Community-Based Gang Intervention Model

After almost a year of ongoing meetings, writing, researching, debating, and fine-tuning, the Community Engagement Advisory Committee (CEAC) -- made up of gang intervention specialists, peace advocates, community leaders, and researchers -- of LA City's Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence & Youth Development, finished its ground-breaking Community-based Gang Intervention Model.

On February 13, the Ad Hoc committee, headed by City Councilman Tony Cardenas, presented this model for approval of the 15-member LA City Council. In an historic vote, the council voted unanimously to approve this model. This is a major victory, however, more must be done to implement such a model across LA's vast poor and working class communities where most gangs are located.

Although gang violence has gone down tremendously since the heyday of the 1980s and 1990s (one fact I came across claims that around 10,000 young people were killed in the LA area by gangs from 1980-2000), LA is still known as the "Gang Capital of the World." Police say there are 700 gangs and 40,000 gang members in LA, not counting the larger LA County area with several hundred more gangs and thousands more gang youth.

It's a real problems deserving of real and serious attention. For example, communities in East LA and South Central LA (now called South LA) have murder rates among African Americans and Latinos as high or higher than the murder rates in South Africa or El Salvador (both these countries have the world's highest murder rates).

However, for several decades, police suppression of gangs has been the main response from the city. These include gang injunctions where whole neighborhoods are put "under arrest" (people have strict curfews and can't interract, even if they'r related, can't have cell phones, baseball bats, and such). They include "three strikes and you're out" where convicted felons can be given 25-to-life prison sentences even for non-violent crimes. They include tearing down of whole housing projects, such as East LA's Aliso Village, which at one time was the largest housing projects west of the Mississippi. They include trying 14 years old as adults, giving kids 50 years and longer sentences (one 14-year-old received a death sentence for an incident in which no one was hurt).

This has only served to squeeze poor communities of color, forcing whole families to move into surrounding areas as well as across the country -- and taking the LA gangs and lifestyle everywhere. Today the biggest gang problem in the US involves LA-based gang structures like Sur Trece, 18th Street, Crips, Bloods, and MS-13, among others.

And we've created the largest prison system in the world, with 175,000 prisoners in close to 35 prisons, in California (thirty years ago the state had 15,000 prisoners in around 15 prisons).

Also US immigration authorities have been targeting immigrant gang youth, particularly after the LA Rebellion of 1992, but also since 1996 when convicted undocumented immigrants could be automatically deported. Since 1996, some 700,000 convicted undocumented felons have been deported, most of them to Mexico and Central America. Today LA-based gangs have become active in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (and recruiting among the poor and war-traumatized youth of those countries), but also Cambodia and Armenia.

CEAC's solutions are to stop this squeezing of our communuities ("concidently" opening up large inner-city areas to high-end development and gentrification) and to provide real resources of jobs, education, skills training, tattoo removal, and re-entry programs for prisoners/juvenile offenders. We want to make gang intervention a well-funed alternative to suppression, with teams of trained gang intervention workers able to move quickly among the gang hot spots. We also have included another prong to provide adequate wrap-around services to youth who need it.

In addition, the CEAC included important aspects of arts & culture (for creative, imaginative and culturally-engaged lives), faith-based/spiritual components, and more to help establish whole and healthy communities that can nurture whole and healthy people, particulary among our youth.

We believe gang intervention must be community-based, driven and led by community, not the police or politicians. Of course, the police, schools, city officials, city departments, and such should be integral to any urban peace plan. We welcome all members of the community to take positive and active steps to curtail the violence that is destroying families and communities.

c/s

Another Friend Passes Over -- RIP raulrsalinas

Raul R. Salinas--also written as raulrsalinas--was an immense inspiration and mentor in my life and writing. Not only was he one of the veterans of Chicano poetry, he was known among the Beats, Jazz poets, and as a leading poet of the prison life after spending 11 years in state and federal prisons in California, Texas, Illinois, and Kentucky. He died today at age 73.

I knew Raul for many years. We took part in Native sweat ceremonies with Barrios Unidos in California; we read poetry together in various events, including in San Anto, Tejaztlan. He also founded La Resistencia Bookstore in Austin, serving as an example to me when I later helped create Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of LA.

One time we found ourselves in hotel rooms next to each other. I walked out into the balcony and saw Raul on his balcony looking into the Texas sky as I was doing. We shared moments about heroin addictions, jails, poetry, but also the Native spirituality we both shared. A couple of times he told me that his favorite poem of mine was "Tombstone Poets," about two heroin-addict poets in East LA.

My favorite of his was his most famous: "Un Trip Through the Mind Jail," a classic of Chicano poetry (actually of any poetry, anywhere). This text appeared in the 1960s and opened up the imaginations and language adventures of vatos like me.

Please go to his website at www.raulrsalinas.com to find out more about his work, his importance in US and world letters, and about La Resistencia.

A true revolutionary, poet of the people, human rights advocate, Native spiritual leader, and a great friend, I will miss Raul very much. I will also honor his life and work by continuing his struggles for the dignity and rights of all people, but in particular the Native peoples of this land, this country, this continent -- this world.

Tlazhokamati y tiahui.

c/s

On the Road Again...

I'm getting ready to embark on a number of trips outside of town. I'll be in New Jersey this coming Monday, February 11. I return after a few days, and then I go to San Francisco for two weeks – to be part of the Mosaic Foundation's Koures Youth Symposium in Santa Rosa, CA (Tia Chucha's Young Warriors is bringing to young leaders as well), which culminates in a public event at the Brava Theater in the Mission district of San Francisco on February 24. I will also take part in programs sponsored by Intersection for the Arts and the Mission Public Library. In addition, I'll be visiting New Folsom prison near Sacramento, a youth detention facility in the Bay Area, and the juvenile halls of San Francisco and Alameda counties. You can get more information on my events page of my website: LuisJRodriguez.com

Then in March I will be visiting universities, high schools, poetry centers, elementary schools, and more in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. I'll be gone through the end of the month. In addition, I have some local schools – primarily those coming to Tia Chucha's for field trips (we have about two a month during the spring).

Traveling about a third of the year, I'm able to sustain my family and to help with Tia Chucha's – it also allows my wife Trini to devote more than 40 hours a week to Tia Chucha's without pay, but also for me to write, accomplish my commitments to Tia Chucha's, other community work, and, most importantly, to spend time with my family.

Recently, I spoke at the New Roads School in Santa Monica, invited by a good friend in a seminal rock & roll bad of the 1960s (I'll keep his name private for now), whose son goes to this school. With a roomful of students, we had a great discussion about gangs, drugs, how to overcome obstacles, the arts, and life in general. I also went to a Creative Writing class of another friend, Mel Donalson, at Cal State University, Los Angeles, where I got to speak about writing in different genres, the fiction dynamic, and my own writing process.

I also had an amazing time at Wilson High School in El Sereno/East LA where I spoke to several assemblies of students. On the walls in the auditorium, the students had placed posters and artwork with scenes from my book “Always Running.” Several young people even got up to read poetry and essays -- and there was two girls who announced that they stopped doing drugs after reading my book. I was very moved.

For Martin Luther King's Jr. birthday commemoration, I co-hosted with Elaine Swann a concert at Golden Hall in San Diego, CA with the incomparable Odetta, and various local singers, dancers, poets, and speakers. Some 600 people came.

I also did three events at the Getty Museum at the Getty Center around the fantastic photo exhibit by one of Mexico's leading photographers, Graciela Iturbide (the exhibit ends April 13, 2008). Her work captures the images of mostly indigenous people of Mexico, including the Tehuanas of Juchitan, Oaxaca (Zapoteca indigenous people), a place close to my heart when in the early 1980s I took part in uprisings against the Mexican government including when farmers, workers, students, and indigenous communities took over the city hall and demanded equal representation. It was quite a time – they were quite a people.

Graciela spent many years among them and these photos are internationally acclaimed. She also spent a couple of days in East LA and was one of the few Mexican photographers to capture the Cholo cultural phenomena of Chicanos in the 1980s – mostly women, many of whom were born deaf after a particularly powerful epidemic hit East LA's Mexican community in the 1960s.

I ended up speaking to a group of college and university professors as well as teachers at the Getty earlier in January. Then at the end of that month, I spoke to a group of students, black and brown, from Locke High School in Watts (the school was actually built on top of where my oldest sister once lived, and where I stayed a couple of summers when I was a kid).

This exhibit also allowed the Getty Museum to organize a panel of Chicano artists and writers to discuss art, Chicano life, and the Cholo culture, among other things, in the context of Iturbide's work. Visual artists Ernesto de la Loza and Alma Lopez as well as novelist Yxta Maya Murray were on the panel that I moderated to a fairly packed house on January 27. Powerful ideas, visions, and even critiques (in particular about museums, the Getty included) were on the table. However, we also affirmed our Chicano realities and the diverse means these are expressed in Chicano art, especially over the past 40 years. It turned out to be a rich and powerful discussion, including with the audience. I thank the Getty for inviting us to have this exchange.

Finally, I want to draw everyone's attention to an important upcoming event with the theme of “Common Roots, Common Dreams: A Celebration of the Commonality of Black and Mexican Culture & History.” With all the recent media attention on Black & Brown conflicts, this is in honor of what actually unites us and the reality that African Americans and Mexicans are more united than divided. Sponsored by Rock A Mole Festivals, CDs & Films, the event will be held Sunday, February 17 from 6 to 10 PM at Industry Cafe & Jazz, 6039 Washington Blvd. in the heart of the Arts District of Culver City. Food, beer and wine will be available.

This is a free event – Rock A Mole (rhymes with guacamole) festivals generally are. I'll be one of the hosts, and will do a poetry collaboration with one of LA's best performance poets, BessKepp. Also on hand will be new music with “Ten East” jazz band and a traditional Mexican band, “La Santa Cecilia;” a short play, “The First Embrace” that will depict Mexico's embrace of fugitive slaves despite enormous pressure from the US during the mid-1800s; a beat box chorus with both break dancers and traditional Mexican dancers; the world premiere of a new poem by Mike the Poet celebrating the ongoing synergy between Black and Mexican culture; and a killer house band with Fre Ballesteros (my favorite saxophone player in LA) of the Boxing Gandhis on sax, Michael Suicer of the Ray Charles Orchestra on drums, Boudro of the Gladys Knight band on bass, and G Mack of Polyester Players (who's played with the likes of Mary J. Blige) on guitar (singing will be one of my favorite singers in the city, and the creator of the music for my CD “My Name's Not Rodriguez,” Ernie Perez – musical director is Carvell Holloway, who also did the great trumpet solos on my CD).

To top it off some of the best African American and Mexican/Chicano poets and rappers will be performing, including TamaraBlue, Metaphysics, Sarah Cruse, Busstop Prophet, Ant Black, and Redemption (Redencion of Guanajuato, Mexico), among others. For more information, go to rockrap@aol.com.

Don't miss this!