I got a gun when I was 13. The chiefs of the
block, the upper generals of the block, they buy the guns. And as
soon as you walk up there on the street, they gonna tell you that
you going to need one. They say “You protected?” And you be like,
“No” and they be like, “Hold up” and they give you their gun, and
they’ll go get another one. It’s that simple.
I don’t have a gun anymore, but I used to
keep it in a shoebox. Or, then I had got me a tackle-box, like fish
tackle-box, and I put a lock on it because I know my little
brothers come in my room to play. And I would slide it under the
far end of my bed, and I’d throw some dirty clothes on it or
something, to make it look just like my room’s junky.
I was basically dragged into gangbanging.
Because if you related to this person, and they in a gang, their
enemies are going to assume that you’re in a gang, too. Like, so,
you get forced into it. You have no choice. You got to protect
yourself somehow. You gotta…if you out there by yourself, if you
not claimed by a gang…basically, that gang is not going to help
you. If this other gang attacks you, because they think you in a
gang, you out there by yourself. You’re out there alone.
The area I live in has always been rough.
That violence—everything just got out of hand. The streets aren’t
really safe no more, like there’s more gun violence, more gang
violence, drug violence. People getting beaten half to death—or
beaten to death. This side of the street don’t like that side of
the street. I don’t know why, it’s just been like that all this
time.
When I walk at night, it’s like walking
through Baghdad or something. You don’t know when somebody might
pop out or shoot at you. I was standing, and the streetlights all
got cut off for some reason—every now and then they get cut off.
When that happens, that’s when everybody starts shooting.
One time, somebody shot in my grandma’s house
and a bullet missed two inches from my head. Hit the couch pillow.
Another time, when I was 19 years old, I was at my house, and my
mom was around the corner at my grandmother’s house. I was in the
house playing a game. I heard the gunshots, but they sound far
away, so I can’t really tell where they coming from. So I’m
thinking, they could probably be coming from over there by my
grandma’s block. So I’m like, “Nobody’s really getting to it, so
what could have happened?” As I’m walking up the street, I see one
of my friends and I ask him, “Did you hear some gunshots coming
from this direction?” He was like, “Yeah, they was shooting on your
grandma’s block.” So as I was walking down there, I was thinking in
my head, “Please, nobody hurt. Nobody shot.”
But it was my mom. She was just sitting on
the porch. They just came right through, shooting. At first we
thought she was shot in her stomach—though later we realized she
got shot in the hand. So everybody’s mad and angry and upset. Then
everybody just went looking for guns.
It escalated to a big, all-out war. They
would come by and shoot inside my grandma’s house. All the windows
were shot out, with bullet holes in the walls. None of the kids
could stay there because of what happened, so we had to get them
out. But my grandma—they still stayed, I don’t know why, but
luckily nothing ever happened to them. They come, they shoot, and
then we’ll go back and shoot at them.
Nobody knows what the original argument is.
It’s been like that for years. Since my parents, it’s been like
that. Since my mom lived there, nobody on that side of the street
likes this side. And my mom told everybody to leave it alone, let
the police handle it. We were just leaving it alone because she
said it. But they kept shooting at us.
It’s basically all about territory. In this
neighborhood, all the gangs be on the same block. There’s Vice
Lords on this block, Latin Kings on the other block—each block got
their own gang. Whether you gangbang or not, if they see you on
that block, they gonna assume you a Vice Lord or something,
especially if you a male. They’re just going to assume.
Because you can’t really tell who’s
affiliated by looks alone. You can’t do it. There’s a lot of drug
dealers that wear baggy clothes, like baggy jeans. Then you see
these guys who are wearing skinny jeans. Some of the dudes in
skinny jeans don’t like the baggy clothes, and some of those guys
wearing the baggy clothes styles don’t like skinny jeans. Clothes
don’t matter. You gonna try to have something with your gang color
in it. You could have on a whole green outfit and you gonna put on
some red shoes because your gang color is red. That’s how it goes.
So it’s like a fashion thing.
Police don’t understand that. Just because
you have your hat cocked a certain way, that don’t necessarily mean
that you’re in a gang now—that’s more of the style. Everybody cock
their hat now, just to be doing it. Justin Bieber be cocking his
hat, but the police aren’t calling him a Vice Lord.
The police can only help so much, though.
They can’t catch every bad guy, every person with a gun, every
person committing a crime—they can’t catch everybody. It got to be
an internal thing. There’s got to be a person saying that they want
to make a change. People know what they’re doing is not right. They
know deep inside it’s not right. But still, that’s the path they
choose. It’s got to be an internal thing for you to have your own
change. Because if you don’t change, who’s going to change? You got
to set an example for somebody.
I didn’t have a lot of examples of my own.
All the dads in my family are either dead, in jail or hang with
gangs. It’s like no real fathers around, just mostly stepfathers.
We don’t have a dad. All my cousins, brothers, friends—all of them,
same thing. My dad’s a deadbeat. My brother, his dad got killed.
That was my stepfather—that was who I called my dad. He got killed.
My little brother—my youngest brother—his dad is engaged to my mom,
so he’s around. My little sisters—one of my little sisters’ dad,
he’s around. But my other little sister—we share the same dad—he’s
not around. One of my cousins, his daddy’s in jail. His brother’s
dad lives in Atlanta. He’s a deadbeat. His older brother, his dad’s
in jail. And my cousin, his dad’s in jail. His dad’s a deadbeat,
just like mine. That’s something all of us have in common. We joke
about it, but it hurt us, you know what I mean? We joke, “Ah, our
daddies ain’t nothing.” We laugh about it, but we not really
laughing, we’re just expressing ourselves to each other. We don’t
want to seem like a bunch of wimps. We’re telling each other
“You’re not alone in this.”
I don’t want my daughter to feel like she’s
alone in the world. I want to be there when she needs me. I know
how it felt to not have a father and my biggest fear is that I fail
her. I don’t want to become like my dad.
I made high school rough for myself because I
stopped going and started getting in with a tough crowd. I’d be on
my way to school, uniform on, everything, And I’d get a phone call,
like, “Oh, you wanna go play ball?” Or, “Do you want to hang out?”
And I’d just ditch school and go with them. That was their life,
the streets. It was all they knew.
But I just decided to start over. I missed
out on the last semester, so I had to do my senior year over. I
told myself, “No matter what, I’m going to keep going.” I got my
diploma in 2010. I’m the older child, and I didn’t want my little
brothers to see me not graduating. I felt like I was letting them
down by not going to school. And I didn’t want them to go the same
route I
was heading.30
I hate when you see someone fighting for
their goals, for what they want to be and then they die or
something happens to them. Broken dreams. Like, their dreams was
broken and other people see that, and they’ll be like, “Don’t let
that happen to me.” And I’m like, “What should I fight for? What
goals should I set for myself, besides staying alive?”
Like, my cousin Danta. His goal wasn’t to be
someone big or whatever—he was a drug dealer, he always been a drug
dealer, since he was like 10. His goal was to go back to school. He
told me he wanted to go back to school. He was supposed to start on
a Monday. But he was killed that Sunday.
I feel like I just got to take life day by
day. How many days can I get out of it? Nowadays, people my age,
they’re not going to live that long. Every night, I just felt like
I don’t know when it’s going to be my time to go. I hear about it
on the news: A guy my age that lived down the street from me was
killed. That could have been me.
People who aren’t from here don’t have no
clue about how intense it is. They gonna go by what they see on TV
or what they read on the paper. But to really understand how
intense the violence is you got to be living in it. You got to be
part of the danger.
—
Interviewed by Colleen Wick
Endnotes
30 Deshon reports that he now works the
overnight shift at Target.
GOD, ARE YOU TRYING TO
GET
MY ATTENTION?
JORGE ROQUE
Residents of Little Village sometimes refer
to their Southwest Side neighborhood as the “Mexico of the
Midwest.” A tiled, terra-cotta gateway over 26th Street, adorned
with the welcome-greeting “Bienvenidos,” has served as the point of
entry for generations of Chicano immigrants to the city.
Little Village has a rich cultural life,
bustling business district and proud heritage, but like many
inner-city neighborhoods, it is plagued by street gangs, with the
Latin Kings and the Gangster Two-Six Nation locked in a bloody and
long-running rivalry.
Now 36, former Two-Six member Jorge Roque
barely survived his teen years in Little Village. These days, he
devotes himself to getting other young people off the streets. When
we interviewed him in 2011, he was working as program coordinator
for the YMCA’s Street Intervention Program, an anti-gang effort
with a presence in 11 of Chicago’s at-risk communities.31 The
barrel-chested Roque has the hard look of someone who has known
more than his share of tough situations. But as he tells his story,
there’s calm in his voice and compassion in his eyes.
Everything behind the gang is fake. It’s
people wearing masks, guys wearing different masks because they
have to cover the pain that they’re going through, the pain that
they have in their lives. And, for me, that was maybe a fake type
of love and acceptance, but it was that camaraderie between street
soldiers. I always tell people, “Do not judge if you’ve never been
there. Or if you’ve never tasted from that.” Because I’ve seen
gangbanging and drug dealing. It’s an adrenaline—it’s a rush. It’s
like a drug. It’s an addiction of feeling that you’re someone.
Because everyone’s looking for that acknowledgement and acceptance.
That was that one missing thing in our lives.
I was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised
here. In 1977, when I was 1, my parents brought me here to Chicago.
I guess my father had been coming back and forth to the States from
Juarez. He ended up traveling from out of the West Coast and
finally touching down here in Chicago and liking Chicago for
whatever reason. Liking the snow, I guess. And the first community
that they ended up in was Little Village. So they stayed there for
at least seven years, renting an apartment there on 22nd and
Albany.
My parents saved up some money and they were
able to buy their first home, like in 1982 or 1983, in we call it
the suburbs of Little Village, which is west of Pulaski. But
growing up in Little Village, from 1983 on, by Komensky, that was
my block. I had my grammar school there, at Whitney Elementary. We
never really left Little Village. My parents love this
neighborhood, this community. They still own that house.
But with the beauty of the neighborhood of
Little Village, there was the other side. The dark side of Little
Village, when it came to the gangs and drugs and just the violence,
the youth violence, the street violence, kind of impacted my life
as I was growing up there. There were not too many of the role
models that I wanted to look up to. Because I believe it’s a choice
of who you choose to hang with, be around.
The guys that I was kind of looking up to in
my teenage years were the guys on the street corner. Instead of
looking up to the doctors and lawyers, and the young women and
young men that were going to college or university, I kind of chose
the fast lane, the fast lifestyle of just, you know, the drugs and
the money. And just what it offers: that package of making it
easier and living a lot faster, and growing up faster as you
experience violence.
And so at one time in my life, I decided that
I just didn’t want to be an outsider. I made the choice myself,
that I wanted to be part of a street organization in Little
Village. Some people say, “Well, you can blame your parents.” But I
had both parents. I come from a strong family of hard workers. My
father worked long hours to provide and purchase a home.
But it’s also true that I saw a lot of
violence within my home. I got to experience a lot of infidelity
within my father, got to see a lot of domestic violence, got to see
the alcohol problems that he had and just the mistreatment that my
mom experienced. I remember, you know, my dad just coming home at
just two or three in the morning and wanting my mom to cook for
him. I remember going to the bars in the neighborhood, in Little
Village, looking for my dad—me, personally, at the age of 6 or 7,
telling Dad to come home. I got to meet a lot of his girlfriends as
a young kid.
I’m not going to say I blame my parents’
issues or problems at home on the way I turned out. But I know it
did affect me. I started to build a lot of anger towards my father.
When you’re growing up as a Mexican father, parent, you’re brought
up thinking macho. You know? And you can’t cry, you can’t show
emotions, and you can’t hug your child or give him a kiss or give
him words of affirmation and just say, “Man, I’m proud of you.”