The Youth and the Gangs

    I have the kids next door help me out with the transcribing of these interviews.  I felt bad paying them so little at first but I soon realized I was paying them top dollar. 

     My transcriber is a teenager girl named Nila and tonight she was making a card for her friend at school.  Cutting cardboard and color paper with bright markers and glue and sparkles and typical young teenage girl stuff. 

     I had just learned that the last kid I interviewed in Colonia San Francisco is part of a gang and had been told to rob me next time I came out to film.  Ivan liked me and he didn't want to do it so he warned me.  Nila had transcribed the interview and I told her about it. 

     She didn't seem to be shocked.  I asked her why she didn't seem very surprised.  I wasn't too surprised to learn he was in a gang either, but I had seen him, had seen the way he dressed and checked out his Facebook page.  Nila had only transcribed his words. 

     I teased Nila that the kid she was making the card for was her boyfriend.  She told me the kid had just been shot in the stomach.  She said this to me in such a nonchalant way as if she was telling me we would be having spaghetti for dinner.  Here were three little girls gluing cardboard hearts and sprinkling glitter and they seemed unphased by the real and possible violence that surrounds them. 

    The more I have asked about the gangs here the more complicated and nuanced they become.

    It is safer to be in a place where the gang has unquestionable control.  There you know at least there will not be any gang vs gang fighting. 

    Gangs actually look out for their community in some ways.  They often help pay medical bills for people in the community.  I hear stories that they help in parenting.  If a kid is talking bad to his mother and the gang hears about, or if the mother actually tells they gang, the gang will "hit him up".  Which is to say they will beat the hell out of him. 

    One woman told me that gangs force girls into prostitution.  Another source refuted that.  He tells me gang member will take on girls to be their 'Heinas' which is kind of a booty call.  My friend went on to tell me about a kid he knew named Carlito.

    Carlito was a 14-year-old with a dad that left him for the US.  He was poor and living in a tough barrio.  One day an acquaintance asks him to deliver a package.  Carlito does not ask what is in the package, just does it.  He may or may not realize that the acquaintance was part of a gang but regardless he has made his first step into the gang life. 

    The gang member gives him a cell phone one day for his deeds, next time it is a pair of shoes.  People in the barrio notice Carlito has some nice things and they suspect that he is in with the gang. 

    The small deeds go on for a month or two and one day one of the gang members asks Carlito, "Are you with us or not?  You need to decide."  Carlito thinks about it for awhile, he is afraid because he knows who these guys are and he has unwittingly drawn himself deeper and deeper in with them, but now he has a choice. 

    He says no, he wants out.  He is still nervous though as he knows too much now.  He keeps himself locked away in his mom's house for a long period of time and doesn't want to see anybody.

    One night a friend comes over and convinces him to come out and enjoy himself so he does.  This "friend" takes him to the gang where he shot dead on the spot at the age of 14.