Beyond the Stigma: Geography of an Identity
Alarcon, Cristian & Reguillo, Rossana
For six days they fled through the underbrush from the Salvadoran army, near the Honduran border. The families pushed on with the slowness of iguanas, having taken the worst of roads, taking...
...The official passed the papers to another functionary, who looked them over with a human rights observer...
...A man’s man, you know...
...His mother rocked his little brother...
...Cristian Alarcón teaches journalism at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Buenos Aires...
...I hadn’t been in touch with the gang, but in a few days some guys from the 18 in Soconantengo thought I was one of them...
...A Centaur gently pushed her with his rifle toward the immigration official...
...Years later, when rivals from the 18th Street Gang shot at him in Los Angeles, he felt the same way—“nothing, as if I had left my body...
...The crafty Jabón gave Fredi enough money to live with a certain luxury...
...Don’t get slick, muchacha...
...And Fredi defended him from the worst jokes, because in the end, he always loved him...
...Nayeli made the first move...
...Veracruz was fun...
...El Jabón caught wind of this and kept Fredi very busy...
...If they made noise, the soldiers’ dogs would hear them...
...That night, in the tunnel beneath the train tracks in Guadalajara, Fredi was scared...
...Since there had been a dengue outbreak in Guadalajara, it was believable that a cold could be a bad sign, and without further explanation he went out to the train tracks...
...When the sun came up, I didn’t feel anything anymore,” Fredi says...
...His homies, two Salvadorans and a Guatemalan, planned it...
...Green eyes, like mine, but less faded...
...From there we went with our own money to Mazatlán, far up north, but also near the water...
...Both decided they were fake, and she was taken out of line...
...There was no one more receptive, more sensible than a father aching over his son, jobless, illegal, and desperate...
...It was there that don Cato would sit in the mornings in front of a big fan and put an ice tray in front of his legs...
...it was January, and the little jacket he was wearing barely shielded him from the wind in that desert that seemed to have no end...
...But they got along, and so he ended up being sent to El Salvador with his haina...
...More shots followed, and a bullet went into don Ezequiel’s stomach...
...But the worst stretch still lay ahead, crossing into the United States...
...That’s why we’re carnales...
...The cacophony of gunshots, shouts, and unfollowed orders attracted the Centaurs...
...Psychologists looked over his tattoos, and his fingerprints appeared in a file marked “highly dangerous...
...Now we’re fucked, he thought to himself...
...His uncle got a job at the railroads and spent those months saving every penny for the trip north...
...She even opened franchises in the United States...
...We had to hire Mexican coyotes, who were some real assholes...
...Fredi knew that the more times he told them of his father dying on the mountain, the more he repeated that as a child, his uncles had been busy forging their future in the United States while paying him no attention—the happier the psychologists were and the sooner they would let him go...
...Amparito couldn’t forgive Fredi for dropping out of school...
...because her mom was deported...
...Robbing a 7-Eleven in Guadalajara is child’s play...
...We had to find those guys and give them what was coming to them...
...I told them over and over: ‘American citizen, American citizen.’ ” His uncle had gotten Fredi’s papers in order...
...He dreams of being released from prison and returning, with Nayeli and the boy, to MacArthur Park, the heart of Pico Union...
...he knew Fredi’s heart didn’t belong to him, as opposed to his other lieutenants, who would do anything for him...
...Fredi’s heart was in Pico Union and his Mara Salvatrucha, in the dream of raising Angelito in MacArthur Park...
...Fredi’s gun fired, throwing sparks...
...The homies are neighborhood, family, the primordial group, and the clearest sign of loyalty and permanence...
...The rest of his family stayed in the middle with others from the community, and with the baby...
...When la migra got Fredi, Subwoofer was sick with pneumonia...
...they gave him medical exams and tested his urine for drugs...
...They were so exhausted, they accepted the offer with gusto...
...The day I left L.A., I cried from pure sadness, from anger...
...They put Sapo in jail, they set Motroco free, and they sent me away in an airplane, with my hainita and Angelito, who was about to me born...
...American citizen...
...Everyone knew it was the safest place, thanks to the oral culture of migrations...
...With the gunshots Fredi cried at first...
...From Guadalajara, sir...
...Fredi felt as if Pico Union had exploded in a play of light, like when he met Nayeli and they went walking from the restaurant and watched the fireworks at Disneyland, all of it unreal, yet happening...
...He felt guilty, but nothing could make him leave the gang, not even if he had to face a great emptiness...
...She was tough with her compañeros, but with Fredi, she acted like a sweet mother...
...Fredi was 19, Nayeli, 16...
...I’m proud to say that because of my statement, they let Motroco go,” Fredi says...
...Pico Union was my neighborhood...
...Hands up, cabrones...
...He learned how to cope with this, how to fool psychologists and police officers, how to tell them what they wanted to hear...
...Ah, well, the truth is, no, sir...
...Fredi and Nayeli didn’t know any of the others, but they all went together into the tunnel to sleep...
...He took $200 from his wallet and gave it to Fredi...
...The months Fredi spent in Tecún Umán gave him the opportunity to have don Cato as a teacher...
...The family, which fed him and sent him to school, had been strong, but between caring for the cousin with Down syndrome and pestering Fredi not to drop out of school like his friends, his aunt lost her morale...
...We’ve been together for seven years and we have a son named Angel, who’s with his mom in the women’s prison...
...Even then, at six years old, Fredi was already very adept, he remembers...
...They split up, directed by his father and the other men...
...In the stories about narco-trafficking, those that appear daily in the Mexican press—“Narco: 300 Dead,” “Narco: 420 dead”—Fredi played his part...
...The Tijuana cartel was more sophisticated, the bastards: They married the daughters of the local bourgeoisie, and even the country club opened its doors to them...
...Do you have your papers...
...Patricia Estrada, sir...
...Some had criminal files opened and were sentenced...
...Fredi was scared when he arrived in San Salvador...
...Plus, the tattoos don’t lie...
...It’s been months since I’ve seen him...
...Fredi says...
...Fredi would have liked him to have been born in Pico Union, the immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles where he grew up...
...Everything ended up well, but Fredi’s journey remained unfinished...
...They looked for a hotel near the hospital and slept, like Angelito, for more than 12 hours in a row...
...El Jabón quickly adapted in La Consti, a neighborhood so tough, it is said, that the police cross themselves before entering...
...Angelito spent three days there recuperating from rotavirus...
...They let him know through an 18 member who crossed into MS territory to deliver the message...
...He quickly learned how to kill them, throwing a well-aimed stone from afar...
...His tactic, and his alone, was to hire locals and heap the white powder on them instead of drowning them in dollars...
...The official got pissed off and said, “We’ve got ourselves a lawyer...
...So small and fragile, she never complained even during the steepest stretches up the mountain path...
...They went out at night to the Tropicana, to the Nile, and Fredi’s green eyes were always a passport...
...Where are you from...
...Something of that sweetness was in his own mother, he says...
...The official himself told them, “Well, all right, while we look into this, you’ll go right away to the Red Cross...
...They surrounded the place and came in, guns blazing, while Fredi lay flat on his stomach...
...They’re a very strong signal that works like a passport or a birth certificate...
...Planning his exit wasn’t easy, since his scarce savings could only take him as far as Ciudad Hidalgo, and from there, he’d be on his own...
...The Boss had told him he had to leave Juárez, that things had turned very ugly, and that he, El Jabón, was causing problems...
...Fredi can’t remember how many “last jobs” he had to do for El Jabón...
...Don Cato, a Mexican, was from Tapachula, but had been living in Guatemala for a while...
...From Honduras, sir, but I have my papers, look...
...That’s how I got to San Salvador, with $120, my pregnant haina, and some directions my aunt Amparito wrote for me on a napkin, which she had a neighbor woman deliver to me...
...He learned in that first test that you can suddenly be left alone, and that even if they lock up or kill a homie, there will be another homie, another brother, in your own clique or in another, who will watch your back...
...They sent Fredi with an uncle to the highest part of the slope, and his sister with an aunt, a very brave woman from the Frente, to the precipice below...
...But it earned him nothing in that time of deportations...
...An intelligent guy, he found a way to hide himself among the toughest...
...Others like him had to report three times a week to a police station...
...Like a good jenja, he didn’t have many tattoos, and it was easy to fool la migra...
...After 24 hours of knowing him, El Jabón said to Fredi, “Well, carnal, when are you going to leave the Salvapussies and join the real men...
...The soldiers, who are some real dumb asses, Fredi said, wouldn’t expect that...
...They admitted Angelito without major questioning, and the doctor carefully looked over the boy and verified the dehydration...
...Amparito had a very successful business...
...The survivors reunited in a little valley near Honduras...
...The hardest thing was knowing his body didn’t belong to him...
...There were very few of us, and my uncles were crying...
...Late-night drivers came in and out with their Big Bites, Pepsis, and peanuts dusted with chile...
...Fredi likes to jump back in time to the first of the borders he stealthily approached: the one near Tecún Umán, the last stop in Guatemala before crossing over to Ciudad Hidalgo, on the Mexican side...
...Second, Nayeli never stopped talking, even if the jenja himself told her to...
...His friend from the gang had named his cousin El Subwoofer, for the sound he made when he whined...
...The soldiers opened fire and killed him, and that’s when the massacre began,” Fredi says, now locked up and harassed by a security guard, who grudgingly trades more visiting time for a cigarette and our attention to a short lecture...
...His training began with hunting scorpions...
...After recovering the stolen goods, Fredi went to Carl’s, a local burger joint, with his homie Pedro, who later died, but that’s another story...
...They separated him and took him with the young woman and three others...
...Don Ezequiel didn’t die, but his wounds were enough to press serious charges: gang activities with aggravated intent to kill...
...They never guessed that don Ezequiel, an old guardian of the barrio, a policeman as poor as they were, would show up, ready to defend the honor of his badge...
...When finally Angelito went to sleep, exhausted by diarrhea, they heard loud voices...
...Now that I’m talking about it, it seems easy, but within two years they killed my whole family, and I smiled playing in the waves or looking for dough for my aunt’s pupusas...
...The jenja gave the order to attack the 18’s hideout, and Fredi, who since the age of six was very adept, executed it perfectly...
...He looked for MS homies and eventually ran into some...
...If the Tijuana guys go to bed in silk sheets, we recruit the scum of the earth...
...The M-16 is, in Mexico, a considerable aggravation...
...They didn’t let him see the killing...
...For months El Jabón worked to soften up the local police, establishing links with local gangs and the barrio dealers...
...The worst of his imprisonments was when he was deported, after the cops saw his tattoos and picked him up...
...He was cold...
...A doctor even came out to receive them...
...The night Fredi met Nayeli, the Guatemalan girl who would become his queen and the mother of his son, Angelito, he was coming from a mission to reclaim merchandise the 18 had stolen from his gang, or mara, the Mara Salvatrucha...
...Fredi had never seen the ocean, and with the port full of oil workers, his aunt set up a stall where the men fought over her hot pupusas...
...Fredi got the order from the boss of his clique, Marcos, a very well-respected and feared jenja...
...Sometimes a beautiful woman came, armed to the teeth, who put the men in their place, making them whistle under their breath and stand up straight...
...It was late at night...
...The police lined them up, about 30 people, mostly young...
...Fredi went up to the cashier, carrying the M-16 he had “borrowed” from El Jabón’s arsenal, and forced him to give up the money, barely speaking...
...Los Angeles was in his heart, like the tattoo on his back...
...A family heirloom...
...The dehydrated baby wasn’t even crying anymore...
...From right here, jefe...
...Money turns people into idiots,” he would say...
...And Pedro started flirting with her, but she only had eyes for me, and I pretended like nothing was happening and let time pass...
...Fredi couldn’t believe it...
...The MS began in L.A.’s Barrio 13, founded almost entirely by Salvadorans, along with a few Guatemalans...
...In Veracruz, where they arrived with his sick cousin and sobbing aunt Amparito, everything went better than expected...
...Fredi met Nayeli in Orange County, the home of Disneyland, and just seeing her he knew she had two things he loved...
...From here, Mexico...
...But so you can see that I trust you, I’ll give you Guadalajara...
...The families pushed on with the slowness of iguanas, having taken the worst of roads, taking ridiculous detours to avoid the soldiers and their tireless dogs...
...And he added with irony: “A human rights defender...
...Nayeli left the United States with Fredi, so their son is Salvadoran...
...The 18 had sentenced him to the “final vergeo”—that’s what they call their beatings to death or near death...
...His gang years caused Fredi serious problems with his aunt Amparito...
...So he decided to return to Los Angeles...
...His loyalty was with the mara, not the cartel, even though they were his bosses...
...He was tapped to take on the Crazy Riders, a minor but fierce clique...
...And this beautiful haina served us,” he says...
...The simple truth is, it was my country, my home...
...Where are you from...
...I’m Mexican...
...The children, not Fredi, started crying...
...It’s all over, he thought...
...They thought the road would be flanked by men from the Frente Farabundo Martí, but the soldiers had dug their talons into the Frente and stayed behind to protect themselves...
...They were preoccupied with Subwoofer’s pneumonia, and angry at Fredi—all they had given him, with his father, mother, and brothers dead...
...There, Fredi had a new notion of family—his uncle, his uncle’s wife, his aunt, and one of his cousins, who “wasn’t in his right mind...
...Patricia, sir...
...It was a faint barking at first...
...The pact was sealed...
...Gato was later charged with murder...
...We were coming from a bad fight with Los Ñetas, and they got us...
...So El Jabón moved from Ciudad Juárez, fleeing the other mafias, charged with administering the boss’s business in Guadalajara...
...The store was near the train tracks and below the northern highway...
...Fredi was 15 when he joined the Mara Salvatrucha...
...He got a job loading and unloading merchandise at the market...
...Hands up...
...Since 9/11 the Mexican border police have been very tough, having become the first line of defense...
...The power of the top jenja, or undisputed boss of the gang, descends vertically through the local and regional bosses over occasionally sedentary bodies like Fredi’s...
...He had been an oil worker and had some money to spare, and he preferred to station himself in a place like Tecún Umán...
...For two months he was in jail, which was clean like a hospital and sealed tight like a coffin...
...The only thing that upset her during the journey was the children’s cries...
...Fredi had prepared for this moment, having bought fake Mexican passports and practiced his “Yes, jefe,” “excuse me,” and “we’re coming from Veracruz...
...What, I need papers to be in my own country...
...Word got around and soon enough the MS came looking for me, suspiciously at first, but after the first couple of tests, I showed them I was a firm and upright guy...
...later he became quiet...
...I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone...
...He and many others were part of a wave, flying together in groups, relocating en masse...
...He helped them, hiding them in his house for several days with help from Nayeli the haina...
...When he went to live in San Jacinto, a working-class neighborhood that reproduced the gang geography of Los Angeles, with south against north, west against east, MS against 18, he felt like he understood nothing...
...For every male member of a mara there is also a haina like Nayeli, warlike young women empowered to fight but barred from leadership...
...He liked cleaning their rifles and listening to them talk when they came by the ranch...
...There you’ll set up a good business for me, because the guys from Tijuana have it under their control...
...It was a big affront, you know,” Fredi says...
...Others stayed in Mexico, where the mara became stronger, bigger, another thing entirely...
...And don Cato, who was in charge of the place, came to like me...
...First, she looked like the brave, beautiful woman from the Frente, the one who loved to muss his hair on the ranch...
...The first in line was a pretty girl...
...No one in the barrio suspected that El Jabón had come to open an office of the Jaurez cartel in Guadalajara, to take over the market and to show those who had lost out to Tijuana how it was done...
...Mexican immigration was conducting an operation with the Centaurs, a special police unit dressed in black uniforms...
...They’ll take care of you there while we verify your information...
...Help us,” she said to the official in a commanding voice, pointing to Angelito...
...He was awarded the 2006 Samuel Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism...
...They had arrived in Guadalajara eight years earlier, he fleeing the Tijuana cartel and she an unrequited love...
...They began conversing and soon enough became friends, compas, homies...
...With the siren on, they went straight to the hospital...
...The jenja is the figure who establishes, preserves, and enforces an unshakable order within every clique of a mara...
...What’s your name...
...But the mara was generous, giving him money, things for the trip, and a Mexican contact to get passports...
...He has thought a lot about that moment, why his father did what he did...
...During his visits to the police, he was interrogated...
...The stupid cousin got all the extra attention that he, clearheaded and smart, would never get...
...Fredi clutched his scapular and decided to say as little as possible...
...It was as if he had arrived on Mars...
...Everything was silent...
...Those last weeks in San Jacinto, Fredi was very upset...
...there were trees everywhere, shabby houses made of metal sheets, street dogs—a world that for an ex-student from Belmont High was a complete otherness...
...Not me...
...And even though he did his job well, he says, El Jabón never gave him enough money to go to Los Angeles...
...Nayeli was exhausted by the feat of having deceived the Mexican migra, for the time being...
...Cocaine awakens the instincts, and this way you’ll have more dealers...
...I think I was already eight years old...
...What’s more, Fredi was tough like him...
...These hospital people will do anything for money, and if the kid needs anything, I’ll take care of it...
...There, at the starting point of migrants’ journeys, they still had some money in their pockets...
...El Jabón liked the skinny kid with the green eyes who slept in a broken chair in the hospital waiting room...
...We came from Veracruz and we’re going to Mochis to see some relatives and look for work...
...It was the first time Fredi had heard the word carnal, but in his old memories he knew, he felt, that a carnal is a homie, and that he would trust even his dying son with a homie...
...You always have the barrio inside you,” he says...
...His uncles didn’t show up to say goodbye...
...But Fredi, who always escaped, even in the worst predicaments, slipped away from the police by a hair...
...Finally his uncle could rent a big room...
...We don’t have any money and the boy is dying...
...They arrived with press coverage...
...How wrong they were...
...El Jabón was very worried, because his only sister was on the verge of death and he, ex-lieutenant of the very Boss himself, could do nothing...
...And even though he doubts it, he thinks, feels, that his father probably thought it best to stake his life to save the rest of them...
...A warning like this was no game, because in the code of the mara, when one is “sentenced” like this, the homies step aside...
...But he never guessed what could happen in Guadalajara...
...He desperately needed to talk to someone about the pain of his sister, dying helplessly...
...That’s when I became a man, and I soon realized that men don’t cry, or else they get fucked up...
...His uncle grabbed him and they continued on, up the slope...
...El Jabón and the police and jail and Angelito without MacArthur Park and Nayeli, so beautiful, without a man to take care of her...
...He didn’t move, watching the comings and goings at Tijuanita, the bar...
...But now here was El Jabón, the veteran of a thousand wars, stabbed and shot, tattooed near his heart...
...Estrada...
...The bonanza in Guadalajara frustrated his plans to return to Los Angeles...
...That night must have been a busy one, because neither the official, a Centaur, nor the observer showed up at the hospital...
...And in the center of the mara’s perpetual motion, there are the homies, comrades who just as easily punish the disloyal as they shelter each other against the feeling of rootlessness—in San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Tecún Umán, Ciudad Hidalgo, the Mexican megalopolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco...
...Fredi held Angelito close...
...In the early hours, waiting outside the intensive care unit, Fredi met El Jabón, a calm guy who had his dying sister in the hospital...
...So Pedro goes, ‘Let’s go, homie, let’s go, we’re in dangerous territory.’ And I said, ‘It’s OK, wait just a minute.’ In the end, he left and I stayed waiting for Nayeli, who was alone in L.A...
...A Chicano lawyer was assigned to Fredi, who had never liked Chicanos...
...Fredi became sad and unfriendly...
...They were almost at the point of letting themselves fall asleep when they heard the dogs...
...Fredi took out the passports, which were well worth their price, because the second official in charge and the human rights observer assented...
...Every homie they caught, they locked him up or killed him, and they began forcing people to return to the countries thought to be their true homelands: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala...
...That frosty night, they decided to camp, as well as they could, on a terrible slope...
...So when they started crying, their dad, a big, brusque man, softened up, speaking to them gently...
...Lots of Salvadoran girls, even a Cuban one...
...The night of the hit, Nayeli got Angelito ready and stayed home, waiting, like a good haina, in case her man needed her...
...The cliques are cells, numbering in the hundreds, that cover the territory of Central American migrations and counter-migrations, across the poor countries that expel their people to the United States...
...The time would come, later, for his homies to avenge him, but for now, he alone had to face an entire clique...
...It was a different time...
...He called it Tijuanito, after don Cato...
...And nothing makes the MS homies more nervous than a couple of assholes walking beyond where they should...
...Fredi split into two personalities: the victim who acted for the adults and the authorities, and the veteran hardened by stabs and fights, the loyal and upright homie, tested on the battlefield...
...I don’t even remember how much it cost, but between the money my uncle put up and the tips I added in Tijuana, we came up with money for an asshole they called El Tepache, and that’s how we went...
...the gang, my family...
...After all, the baby is being well taken care of, and I’m not going to leave here until they bring news of my sister...
...From where...
...That’s the mara...
...If you cheer up, let’s leave tomorrow morning,” she told him...
...He told El Jabón he didn’t feel well...
...he yelled...
...Fredi had room for a dog he picked up off the street...
...Go to a hotel with your girl, take a bath, sleep...
...It was all a matter of gaining Fredi’s trust, so he could begin working—delivering merchandise, making collections, serving as a bodyguard, buying soccer tickets, taking flowers to the sister who never recovered...
...If “stability” engenders certainty, constant movement is the bearer of learning...
...Fredi, a Salvatrucha through and through, had to stab one, he says, because he didn’t want his own homies to confuse him with another gang...
...He spent all his time with the gang, a real loco, smoking joints and doing cocaine...
...As translocal migrants, mareros don’t confine themselves to any single territory, because they were ejected from their homes long ago, and their feeling of rootlessness is their principal strength...
...Everywhere, everything was fucked...
...Fredi had admired the Frente men since he was a boy...
...They had ripped off a gold chain from Gato, a homie from El Salvador, whose father had given it to him before he crossed the border...
...Rossana Reguillo is a professor and researcher at the Department of Sociocultural Studies, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, in Guadalajara, Mexico...
...And Fredi had grown up, a North American like any other, like his friends in the clique, pledging allegiance to the flag and singing “America the Beautiful...
...Are you from here...
...Not Fredi’s, but the babies...
...In the end, I was really distracted, and then they got us—Sapo, the jenja Motroco, and me...
...It was a really badass city, good nightlife,” Fredi says...
...And she looked like his mother, skinny and petite...
...He brought three brave, daring men with him, but he always needed new people...
...No matter what I said, they were going to send me back...
...He only remembers his uncle’s cousins, all those unknown relatives his father had left up north...
...His homies escorted him to the border, and shortly enough he was on the bus, safe and secure, on his way north...
...Deliver this merchandise, make that collection, this guy looked at me wrong so go kill him...
...Their relatives stood in a line, with lanterns, waiting for them...
Vol. 40 • July 2007 • No. 4
