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About a third of the way into Luis J. Rodríguez's Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (1993) I had to set the book down to do other things. One thing led to another and a week passed by before I got back to it. Within the space of a few pages I looked at these events he describes with real disgust, an emotion 180° from my first reading. There are moments throughout this autobiography of gang life where Rodríguez himself recoils in shock, but the rush of events, the pace of the narrative itself, doesn't allow either the writer or the reader to dwell on them for very long. The interruption had given me enough distance from the cascade of violence to escape its distorting lens. Boxed in by this first-person narrative it's not possible to see the world through any other eyes but those of the author.
And yet what eyes this writer has. And what a command of words to present his vision. Not a few of his terms are Spanish. At the end of the book you'll find a surprisingly long glossary. At first glance it might seem as if the author has been kind enough to provide a translation for English readers. But I think even those at home with Spanish would be thrown by many of these words. This isn't just a simple case of translation (if there is such a thing). Not at all.
The crazy life is a world unto itself and that world is created, maintained and perpetuated by a culture. Gangs may well have arisen out of particular circumstances, they may be products of prejudice, poverty, and human desires to belong, but they share a range of physical and symbolic life with the rest of society. In fatal stabbings and shots fired from cars, in tattoos and graffiti, and in living words, the spoken terms of brutal affection or loving hatred, there are altogether human motives. Gangs create language to set themselves apart, to protect their culture and foster an identity. This list, this glossary, doesn't enable you to ask "How are you?" in Spanish. It commands: Así es, así será. This is how it is. This is how it's going to be. A geography of principal landmarks is mapped (La Colonia, Las Lomas, la pinta, la torcida), the principal protagonists of the life are defined (cholillos, chota, dedos) and their motives proclaimed (Qué Rifa). Not surprisingly, today the people most interested in gang slang are law enforcement officials. Unlike the police, Rodríguez isn't interested in decoding these words. He wants to convey what it feels like to live within such terms.
Somewhat hidden beneath this story is also the tale of a writer gaining consciousness, isolating himself in a garage to write his thoughts on a manual typewriter rescued from the trash, entering the foreign turf of a library, or carrying books which he will explain to his friends are "business." He tries his hand at writing and performing plays. At another point he's captivated by mural painting. He designs and supervises several public art projects. But this dawning of an artist is overshadowed by events in the barrio. And his response is to begin political organizing, an arena that he seems to credit with a greater power of awakening.
No doubt there are political remedies that are desperately needed in urban America. No doubt the public schools are in constant need of reform. But the latter portions of the book that describe his high-school organizing are some of the least interesting parts of the narrative. His arguments, his 'solutions,' his tactics, seem adolescent. This might seem like an unfair criticism given that Rodríguez is in fact describing the efforts of an adolescent, but I had the sense that his views haven't altered appreciably.
I sympathize with his frustrations in the public schools. The recent documentary in the P.O.V. series on PBS, "Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary," convincingly argues that the inadequacies, the hostility toward Hispanics, are still an institutional rot that plagues schools in L.A. and elsewhere. Mascots that ridicule minority people, teachers who refuse to open themselves to either the language or the culture of the students they teach--these are elements of a racism that is endemic, these are established norms and practices that are widespread, in no way limited to Latinos or Hispanics, and seemingly intractable.
However, the evidence for the gravest concerns arises from the story itself. The author's closest vantage on death wasn't in the face of a gun, or any other weapon common in gang violence. Rodríguez's most harrowing experience comes by his own hand, sniffing chemicals in paint, gasoline, glue or anything else that will take him outside of himself and his circumstances.
Two years ago there was a sobering article that appeared in the business section of The New York Times that touched on this issue.i H.B. Fuller is an American company that manufactures most of the glue sold in Central America. The company operates 18 plants in the large metropolitan areas of six of the seven Central American nations. In part because Fuller had promoted itself as a "socially responsible" company, eager to join the ranks of other businesses with good records of "corporate citizenship," they had been criticized for doing little to prevent the abuse of their products by children. Among other reasons, the company was reluctant to withdraw its products because they claimed no one could determine how many children were addicted to sniffing. Critics of the company argued that ten of thousands of homeless children throughout Central America sniffed glue. These addicts are called resisteroles, so named for the Fuller brand "Resistol."
The patent need for jobs, the prejudice and greed of the powerful, the deadening of the spirit--none of these things can be discounted when explaining gangs. But what could be more pragmatic in the short term than cutting off the ready supply of the materials, the technologies, the most lethal tools of despair, crime, and death? Look again at the role of glue in the lives of the children in that great Brazilian film "Pixote." What pathetic irony lies in this word "glue."
Gang violence is hardly an American creation. One of the very best films I've seen from Latin America is a Colombian film titled "Rodrigo D: No Future," directed by Victor Gaviria. As odd as this may sound, the viewpoint of the main characters is scenic, panoramic, and, I fear, overarching. By this I mean to imply that the lives of these criminals are the most expansive windows on urban Latin America. Pushed from the valleys, the poor of the continent cling to the steep mountainsides and stare down at the symbolic world in which they have no part. These vistas that Rodrigo D hails each day are as unreal as two dimensional paintings, cruel and magnificent backdrops to his life.
Now Central America (and the Caribbean as well) are on the receiving end of a growing stream of gang members who are being deported from the United States. At present the deportees are being "repatriated" at a rate of something like 50,000 per year. But this number will increase with more vigilant enforcement of immigration laws. Perhaps you've seen the two features in The New York Times this past week that focused on the exportation of U.S. gangs to El Salvador.ii In light of Clinton's explicit statements about the special circumstances of the illegal Central Americans excluding them from tightened U.S. immigration policy, gang members would seem to be the exception within the exception.
It's quite a package: gangs, guns and glue. Not exactly, the ties that we would have bind us. The hemisphere is bonded in ways never envisioned. I give credit to the reporters, filmmakers and writers who are throwing light on this brave new world.
-August 16, 1997
Endnotes
iDiana B. Henriques, "Black Mark for a 'Good Citizen': Critics Say H.B. Fuller Isn't Doing Enough to Curb Glue-Sniffing," New York Times, November 26, 1995, p. III-1.
ii Larry Rohter, "In U.S. Deportation Policy, A Pandora's Box," New York Times, August 10, 1997. Deborah Sontag, "U.S. Deports Felons but Can't Keep Them Out, New York Times, August 11, 1997.
