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Children stay inside to avoid stray bullets. Adults rarely venture
out after dark. By day this Santa Ana neighborhood in the shadow of the
Civic Center is bustling with life; by night it’s held hostage by gangs
– and fear.
For many Hispanic immigrants, this is the price of living
in the United States. But some wonder if that price is too high. The sweaty
palms. The anxious stomach. The racing heart.
There is no denying Maria Navarro’s fear every time her
Spurgeon Street apartment windows are rattled by the crack of gunfire
— much of it directed at a nearby gang hangout.
“It’s torture, especially when you hear them in the middle
of the night,” says the mother of four. “We just throw ourselves on the
floor and pray that no one gets hurt.”
Sporadic gunfire is one of the most daunting aspects of
everyday life in Navarro’s neighborhood, a heavily Hispanic enclave of
Santa Ana just north of the Civic Center.
By day, it is a bustling area, alive with street vendors
and schoolchildren, young mothers and a few seniors who have been here
since before the demographics began to shift from white to Hispanic.
By night, it is a vastly different scene, an urban landscape
often barren of all but the gang members who run the streets.
“We only kill people who don’t cooperate with us,” says
Carlos Martinez, 19, who sports a thin mustache, calls himself “Shadow”
and belongs to the Logan Street Gang.
It is one of Santa Ana’s oldest gangs, and the members who
hang out on Spurgeon Street are part of a branch that dates to the 1970s.
Police frequently are sent to the gang’s apartment hangout on reports
of loud music and other disturbances, and of minors drinking in public.
Officials say the gang generally is more youthful and less
violent than others, but its members openly boast of criminal activity.
Most are teen-age high school dropouts who sleep by day and spend their
nights on the streets painting graffiti.
They speak of burglarizing cars, abusing drugs and intimidating
their neighbors — many of whom have moved to this urban setting from
poor farming villages in Mexico and Central America. Along with brazen
drug dealers and prostitutes, the gang contributes to what Santa Ana police
Lt. Dave Nick calls “an atmosphere of fear” in the neighborhood.
“You hear shots fired, gang members are on the corner, your
car has been broken into a couple of times, and before you know it, people
don’t want to go outside,” says Nick, a 21-year veteran.
The immigrants learn not to leave their homes at night,
not to carry too much cash, not to make eye contact with strangers on
the street, not to let their children play outdoors and not to get involved
when they see a crime. The result is a neighborhood in which residents
feel besieged and, in many cases, distanced from their neighbors and alienated
by police, who they fear might have them deported — though the police
say that does not happen.
“Really, in our countries you can’t trust police,” says
Marisol Herrera, 32, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who lives in
an apartment on Washington Street. Herrera regrets not reporting being
mugged at knife point by a gang member shortly after she moved in four
years ago.
“Now I know that here, police are better, and I would call,”
she says. “But when I first got here, I was afraid. The crooks knew that,
and they took advantage of it. ”
Police estimate that fewer than 1 percent of the 7,000 residents
in Herrera’s neighborhood are involved in crime.
“It is really a case of a small number of residents causing
the problems for everyone else,” Nick says.
Gang members say they do what they do because it is their
only means of survival. Their appearance and lack of education make it
difficult for them to find jobs, they say.
“People write us off just ’cause we’ve got shaved heads
and a few tattoos,” Martinez says. “We have hearts, man. We could be shooting
people just for nothing, but we don’t. We just shoot back when people
are disrespecting us. ”
They generate “respect” through violence and fear, extorting
free food from vendors, intimidating people on sidewalks to move out of
their way or risk being beaten or shot. At least once a week, gang members
are targeted for drive-by shootings by members of rival sets. Payback
shootings follow. It is a pattern of violence that has persisted for generations.
The difference now is that the weapons have become more
deadly. Marcos Correa says he can get a handgun for as little as $ 80.
He pulls up his shirt-sleeve and shows off a 4-inch scar on his arm.
“This is where I got shot,” he says. “I should be dead right
now ’cause the bullet hit an artery. ”
Others have been less fortunate. In his 10 years in the
gang, Correa said, he has been to the funerals of six of his fellow members.
For many in the neighborhood, the solution is not to go on, but to move
on.
Mayela Valerin, 35, who manages the Courtyard Apartments,
said gang activity has scared away prospective tenants and made virtual
prisoners of those living in the 72-unit Spurgeon Street complex. One
family moved at the end of November, she says, because the wife was seven
months’pregnant, and the sound of bullets outside her second-story apartment
almost caused her to lose the baby.
“We feel besieged,” Valerin says. “I just pray that police
are able to get the gang members out of here soon. ” Jesse Ramirez, 50
— “El Indio” to those who know him — is one of the few surviving members
of the original gang.
An ex-convict who says he is addicted to heroin, HIV-positive
and an alcoholic, Ramirez stays at the gang’s apartment. The veins in
his arm bulge like rubber hoses because of drug injections, and a bottle
of King Cobra Malt Liquor is with him wherever he goes. He is a living
advertisement for the ravages of hard living.
“I tell them it’s not worth it,” he says. “I’ve thrown my
life away. It’s too late for me. But it’s not too late for them. They
can turn it around.”
The Rev. Christopher Smith, the neighborhood’s Catholic
priest, says gang members often are sons and daughters of immigrants,
misguided youths who see intimidation as a way of gaining respect.
“I get so frustrated and angry because the loss of these
kids is devastating,” says Smith, who has helped bury a dozen gang members
in recent years.
Smith and St. Joseph’s Catholic Church have tried to stop
the bloodshed by hosting weekly meetings to bring feuding gangsters together.
With several volunteers, Smith plans to open a jobs-and-education program
for at-risk youth.
“If we give them something to live for,” he says, then perhaps
we can live in peace and create a better future for all of us. ” Virginia
Hill, 55, a grandmother of six who has lived in the neighborhood since
emigrating from Mexico in 1974, prays nightly for an end to the violence.
“It baffles me,” she says. “Every time I hear the shots, I ask God why.
Why are these kids trying to do away with their futures? Don’t they have
anything to live for? ”
Her bewilderment and a good Christian heart drove her to
let a gang member take refuge in her home in April while police chased
him. Hill first heard the buzz of a police helicopter overhead, followed
a few minutes later by pounding on her door. She peeked out and saw a
scared teen-ager, no older than 16, with short black hair and a lanky
build.
“Please open the door for me, ma’am,” he said in Spanish.
“I know you’re part of the church, and I need your help, please. I’m begging
you. ”
She let him in and hid him for two hours. “I know it was
wrong,” she said at a recent church gathering. “I know most people think
I’m crazy to have done that, but if you would have seen him, you would
have done it, too. He looked like a scared little mouse. As a Christian,
I couldn’t turn him away.”
To this day, she does not know what police wanted the youth
for, his name or if he was captured. But she says she learned a lot about
the teens who are involved in gang violence from that night.
“When it comes right down to it, they are frightened little
kids,” she says. “They need to be shown compassion, interest and love.
And I firmly believe they can be turned around. ”
Such optimism belies the tragic consequences of gang violence,
which often befalls innocent people. None more innocent, perhaps, than
Steven Martinez, a 2-year-old boy killed in February 1993 by a stray bullet
in a drive-by shooting in the neighborhood.
When Steven died, so did his parents’ hopes for a new life
in the United States. With his wife, Eva, and their two other children,
Alfonso Martinez returned to Mexico last year and now works on a ranch.
“We found out the American dream costs too much,” Eva Martinez says by
phone from Mexico. “After Steven died, all our hopes and dreams died,
too. We felt like this new land completely failed us.”
Staff writer
Jeordan Legon immigrated from Cuba with his family in 1979. He lived for
most of last year in the Courtyard Apartments in the predominantly Hispanic
neighborhood near 15th and Spurgeon streets in Santa Ana.
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