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surrounded-on four sides by the preii * -

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largest concentration of gangs is in the

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Santa Ana/Anaheim corridor, a Latino stronghold. Santa Ana's sc l~ools are 7 3 percent Latino, Anaheim's are 45 ~ercent.

I

Gangs with names like Frogmen, Crank, Santa Nitas and the League prowl the streets, staking out turf and looking for fun wherever they can get it, be it scoring drugs, shooting at ri- val gangs, or chillin' with the liome- boys. "I've never been at this scliool that [gangs] weren't there," says Heritage principal Robert Gresham. "They almost beat [one teenager] to death twice, just because he lives in Santa Nitas and he's a white guy," he continues. "It's also where you live. It isn't just whether vou're a declared gang member. If you . l ive in Middleside, you don't go into Santa Nitas. If you live in Santa Nitas, you don't go into Middleside.

"And they know who's who. I had a boy that was going to visit a girl two weeks ago and got the living be- jesus beat out of him because lle lives in the wrono area." <,

Though gangs have come under public scrutiny only in the last few years, they have been a part of Orange County's diverse fabric for many generations. For Fullerton's Latino community in the Fifties, gang membership meant "you'd have somebodv to back vou LIP if vou ever

A ,

had anv tvpe of encounters," savs Dr. , , L , Jose Lopez, a political science profes- sor at Cal State Long Beach since 1970, who has done-extensive re- search on gangs. He adds, "It also meant a place for cohorts that got high doing the same things. There -- - -- were different g r o u p s There were ---- - people who did alco'lvl, there were people who did uppers, there were people who took downers, there were people who smoked pot ... and there were people who did heroin." Whatever their high, these gangs shared a sense of community-if a

NOVEMBER 1989/ORANGE COAST MAGAZINE

"Prevention is the issue. Adult thugs are

influencing children."

member was threatened, others came to his aid.

Today, Lopez looks typically pro- fessorial in baggy Levi's and Birkenstock sandles, though he has the battle scars of a vcterniio. A faded tattoo of a cross is buried in the slun between his thumb and index finger, while his knuckles read "MOM" and "JOE." Lopez also has a record. At 18, he was convicted of selling ~~iarijuana and served three years at the Deuel Vocational Institution for Men in Tracy.

T ~ I ~ O L I ~ ~ I the legal system, Lopez got his first taste of racism. "About six months later, another kid got busted for the same thing, and he was sentenced [tlirougl~ Juvenile Hall] because, according to the judge, he didn't want to ruin his life. The judge didn't give a damn about my life." The other youth was white.

"I was popped not knowing.. .at that time we were not aware of what was going on. Most of our people had bought into the idea that it was our fault. Anything that happened was our fault. So, I was a bad kid. I just accepted that. I never realized tliere was any kind of discrimination or racism or class involved."

In those days, weapons were not a regular part of the gang arsenal. Lopez recalls an incident in the Fifties where two Latino gangs from Los Angeles were involved in a shooting. "We used to kid them when we were in Tracy. I used to say, 'You guys don't know how to fight like a man. Right away you got to pull out a gun.' We put them down for ltaving done that, and after that it began to get out of hand."

It got out of hand largely because in the Seventies, Southeast Asian gangs settled into what is now Little Saigon. They played wit11 a different set of rules. "The Vietnamese were very willing to use weapons. They

had come from a society that used weapons," explains Lopez. "They were always shooting people, getting maimed and so forth. They were ac- customed to weapons.. .it was part of doing business. In addition, the Vietnamese were smaller physically and needed weapons to defend themselves." Vietnamese gangs were also the first group to set up gang "franchises" in other parts of the country in order to protect a member fleeing the lam.

The influx of weapons, the advent of cheap crack cocaine and a feeling of being locked out of the main- stream of society led to the new emergence of gangs, casting a dark shadow on the effectiveness of the "system" to work for everybody. You have to look at the goals of society, says Lopez, to understand Latinos' need for gang membership. "If the goals of society were to develop a pool of cheap labor, then the educa- tional system was very succesful. It did exactly that. It flunked them out, then if produced gang members, dropouts and derelicts."

Nonetheless, at Heritage Elemen- tary, and in schools tl~roughout the county, efforts are being lnade to cut gang n~embership off at the pass through educational anti-gang pro- grams like Operatio11 Safe Schools, formed in 1987, and f~lnded by the Governor's Office of Criminal Justice Planning. The program is ostensibly designed to get to the child before the gang does. Wliile the program obvi- ously targets scl~ools that are heavily impacted by gangs, such as those in Santa Ana and Anaheim, it affects all- county scl~ools. Gus Frias, manager, of Orange County's Safe Schools, says, "Prevention is the issue. Adult thugs are influencing children. T11e communit!~ has to assist in targeting certain individuals. Once these indi- viduals are removed, we have to fill

that void, providing positive role models."

At a Safe Schools meeting, Jorge (not his real name), a student at Heritage, says he wouldn't join a gang because "I'd ruin my life like my brother. He joined a gang and now he's locked up in Juvenile Hall." Other youths are also surrounded by the spectre of gangs. Says Delores (not her real name), "I have uncles that are in gangs. Middleside Territory. It's around here."

Though young, these students are by no means precocious. They cannot help but soak in the atmosphere that engulfs them. Miguel (not his real name) ul~derstands the business of the street. "[Gangs] sell cocaine, whack.. .(other drugs), they sell i: for a lot of money, and then when they go and buy some more, they get it for cheaper.. ..They steal car stereos, cars. When they go drive-by sliooting . . .those are stolen cars."

At Crest Vielv Intermediate School in Huntington Beach, assistant prin- cipal Larry Tandis saw a problem de- veloping and contacted Frias and Safe Schools. "We had several kids who were associated with, or had neigliborl~ood connections with sus- pected gang rnembers. Some of it was spilling into the scl~ool. Little fights were breaking out here and there."

Though there wasn't a gang prob- lem comparable to Santa Ana's, there was a restless mix of Asians, Hispanics and whites. "We have mostly 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds who were wannabes. They liked the idea of belonging,"says-Tandis.- .. * . .

Safe Schools arrived at Crest View in the fall of 1988. Counselors met with students on a group and indi- vidual basis, helped with homework and took students on field trips to lo- cal universities.

Results have been promising,

NOVEMBER 1989/ORANGE COAST MAGAZINE 117

says skinheads are going to be forced to make their hair grow," he says. "Why are you going to take the whole gang behavior and say no to it? If it has always been a part of our community, if it's been part of the so- cialization process, why not just take those elements of the gang experi- ence that are bad?"

Frias responds: "We are not a sec- tarian organization. We know that the issues in San Juan Capistrano are to- tally different. He [Lopez] doesn't know about our program-we are impacting a lot of kids."

Tandis agrees that Safe Scl~ools' message is effective on a universal level. "No matter what their ethnicity, they all need the same things. Their self-image is low. They don't look at college, and they tend to drop out. The focus is 011 the self-esteem aspect. Self-images have turned around."

'The definition of a gang is inher- ently criminal," says Frias. "It's a group of persons who get together for illicit purposes and engage in ille- gal activities."

Again, Lopez disagrees. 'The prob- lem is violence, not gangs. By saying all gangs are bad, why don't you throw the Boy Scouts in there, too? The bottom line is if we do not un- derstand the problem correctly, then we are going to come u p with tlie wrong solutions and poor policies to address those problems. And that's what's happened.

"The medical model is that if you have a disease, isolate the virus to get rid of it. So, what we do then is elimi- nate the problem, take all of these kids out of the barrio, put them in prison, and that solves the problem. Well, sure it does for awhile. But un- less you can kill them all, they'll be back."

Gresham agrees that punishment only validates gang nlembers. "You and I say, 'Go to jail-ugh!' When they

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NOVEMBER 1989/ORANGE COAST MAGAZINE 119

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go to jail, it validates them. 'I am bad.' It's a graduation ceremony. And it's hard to deal with that. What works for you and me doesn't work for them. It's wrong. It becomes a macho thing." It will get worse, Frias adds, "until the powers that be real- ize that prevention is where it's at."

Lopez believes that Orange County's gang posture fails because it focuses only on prevention of Chicano gangs, rather than all gangs. "The gang situation has not gotten any better. That should tell us some- thing." Minority gang activity ~vil l lessen only when the educational sys- tem changes and offers them real in- centives not to join gangs, Lopez says. He writes in his paper, "Gang activity [emanates] not from urban- ization per se but from emerging eco- nomic, demographic, residential pat- terns, which have produced a neo-apartheid condition that rigidly separates white America from non- white groups, and an expanding cap- italistic economy that creates a de- mand for cheap labor." He was more specific when he told Orange Consf, "Where they used to pick oranges, now there are houses they cannot af- ford. In Orange County, we have the industry of Disneyland and the hotel and support industry that has devel- oped." It's a Catch-22. "Orar~ge County industry demands and needs cheap labor, but the county itself doesn't want them, nor can they af- ford to live here."

There are many non-Latino gangs in the county. Most prominent are the white skinheads and Southeast Asian gangs. Black gangs are not a major player in the county's gang scene. Lopez says blacks, usually concen- trated in Santa Ana, are assimilated into Latino gangs. Skinheads, though, are largely a suburban phe- nomenon, with large numbers based in Huntington Beach.

Emerging as a deranged grand- ?

child of the punk rock movement of the late Seventies, which spurned a generation of angry, politically orient- ed youths, skinheads have taken the rhetoric of the Reagan Administra- tion to ugly extremes, according to Lopez. They bash gays, Jews, com- munists-everything that is not lilly white. They believe in violent white supremacy. Their gang names, which include Blitzkrieg, Gestapo and the Clan, give a good indication of what influences them. Lopez says skin- heads, rather than Latlno gangs, pose the biggest threat to society. "White gangs are probably the most alarm- ing thing for Orange County .... Chicano gangs, they stick to their community. They don't really pose a threat to our way of life. The Viet- namese were also pretty much prey- ing on their own. And what we had was minority crime on minority.

"The most dangerous thing I see in Orange County is the whittling away of the moral society we had built. Here are people questioning our sense of Christian belief," he says. "The Brown Shirts were gonna come back. And they came back in the form of the skinheads."

So far, efforts made to control or eliminate gangs in Orange County have been mixed. Frias believes fur- ther funding for elementary school intervention programs can stop the recruitment of gangs. There are pro- posals on the table that would allo- cate funds for education in lower so- cio-economic areas, enabling youths to attend school after regular school is over-and on weeken'dS. However, . - V p e z writes in his paper that the gang problem cannot be solved until all gangs are treated equally. "Public policy needs to be developed that ad- dresses the entire youth population in the county, not simply a minority of the youth." OC

120 NOVEMBER 1989/ORANGE COAST MAGAZINE