Illegal Alien Gang Plague Mauling America

[indigobusiness]

snip

For some children, the choice is: get beat up once a week, or get beat up once to enter the gang. Others join for the prestige and sense of belonging. Mario Flores was one of them; he joined Santa Ana, California’s, Westside Compadres. “When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I wanted them to jump me,” he says in the soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re like, ‘You want to get down?’ They got to jumping at you, they go to call you, ‘Trips from Westside Comps’—you feel good.”

Flores (or “Trips”) is a depressing specimen of gang culture: uneducated and barely articulate. He’s sitting on the other side of a Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central Jail, talking to me over a phone. In and out of jail with dazzling regularity over the last three years, he most recently left prison on April 14; on April 21, he was arrested again on a rape charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in Mexico, Flores went to live with cousins in San Bernardino, California, at age 13 and has been traveling the Southern California gang circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana, East L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand gestures accompany his speech like hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he says, pointing first to his eyes, then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down with my shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask if he speaks English or Spanish with his gang. “You speak Chicano,” he says. “ ‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English, you’ve got some good words. But the way you talk, you don’t talk good. You don’t talk like other people.”

Flores expresses the fierce attachment to territory that is the sine qua non of gang identity. “I was like, ‘I love my neighborhood. If you don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going to fuck you up.’ ” Charles Beck, captain of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, marvels at this emotion. “They all come from identical neighborhoods, identical families, and go to identical schools, and yet they hate each other with a passion.” The territorial instincts can only be compared to the Balkans, says Corporal Kevin Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang investigator. “There’s people who all they do is patrol gang boundaries. They’re like me, in a way: I’m looking for bad guys; they look for rivals.”

“Trips” showed his love for Santa Ana’s Westside Compadres by doing “missions”—robbing bars, stealing wallets and cell phones, selling drugs—to raise money for the gang. “If a big homey told me to fuck someone up, I had to,” he explains. The gang reciprocated by giving him a place to stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise he lived in cars or on the street, sometimes in a hotel.

snip


http://www.manhattan-institute.org/cfml/printable.cfm?id=1646

[iconoclastic cat]

1. Isn't City Journal the same publication that coined "superpredator"?

I'm pretty sure. A bit right-wing for me.

[indigobusiness]

3. The problem is apolitical.

Not touting the publication.

This is a serious matter that deserves attention by all stripes.

When this time-bomb explodes it will brutalize right , left, and center.

[iconoclastic cat]

4. I don't find the author or the piece credible.

I know that the gang problem is huge, but this article seems a bit on the Uberweis side of things.

[bemildred]

6. With all due respect, I live in LA, and I've been

hearing this shit since I was a teenager in the fifties.
It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. There is a real
gang problem, but it has more to do with jobs and discrimination
and lack of better opportunities in life than anything else.
That this privileged woman with her little sinecure job feels she
can bash latinos as a class with the gang issue says more about
her than latinos.

[indigobusiness]

7. Was this bashing Latinos? I didn't get that from it...

Maybe I didn't read it right, but I got the picture of Latinos as victims of circumstance of failed social machinery... The point is a culture of violence is in place that feeds on itself and is growing.

[bemildred]

13. Yes, it is bashing latinos.

There is no "culture of violence", there is discrimination, a
lack of jobs, and a lack of better opportunities in life. When
you find that situation, you will find gangs, anywhere in the
World, it has nothing to do with culture.

[indigobusiness]

15. No culture of violence? Surely you jest?

Have you not heard of the Mexican Mafia?

Violence within culture is not unique. But the culture of violence in question, is.

Talk to prison inmates who are there by choice, knowing that if they do their time and keep their mouth shut they will recieve their "pensions" and their "diplomas".

This is NOT about opportunity. This is about a society undone...culturally.



typo

[bemildred]

16. Bullshit. nt

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bemildred]

18. Tsk, personal attack?

It requires a vast ignorance of history and culture to think
that there is anything unique about the criminal gangs in LA.
You can find them anywhere, just like you describe, and always
in response to the same situations. It is a failure of the
government that is at issue, and not some unique feature of the
gangs.

[bemildred]

2. More on Ms Mac Donald:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mac_donald.htm

She seems to have a particular thing about illegals.

[iconoclastic cat]

5. Yeah, that page says it all.

I really enjoyed her article, "The Un-PATRIOT-ic Left." That seemed fair and balanced.

[indigobusiness]

8. Are you saying her political stance mitigates

the point of her message?

Regardless of how you vote or what you believe the solutions are, who can deny the issue is a serious problem (to put it mildly).

This is the sort of thing that will spiral into catastrophic consequences by being given short shrift. Only when people are directly impacted will they stand up, shriek, and point fingers of blame and ask why it wasn't foreseen and dealt with.

Victims on all sides of this issue, politics be damned.


sp edit

[iconoclastic cat]

9. A bigot discussing a serious problem is still a bigot.

I do not give bigots any air time in my brain.

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[iconoclastic cat]

11. Sarcasm.

We shall now end this discussion. Have a nice afternoon.

[indigobusiness]

12. ok

shouldn't have tried to kid you, I guess.

Your point is well taken.

[enki23]

14. at first sight....

i wasn't sure whether to read that as gangs of illegal aliens, or illegal gangs of aliens. i wasn't sure whether we should call INS or XCOM.