Illegal Alien Gang Plague Mauling America

[indigobusiness]

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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.

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