In my capacity as a chaplain at a local county hospital, I recently had occasion to accompany a farnily from Mexico as they mourned the slow death of a young man who was for them brother, son, father and husband. Police in our community quickly attributed the brutal murder to raging gang rivalries between a faction of Los Angeles’ notorious Eighteenth Street gang and another local gang, but the veracity of this claim has never been established. For me, Donna DeCesare’s excellent article, “The Children of War: Street Gangs in EI Salvador,” [NACLA, July/August 1998] could not have been more timely or penetrating, arriving as it did the morning after the young man died from massive brain damage due to bullet wounds.
As our team of chaplains shared a 72-hour vigil with the patient’s family and friends, we were constantly aware of the volatile public mood generated by erroneous media reports, and of the persistent presence of law enforcement officers not far from the patient’s bedside, ostensibly for the protection of hospital staff. Despite all this, the vigil was completely incident free. We were offered pieces of the young man’s story by his friends and family, and we watched his homeboys arrive to pay their last respects in tearful, restrained silence, as they gathered around in shifts to mourn his parting.
After such a grievous and exhausting experience, DeCesare’s article was instrumental in helping me put much of what I had seen and heard into a coherent, more informed understanding of gang life and culture. Her detailed, informed analysis of many of the current and historical reasons for the emergence of groups like Eighteenth Street gang, especially within the Latino immigrant community, was enlightening and moving. And, as the best of reportage does, DeCesare’s article invited a more considered, nuanced response to this complex societal issue. DeCesare offers an urgently needed corrective to most press coverage about gangs, for she insists on viewing her subjects as whole persons with profoundly human, complicated stories and motives.
