What to do with those whom society cannot accommodate? Criminalize them. I had to begin the long, intense struggle to save his life from the gathering storm of street violence-some 20 years after I had sneaked out of the ‘hood in the dark of night and removed myself from the death fires of La Vida Loca. I had to cut Ramiro’s bloodline to the street before it became too late. But in Chicago, we found kindred conditions. If I barely survived all this, it appeared unlikely my son would make it. Three years ago, I brought Ramiro to Chicago to escape the violence. After being kicked out of three high schools, I dropped out at 15.īy the time I turned 18, some 25 friends had been killed by rival gangs, the police, overdoses, car crashes and suicides. I had a near-death experience at 16 from sniffing toxic spray.
I began using drugs at age 12-including pills, weed and heroin. I was arrested on charges ranging from theft, assaulting an officer to attempted murder. I spent my teen years in a barrio called Las Lomas, east of Los Angeles. When I was 2 years old, in 1956, my family emigrated from Mexico to Watts. I was involved in gangs in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I see Ramiro’s fleeing figure, his breath rising in quickly dissipating clouds. I go after him, sprinting down the gangway leading to a debris-strewn alley. Within moments, Ramiro runs out of the house, entering the freezing Chicago night. Trini and I had jumped on Ramiro’s case for coming in late following weeks of trouble: Ramiro had joined the Insane Campbell Boys, a group of Puerto Rican and Mexican youth allied with the Spanish Cobras and Dragons.
Two-year-old Ruben, confused and afraid, crawls up to my leg and hugs it. One evening, words of anger bounce back and forth between the walls of our gray-stone flat. My third wife, Trini, our child Ruben and my 15-year-old son Ramiro from a previous marriage huddle around the television set. The bone-chilling temperatures force my family to stay inside a one-and-a-half bedroom apartment in a three-flat building in Humboldt Park. Late winter Chicago, 1991: The once-white snow that fell in December has turned into a dark scum, an admixture of salt, car oil and decay icicles hang from rooftops and window sills like the whiskers of old men.
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