is not at stake. And if they murder, the victims are usually the ones who look like them, the ones closest to who they are—the mirror reflections. They murder and they’re killing themselves, over and over.

At the same time, individual efforts must be linked with social ones. I tried to get Ramiro to understand the systematic nature of what was happening in the street which in effect made choices for him before he was born. The thing is, no matter what one does individually, in this setting, the dangers keep lurking around every corner.

A couple of examples helped Ramiro see the point. Not long ago, a few of his friends were picked up by police, who drove them around in a squad car. The police took them to a rival gang neighborhood. There they forced Ramiro’s friends to spray paint over the graffiti with their own insignias—as rival gang members watched—and then left them there to find their way home. It’s an old police practice.

A second incident involved the shooting death of a Dragon, a Puerto Rican teenager named Efrain, who Ramiro knew. Soon after, we happened to drive through a Latin Kings’ territory. The words “Efrain Rots” had been emblazoned on a wall. That night, Ramiro sat alone, intensely quiet, in the backyard, thinking about this for a long time.

Things between us, for now, are being dealt with day by day. Although Ramiro has gained a much more viable perspective on his place in the world, there are choices he has to make “not just once, but every time they come up.”

Meanwhile I’ve pursued writing this book—after a 10-year lapse. The writing first began when I was 15, but the urgency of the present predicament demands it finally see the light of day. This work is an argument for the reorganization of American society—not where a few benefit at the expense of the many, but where everyone has access to decent health care, clothing, food and housing, based on need, not whether they can afford them. It’s an indictment against the use of deadly force which has been the principal means this society uses against those it cannot accommodate (as I write this, Rodney King’s beating by the LAPD continues to play itself out throughout the country. And the Los Angeles
Daily News
in late October 1991 reported that the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had shot 57 people since the first of the year—about 80 percent were people of color, and a few were disabled or mentally ill; all of them were unarmed or shot in the back).

Criminality in this country is a class issue. Many of those warehoused in overcrowded prisons can be properly called “criminals of want,” those who’ve been deprived of the basic necessities of life and therefore forced into so-called criminal acts to survive. Many of them just don’t have the means to buy their “justice.” They are members of a social stratum which includes welfare mothers, housing project residents, immigrant families, the homeless and unemployed. This book is part of their story.

Although the work begins with my family’s trek from Mexico when I was a child and touches on our early years in Watts, it primarily covers the period from ages 12 until 18 when I became active in Las
Lomas
barrio.

This work is not fiction, yet there are people I don’t want hurt by having their names and stories made public. I’ve changed names and synthesized events and circumstances in keeping with the integrity of a literary, dramatic work, as an artist does in striving for that rare instance when, as a critic once said, “something of beauty collides with something of truth.”

The more we know, the more we owe. This is a responsibility I take seriously. My hope in producing this work is that perhaps there’s a thread to be found, a pattern or connection, a seed of apprehension herein, which can be of some use, no matter how slight, in helping to end the rising casualty count for the Ramiros of this world, as more and more communities come under the death grip of what we called “The Crazy Life.”

July 1992

“Cry, child, for those without tears have a grief which never ends.”—Mexican saying

T
HIS MEMORY BEGINS WITH
flight. A 1950s bondo-spackled Dodge surged through a driving rain, veering around the potholes and upturned tracks of the abandoned Red Line trains on Alameda. Mama was in the front seat. My father was at the wheel. My brother
Rano
and I sat on one end of the back seat; my sisters
Pata
and
Cuca
on the other. There was a space between the boys and girls to keep us apart.

“Amá, mira a Rano,”
a voice said for the tenth time from the back of the car. “He’s hitting me again.”

We fought all the time. My brother, especially, had it in for
La Pata—
thinking of Frankenstein, he called her “Anastein.” Her real name was Ana, but most of the time we went by the animal names Dad gave us at birth. I am
Grillo,
which means cricket.
Rano
stands for “rana,” the frog.
La Pata
is the duck and
Cuca
is short for
cucaracha:
cockroach.

The car seats came apart in strands. I looked out at the passing cars which seemed like ghosts with headlights rushing past the streaks of water on the glass. I was nine years old. As the rain fell, my mother cursed in Spanish intermixed with pleas to saints and
“la Santísima Madre de Dios.”
She argued with my father. Dad didn’t curse or raise his voice. He just stated the way things were.

“I’ll never go back to Mexico,” he said. “I’d rather starve here. You want to stay with me, it has to be in Los Angeles. Otherwise, go.”

This incited my mother to greater fits.

We were on the way to the Union train station in downtown L.A. We had our few belongings stuffed into the trunk and underneath our feet. I gently held on to one of the comic books Mama bought to keep us entertained. I had on my Sunday best clothes with chewed gum stuck in a coat pocket. It could have been Easter, but it was a weeping November. I don’t remember for sure why we were leaving. I just knew it was a special day. There was no fear or concern on my part. We were always moving. I looked at the newness of the comic book and felt some exhilaration of its feel in my hand. Mama had never bought us comic books before. It had to be a special day.

For months we had been pushed from one house to another, just Mama and us children. Mom and Dad had split up prior to this. We stayed at the homes of women my mom called
comadres,
with streams of children of their own. Some nights we slept in a car or in the living rooms of people we didn’t know. There were no shelters for homeless families. My mother tried to get us settled somewhere but all indications pointed to our going back to the land of her birth, to her red earth, her Mexico.

The family consisted of my father Alfonso, my mom Maria Estela, my older brother, José René, and my younger sisters, Ana Virginia and Gloria Estela. I recall my father with his wavy hair and clean-shaven face, his correct, upright and stubborn demeanor, in contrast to my mother who was heavy-set with Native features and thick straight hair, often laughing heartily, her eyes narrowed to slits, and sometimes crying from a deep tomb-like place with a sound like swallowing mud.

As we got closer to the Union station, Los Angeles loomed low and large, a city of odd construction, a good place to get lost in. I, however, would learn to hide in imaginative worlds—in books; in TV shows, where I picked up much of my English; in solitary play with mangled army men and crumpled toy trucks. I was so withdrawn it must have looked scary.

This is what I know: When I was two years old, our family left Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, for Los Angeles. My father was an educated man, unusual for our border town, a hunger city filled to the hills with cardboard hovels of former peasants, Indians and dusk-faced children. In those days, an educated man had to be careful about certain things—questioning authority, for example. Although the principal of a local high school, my father failed to succumb to the local chieftains who were linked to the national party which ruled Mexico, as one famous Latin American writer would later say, with a “perfect dictatorship.”

When Dad first became principal, there were no funds due to the massive bureaucratic maze he had to get through to get them. The woman he lived with then was an artist who helped raise money for the school by staging exhibitions. My father used his own money to pay for supplies and at one point had the iron fence around the school torn down and sold for scrap.

One year, Dad received an offer for a six-month study program for foreign teachers in Bloomington, Indiana. He liked it so much, he renewed it three times. By then, my father had married his secretary, my mother, after the artist left him. They had their first child, José René.

By the time my father returned, his enemies had mapped out a means to remove him—being a high school principal is a powerful position in a place like Ciudad Juárez. My father faced a pile of criminal charges, including the alleged stealing of school funds. Police arrived at the small room in the
vecindad
where Mama and Dad lived and escorted him to the city jail.

For months my father fought the charges. While he was locked up, they fed him scraps of food in a rusted steel can. They denied him visitors—Mama had to climb a section of prison wall and pick up 2-year-old José René so he could see his father. Finally, after a lengthy trial, my father was found innocent—but he no longer had his position as principal.

Dad became determined to escape to the United States. My mother, on the other hand, never wanted to leave Mexico; she did it to be with Dad.

Mama was one of two daughters in a family run by a heavy-drinking, wife-beating railroad worker and musician. My mother was the only one in her family to complete high school. Her brothers, Kiko and Rodolfo, often crossed the border to find work and came back with stories of love and brawls on the other side.

Their grandmother was a Tarahumara Indian who once walked down from the mountainous area in the state of Chihuahua where her people lived in seclusion for centuries. The Spanish never conquered them. But their grandmother never returned to her people. She eventually gave birth to my grandmother, Ana Acosta.

Ana’s first husband was a railroad worker during the Mexican Revolution; he lost his life when a tunnel exploded during a raid. They brought his remains in a shoebox-sized container. Ana was left alone with one son, while pregnant with a daughter. Lucita, the daughter, eventually died of convulsions at the age of four, and Manolo, the son, was later blinded after a bout with a deadly form of chicken pox which struck and killed many children in the area.