Youth gangs in El Salvador
Banks, Gabrielle
The Tattooed Generation Salvadoran Children Bring Home American Gang Culture Gabrielle Banks ARTHA AND la Shadow are talking about sex. Martha is sitting beside me on the steps of...
...Grumpy defies his hushed countenance and picks up the slack...
...These placazos can be in English or Spanish...
...government steadily contributed to the war, providing over one billion dollars in military aid to the Salvadoran government between 1980 and 1992...
...Spread" is a prison cuisine made of boiled ramen noodles mixed with canned tuna...
...I find myself staring...
...Thus, young Salvadoran convicts with gang ties began an involuntary pilgrimage back to their childhood home...
...I spend the next ten days, at Magdaleno's request, following around various members of Homies Unidos to get an idea of the projects they are undertaking and the snags they tend to encounter...
...the clothes come from Homies...
...His lyrics reveal how violent spirits have blossomed from the seeds of war, exile, and neglect, offering a raw account of contemporary Salvadoran history...
...He was just beginning to believe he could beat the odds and increase his life expectancy...
...It is now a safe haven for rival gang members and a testing ground for social change...
...Every few minutes, he pulls a tiny rock wrapped in tin foil out of the canister and hands it off to someone in exchange for a sweaty bill...
...Black-ink tattos signified prison time, and the leftover death squads operated under the extremist philosophy that society needed to expunge itself of its "evils" at any cost...
...Initially, Homies established headquarters in a vacant garage at Negro's pad...
...Like el Shadow, la Huera has created programs for Homies that respond to the voids she experienced on the street...
...The volunteers shy away from hauling food boxes and bird-dogging donations on the bullhorn...
...Meanwhile, the U.S...
...Ringo is a veteran of the California prison system who now directs Homies Unidos...
...Now, along with his leaner, more reserved sidekick, Pansa recruits help from the Ministry of Education to set up educational programs for Homies...
...From there," he says, "they sent me here, to this prison," referring to El Salvador...
...The homeboys and homegirls attended trainings and received technical assistance in data collection at the UCA...
...If they evacuated, they would be homeless...
...We don't have money for rent or electricity, so it's even harder with a kid...
...She didn't know about reconnecting each layer of skin...
...She sets up shop on the sidewalk in the shade...
...While a roomful of off-duty policemen ogle at a parade of half-naked women on television, this family has their first solid meal of the day...
...in prison...
...The local media highlighted his tattoos as justification for the assault...
...While Fredy Cruger pays the fares, Pansa tells me how he convinced the government officials in a few minutes that Homies Unidos needed its new computer curriculum authorized—and, by the way, could he have a chalkboard...
...The furies of nature and humanity may never leave El Salvador completely at peace...
...For the most part, those who sought refuge in Los Angeles settled in poor neighborhoods and never fully adapted to the language and culture that surrounded them...
...I I NITIALLY, my El Salvador travel log ended here...
...T T HE PITCH went like this: "We have a problem...
...He couldn't stagger his meetings by a few hours, because any overlap—a latecomer or an early arrival— could catalyze gunfire...
...B B ULLET, Martha, and la Shadow are protagonists of a lesser-known chapter in Central American history...
...In one of his rap songs, Frutos de la guerra, Bullet dubs his generation "war fruit...
...At age nineteen, Bullet blew off the end of his arm with a homemade grenade while high on crack and alcohol...
...He thumbs a plastic film DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD canister in his jeans pocket every few seconds, then takes it out, puts it back, and counts a big wad of colones...
...After assorted arrests and incarcerations during his years in the United States, el Shadow is now in charge of violence prevention activities for Homies Unidos...
...Weasel and I are recruited to help relocate a family left stranded in a shelter in 28 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 Ciudad Delgado...
...At the same time, in the wake of the Rodney King unrest, the LAPD beefed up its efforts to stop gang violence...
...He reportedly preached nonviolence and gained a few con verts among the Cuban and Dominican prisoners in Dade County Jail...
...She dresses like a typical urban American high school student, though she has never set foot in the United States...
...Ringo quips that he got his high school diploma on the street, but he got his Ph.D...
...Along with several fellow homies, Ringo had just received a grant to study human relations at a local university...
...RoseAvila had just relocated to San Salvador with his family for some reflective down time, when he became intrigued with the idea of teaching and implementing techniques of nonviolence with the "war fruit" generation...
...I find it compelling that those who have spent time in the United States harken back nostalgically to years of processed, freeze-dried food behind bars...
...He is a helpless flirt, generous, effusive as a puppy dog, and simultaneously quick to ask for whatever he wants...
...When the war ended, the spirit of "zero tolerance" for crime and the criminalization of immigrants began to take hold in California...
...He still experiences back pain from time to time...
...The truck deposits us onto a grassy island surrounded by surging traffic...
...Pansa, like the others, looks a bit scary at first—with his handlebar mustache and sumo wrestler physique...
...He left El Salvador at five and returned via deportation at age twenty-five...
...Kids like this, Ringo tells me, get lots of mileage in their local clika by fabricating tales of adventure and adding to the LA gang lore...
...A roving six-person team of soldiers toting machine guns confronts me at the turn of a corner...
...The government has responded to the disaster by deploying military units to all neighborhoods of the city...
...Before we arrive at Homies' headquarters, Magdaleno calls to say he's stranded in Florida because of Hurricane Mitch...
...Most Homies members proudly introduce themselves by the nicknames they earned on the streets...
...Fl Fl L SHADOW is having a hard time getting his team to wake up and show up J promptly on the day I meet him in Modelo...
...While waiting in the customs line in San Salvador, I begin a conversation with a couple of deportees from my flight...
...Many also distrusted him as a Chicano, based on street and prison rivalries in the United States...
...In a matter of months, members of Homies Unidos were zapping news of their projects via e-mail to their sibling chapter in Los Angeles...
...Magdaleno a big man who combines a goofy sense of humor with brazen street smarts...
...You have to tell them the truth...
...In her gang-banging days, Huera saw several of her friends get shot and then sat with them in hospital waiting rooms for hours while they were systematically outtriaged by more traditionally dressed patients...
...I smile...
...The San Salvador headquarters appears mundanely professional, with a steady ebb and flow of visitors, a capable staff, but still no reliable car...
...Deportees like Weasel and Bullet get off the plane and have nowhere to go...
...He is not intimidated by the man's accent or lofty vocabulary...
...Painted eyebrows and all, she decided she wanted to be a doctor...
...Why do you look so offended...
...If the occupants refused to evacuate, social services would take away their kids...
...Instead, life lurched forward...
...In El Salvador, Ringo proudly explains, "spread" is often eaten on thick corn tortillas...
...Both times I flew on United Airlines from Los Angeles...
...I could never get Bullet to use condoms...
...Self-styled alchemists make crack in local labs...
...Homies has also offered English classes and workshops for craft trades like engraving and air-brushing, and job-training programs are next on the agenda...
...He takes me to see the huelepegas (glue sniffers) and crack addicts, and introduces me to the store owners in the city center whom he used to count on to give him food or money when he was strung out...
...In this new age of the global market, all the countries of Central America are officially at peace...
...Peace accords ended the civil war in 1992, but—because of widespread poverty and U.S...
...Now they have outstayed their welcome in the local, makeshift shelter...
...La Huera says that poverty and fear prevent most people in places like Ladina from ever approaching a clinic...
...La Huera also coordinates all health programs for Homies Unidos...
...Pansa teaches a weekly computer class back at the office...
...Because of him, la Shadow, one of his most loyal, accomplished students, is careerbound...
...They are purposely misspelled on walls and tattoos in a sort of defiant linguistic reappropriation...
...Like many deaths before it, the loss of POLITICS ABROAD Ringo had a ripple effect...
...She calls people by their placazos, badgering them, "Don't tell me you're scared...
...A soldier gazes back, eyebrows raised, as if to say, "This is for the public good...
...In hindsight, I wish it had been possible to pause the events of history at this moment as I have attempted to distill it above in words...
...Like Coca-Cola and Michael Jordan, our particular brand of violence has seeped into the fabric of El Salvador...
...He started hanging out with the locos informally, learning their placazos and their idiosyncrasies...
...They are casualties of a war that has not captured the same international attention as the devastating civil war their parents experienced in the 1980s...
...What they want is raw data...
...But almost instantly, INS policy toward Salvadorans changed...
...According to the neighborhoods their families settled in, many kids joined 18th Street, a Chicano gang, or la Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadoran gang, in search of protection, respect, identity, good times, and the comfort of family...
...Weasel, an iconoclastic punk rocker and tattoo artist from North Hollywood's Westside los Crazys, is now a trusted bookkeeper for Homies Unidos in San Salvador...
...She offers free clothes to those who roll up their sleeves and take her up on her dare...
...I was with him last night," she says...
...The mother, grandmother, three kids and Miguelito, their rooster, are huddled on a bedsheet in the corner of a giant warehouse...
...Pansa admits to a history of heavy drug use, violence, and general recklessness in Los Angeles and San Salvador before finding out about Homies Unidos...
...Martha's family, ironically, sent her back to prevent her from succumbing to the allure of LA gang culture...
...Meanwhile in the United States, political discourse has shifted from cold war terminology to the notion of a global marketplace...
...N THE TWO years since its inception, Homies Unidos has moved far beyond the grim set of statistics its founders gathered...
...In the early hours of May 16, 1999, Mario Sigfredo "Ringo" Rivera, the director of Homies Unidos, was shot three times in the chest by unknown assailants...
...What did you tell him...
...There is not much hope for poor kids in the postwar era, least of all from their deflated parents, many of whom sided with the leftist FMLN...
...he was also a master at conflict resolution...
...Most don't even have their childhood shots.They need tetanus shots to prevent infection if they get poked with foreign objects—like bullets or knives...
...In Ladino, Sapo is more popular than the ice cream man...
...Governor Pete Wilson, bolstered by a contagion of anti-immigrant sentiment, won reelection in 1994 by backing citizen initiatives that denied education, health care, and social services to the undocumented and put threetime offenders permanently behind bars...
...Gang members arrive home doubly disadvantaged: less fluent in Spanish and tradition, and more cocky about basic human rights that they expect will be protected...
...Those who don't have family reunite with their homeboys and homegirls from Virginia Street, Lennox, 18th Street, Mara Salvatrucha, and Crazy Riders...
...The younger, more roughed-up looking one perks up when I tell him I am in El Salvador to spend time with pandilleros, gangsters...
...Ringo was proud to be a homeboy...
...Frequent travelers of this route verify that it is quite common to be accompanied by deportees on daily commercial flights from LAX to San Salvador...
...Eighteenth Street and its rival Mara Salvatrucha reinitiated their battles on Salvadoran soil after the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deporting convicted gang members back to their native lands in the early 1990s...
...The organization's stated purpose is to stop violence and to provide services to at-risk and gang youth...
...After they settle into their new temporary home (a storage room at the Y), we drive them to the local restaurant, a tin shack with a dirt floor and benches...
...He says to me in English, "She reminds me of my mother...
...For lack of dishware, the homeboys mix it and spread it out on top of an unused garbage bag...
...It doesn't take long to discover that along with cholo-style dress, drugs, music, and weapons, gang life has been deported full-scale to El Salvador...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 25 POLITICS ABROAD (UCA's social scientists had found it impossible to acquire trust or truthful responses from wary pandilleros...
...Yet because it is a war between "have nots," the combat seems all the more bitter and senseless...
...What jars with the wholesome image is the dark blue scrawl on the concave part of her chin...
...But most active gangsters today have never left El Salvador...
...Weasel was scared by reports he had heard—underground mumblings about rightwing vigilantes...
...Homies encourages gang members to abandon the drugs and violence but not their pride, status, or identity...
...If you didn't encounter la sombra negra, you certainly couldn't escape the pervasive scorn Salvadorans retain towards the tattooed generation...
...B B ACK AT THE Homies office, Ringo is hosting a Spanish filmmaker who wants to make a documentary on gang violence...
...Those who have lived in Los Angeles are venerated as a new tier of gang nobility...
...It was like out of the blue...
...El Shadow, Negro, Spike, and Feo plan to survey a random sampling of their neighbors in highcrime areas, to ask whether they have seen violence and whether they are willing to be part of the solution...
...A few days later, la Huera ("Blondie") invites me along with her to see the Homies' immunization campaign in Ladina—a dusty alleyway in the heart of 18th Street turf...
...They are unfamiliar with Salvadoran culture, many don't speak much Span 24 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 ish, their educations are stunted, and their parents and even their young children live in exile...
...Some refugees went to neighboring Honduras, but a large percentage fled to Los Angeles and other U.S...
...Recently, she has taken an interest in computers and spends hours, body motionless, fingers clicking away, at the terminal of an ancient Mac II at an office in this building complex...
...Bullet darts over to where the young women are chatting and lifts the baby out of Martha's lap with one and a half arms...
...La Shadow recently survived a wound inflicted by a rival gang—a gunshot to the breast that ripped downward through her internal organs...
...The nursing school supplies the medicine free of charge...
...If his body had not been covered in tattoos, Bullet says, he would have been tended to right away and his arm could have been saved...
...Parents worked long hours at minimum-wage jobs and spent little time at home with their families...
...Most homies, including the current leaders, Weasel and Pansa Loca, have continued their projects and maintained their resolve...
...with leaders from UNICEF and two dozen other agencies...
...When I ask, she shows me, nonchalantly, the scar near her navel where a catheter was attached for several months to hold her excrement...
...A few gangsters took interest, and they began to work on spreading the word...
...That afternoon a flatbed full of young YMCA volunteers swings by the Homies office to pick up Weasel, Grumpy, and me to help collect food and supplies for the victims of the hurricane...
...Consequently, some of the worst casualties result from amateur weapons...
...Pregnancy is a moot point...
...Martha asks...
...on behalf of Save the Children (USA), along ' Magdaleno is a charismatic Chicano activist with thirty years of human rights organizing under his belt...
...The small apartment-turned-office sits on neutral turf in the suburban hills of La Cima...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 29...
...But back when domino theory was the vanguard, the United States forwarded over a billion dollars to the tiny nation of El Salvador to help stop a peasant uprising...
...His uncle, who looks at least fifty, is hooked on crack...
...What remains of Bullet's injury is a poorly healed, bony stub a few inches below his elbow—evidence of the hatchety treatment he says gang members receive in public hospitals...
...This neighborhood, which borders on a polluted ravine, is Mara Salvatrucha turf...
...My man keeps saying he wants to have a little girl...
...I'd heard stories that they kill people like me...
...As soon as we drop him off, Ringo tells me that this kid must have spent his gang years in El Salvador and then dropped out of gang life in the United States...
...They racked up arrests, criminal records, and prison time...
...By the end of the day, Huera and her team have immunized thirtythree people and given away all the clothes...
...When I met him, years later, he was the executive director of the Cesar Chavez Foundation and I was a field organizer for the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO...
...Shot me down here to El Salvador," he tells me...
...Last summer, en route to an international violence prevention conference in Portugal, el Shadow was detained for a month in Florida on a mistaken weapons charge...
...Many of these reluctant voyagers have not set foot in El Salvador since they were small children, and will begin their new lives homeless, friendless, and jobless...
...The Tattooed Generation Salvadoran Children Bring Home American Gang Culture Gabrielle Banks ARTHA AND la Shadow are talking about sex...
...dealers push it widely and openly in the face of law enforcement who are otherwise occupied rounding up violent criminals...
...Some succumbed, some are recovering, a few ended up in prison...
...I was getting the shot," she says, referring to the Depo Provera injection...
...El Shadow has his share of bullet holes in his belly...
...All spellings have been retained in this article...
...Cars whiz by...
...The family we meet evacuated—but they have no relatives to take them in...
...Weasel and Grumpy are old prison buddies from California...
...A wall of loose mud was hovering above a group of already tenuous tin houses, the YMCA volunteer explains...
...Are you taking pills...
...A car with tinted windows drives by and I watch Sapo exchange money for goods...
...It's easy to lose morale, but Shadow is persistent...
...Having a kid is really hard for us now...
...I go with him by minibus to Feo's place in San Marcos, a muddy, marginalized community in the hills...
...Throughout the expatriate Salvadoran community, relatives gathered news of a death squad called la sombra negra, or Black Shadow, that preyed on tattoed kids...
...Whether or not it was our leaders' intention, U.S.-trained death squads killed civilians by the thousands, and then the U.S...
...Feo is pulling on a pair of wet slacks his sister washed and hung up on the clothesline for him late last night...
...Ringo and I trudge in, drenched in the span of a four-second walk from the taxi outside...
...He died outside Hospital Zacamil in San Salvador, where health workers allegedly refused to admit him for treatment...
...Both he and Martha grew up in Los Angeles before returning to El Salvador a few years ago...
...The gangs decided to work together— though independently at first—to conduct a survey of gang members...
...In its day-to-day reality, Homies provides a safe place for young people with often dubious pasts to hang out together and to learn about the nuts and bolts of social change...
...Ringo was an admired leader and a rising star in mobilizing and uniting everyone from gangsters to diplomats...
...After completing a twenty-six-month sentence for weapons possession, he was released into INS custody and sent to a detention center in San Pedro...
...I run into Pansa one day as he pants up the back steps of the Route 5 bus, sweaty, with a green chalkboard, an eraser, and a box of POLITICS ABROAD chalk...
...Rose-Avila's vision was to refocus homies' natural organizing instincts with conflict resolution seminars and nonviolence trainings...
...He gazes at the grandma while she cuts her chicken at a slow, dignified pace...
...It says "Tiny Locos," the name of the mara, the gang she belongs to...
...He is a very convincing speaker, leaving several lawyers from the Foundation for the Study of Law and YMCA staffers in stunned silence as he effectively persuades them to alter the program of an upcoming forum on youth empowerment to include testimonials and videos on gang life...
...La Shadow is tall and dark, with wavy hair...
...Not everyone heard the news...
...Like many immigrant kids, Salvadorans felt a linguistic and cultural gap between themselves and their parents...
...Early donations and volunteer gang youth kept the project financially afloat...
...Third world gangs, unlike their "developed" counterparts, often lack the proper equipment for drive-by shootings and other forms of urban warfare...
...But you can't just get up and tell them what gang members are like...
...With guts and instinct and no medical training, la Huera began performing street surgeries— removing bullets, soaking wounds with rubbing alcohol, and sewing them up with thread and needle...
...Their neighborhoods were already war zones, divided up and marked with graffiti by the street gangs who claimed their ownership...
...Rival gang members began to recognize the parallel roots of their anger and frustration...
...If your tattoo is hidden and your employer finds out about it, you lose your job...
...Most deportees like Weasel and Bullet cannot legally return to the United States for five to twenty years...
...The war, exile, and loss broke many families apart...
...When the scruffy-looking homeboys begin to approach the open-air clinic, Sapo ("Toad"), a local boy, catches on and starts yelling at people to put down their crack pipes and come over and get a shot...
...Martha is sitting beside me on the steps of a suburban apartment complex in San Salvador with her fourmonthold baby girl in her lap...
...La Shadow sits across from us in a lawn chair, gazing into a pocket mirror and dabbing on fresh lipstick...
...They learned about sex, drugs, and violence...
...Ringo meets me at the gate, and I tell him about the encounter...
...El Shadow's new haircut reveals a blue smudge behind his ear covering up an outdated tattoo...
...Most deportees aren't kids anymore, but El Salvador offers them few adult options...
...Rose-Avila applied the technique Fred Ross used to organize a skeptical young Cesar Chavez in the 1950s: he encouraged gang members to begin with data collection...
...They started sporting baggy clothes...
...Some Homies members affiliate with political or religious groups, but none of these connections are uniform across the membership...
...Homies Unidos members struggled to resist the lure of alcohol, drugs, and violence...
...But through the efforts of Homies Unidos, a growing number of disenfranchised youth are grappling with renewed hope...
...He organized farm workers with Cesar Chavez, he headed the Peace Corps in Guatemala and Nicaragua during the turbulent war years, and later directed the West Coast Amnesty International campaign to end the death penalty in the United States...
...In essence, they were no longer "refugees," and, as mere "immigrants," they were more likely to be deported...
...Federal immigration policy promoted immediate deportation of inner-city refugees who had acquired, arguably, the best fluency in survival warfare...
...Nah...
...It was months before Negro—the gang veteran who eventually became Homies Unidos' first president—would tell him his real name...
...In the course of the civil war, an estimated seventy-five thousand Salvadorans (mostly civilians) died, and over one million fled the country...
...deportation of refugee felons—the level of street violence in El Salvador has risen dramatically...
...GABRIELLE BANKS is a writer based in San Francisco, California...
...They met and fell in love on the streets of San Salvador...
...At first, she had poor thread choice...
...He offers the pimply-faced kid a ride...
...In the course of the next few months, under the guidance of Rose-Avila, Homies Unidos was born...
...My first day in town, to the sound 26 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 of the hurricane's pummelling rain, the homies treat me to a communal lunch of "spread" with twelve members from five different gangs...
...cities...
...On our visit to Ladina, la Huera rides in the back of a pickup truck with two homeboys, two uniformed nursing students, a box of medicine, and a box of second-hand clothes...
...I am taking a picture and she poses with her homegirls, giggling while she throws a gang sign—for old times' sake—in her Florence Nightingale uniform...
...both times uniformed INS officials guarded the walkway down to the plane...
...He seems to see no contradiction in the fact that today he's also helping his homegirl Huera distribute tetanus and rubella immunizations on the sidewalk where he runs his business...
...They would find out where you live, knock on your door, and drag you out and shoot you right there," Weasel says.(Human rights workers confirm la sombra negra's violent attacks, although they are not officially acknowledged by the government...
...Ringo keeps quiet while the twice-uprooted young man jabbers about his exploits...
...La Shadow smiles when Martha asks how it's going with her boyfriend...
...Bullet is now a street ambassador who translates the history and politics of la vida loca into rap lyrics...
...He masterminded the first joint meeting, luring active gang members from different neighborhoods over to his house with the promise of free food—several buckets of Pollo Campero (the Central American equivalent of KFC) and Cokes...
...Bullet belongs to 18th Street, a well-known Los Angeles street gang that has planted a seedling in El Salvador...
...Pansa Loca ("Crazy Belly"), an 18th Street veteran, partners up for his daily work with Fredy Cruger, a former rival from Mara Salvatrucha—unless Fredy sneaks off to see his new girlfriend...
...Ringo tries to convince him that it isn't enough just to highlight the problem...
...No one has seen or felt a military presence like this since the end of the war...
...Weasel has been living in exile for almost two years...
...Weasel brings along his spare mattress...
...Rumor has it he got his nickname because he moves so fast, not because he is quick with a trigger...
...Nothing...
...Drug peddling is a common alternative...
...Homies is nonpartisan and nonreligious, and it has no formal relationship with unions or other longstanding institutions of the Salvadoran left...
...POLITICS ABROAD M IN El Salvador at the invitation of my Rose-Avila agreed to sit on El Salvador's friend Magdaleno "Papa Bear" Rose-Avila, permanent committee to prevent gang violence who helped found Homies Unidos...
...You're going to design the questionnaire, analyze it, and explain it...
...Meanwhile, to the "war fruit" who never left El Salvador, gang life and gangspeak is cooler than Michael Jordan...
...They didn't have the time or resources to address their grief or nurture their children...
...Bullet was deported...
...at this point Homies is prepared to document solutions...
...And both times I learned that there were deportees on board...
...She now attends nursing school in San Salvador and teaches STD/HIV prevention to her peers and the community at large...
...Gang members initially viewed him as a foreigner and outsider of a different generation...
...Magdaleno Rose-Avila learned about gang proliferation in El Salvador in 1996 from Donna DeCesare, an Emmy-award winning photographer who had covered the war and was now intimately aware of its aftermath...
...Shadow can never have children...
...And then, while the streets of Los Angeles burst into a collective DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 23 POLITICS ABROAD rage following the Rodney King verdict, in their tropical homeland peace was declared...
...The Homies Unidos/UCA survey was eventually published in 1998 as a sleek 249-page paperback, which international journalists have used as a source of statistics on the new wave of gang culture...
...But then we stopped, and . . ." she trails off, stroking her daughter's hair...
...They are two of the most well-mannered, cordial people I've met...
...I I MADE TWO visits to El Salvador in 1998...
...In casual conversation, they will lift up a shirt or a cap to reveal scars on their bellies, backs, scalp, or hands...
...It was all about grabbing hold of their own destinies again...
...Inside the building complex, Martha's boyfriend, Bullet, is hanging out in the apartment that has been converted into the office of Homies Unidos, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) whose goal is to end youth violence in El Salvador...
...I can't have kids...
...He has great patience and tolerance behind an X-ray glare—a remnant of his hard time that wholly intimidated me when I first met him in January of 1998...
...Bullet's secret weapon is an electric smile, but he tends to scare off strangers because he has 22 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 POLITICS ABROAD the numbers 1 and 8 tattooed on his earlobes...
...The homies thought he was stupid, Magdaleno says, but he knew their weakness for junk food...
...government quietly opened its doors to a flood of refugees...
...He moves in jumps and starts as if pursued by an indecisive mob...
...This tattoo is not the only mark gang life has left on the willowy seventeen-year-old...
...The problem is people are ly ing about you to the media...
...Rose -Avila had to plan meetings with different gangs on different days...
...The irony stings: this is what refugee ambassadors have brought back from their fortuitous escape to the land of milk and honey, baseball and apple pie...
...But upon close examination, it is no longer possible for the United States to absolve itself of guilt for the culture of violence it exports...
...Many, like Bullet and la Shadow, suffer a new style of war wounds...
...Bullet is spindly and agile...
...They took my papers away...
...I thought I was a permanent resident, but not so permanent, you know...
...We carry their worldly belongings (a dozen plastic supermarket bags) into the back of the truck...
...The tattoos across his torso told part of the story...
...They earned tattoos as rites of passage...
...He got his computer training under a grant for at-risk youth...
...He couldn't say where he hung out or what gang he claimed...
...If you have a tattoo, many young people verify, you can't get a job...
...I ask Martha if kids here use protection...
...The University of Central America's (UCA) Institute of Public Opinion agreed to train the assembled crowd in the science of data collection, since their own attempts at assessing the scope of gang violence had backfired...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
