Maras: a round trip San Salvador, Los Angeles

INTERVIEW / Juan Carlos Narváez Gutiérrez

After studying migrations between the United States and Mexico for a number of years, Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Narváez decided to immerse himself fully in the world of Maras, or transnaItional gangs (also known as pandillas) after a visit to El Salvador. “ It was a personal trip, I arrived at the city of San Salvador in December of 2002 and it was there that my sociological eye found new bearings; my previous work was limited to the cultural products generated in the area around the Mexico and United States border” said Narváez.

 “Ruta transnacional: a San Salvador por Los Ángeles. Espacio de interacción juvenil en un contexto migratorio”, (or in loose translation: “Transnational routes: to San Salvador through Los Angeles. Areas of youth interaction in a setting of migration,”) was the result of Narváez’s close and detalied study of former and current members of maras. In the book Narváez establishes connections between migration and youth, and the phenomenon of transnational gangs whose members circulate – mostly through deportation – between the United States and Central America.

 “During my stay in El Salvador I was able to realize that the maras, as a subject, are in the streest, that it is tattooed on collective memory and that it is part of the national agenda. The creation of the Mara Salvatrucha in Central America is a result of the forçed migrations that took a large contingent of Salvadoreans to establish themselves in the 1980’s in the United States. On could say that Mara Salvatrucha 13 is the result of a Salvadorean diaspora in California, they are the sons of war, a war that is not ending,” said the researcher.

Comunidad Segura talked to Narváez about the maras and about a few attempts to use their structures as tools for social inclusion, such as is the case of the Homies Unidoes and California’s Father Gregory Boyle.

Aside from theory, your book includes a number of interviews. How did these interviews take place? Where your subjects interested in telling their stories? And how did they react to the fact that you are a researcher?

To carry out an investigatio of this type meant more than a few challenges. Firstly I how to approach the community that is marginalized in the United States. Secondly, there was the political timing of my research, that coincided with the mano dura policy both in the United States and in El Salvador, which placed me always under suspicion in their communities. More than once I was subjected to exhausting interrogations about who I was, my work and why this interest in them.

My approach was to start with the community first and then go to the individuals, and along the way I would meet their leaders and the organizations present there. That is why the book has this structure, so as to lead readers to understand the origins of the displacements of the Salvadoreans with the 1980’s civil war as a background, their establishment in Los Angeles, the interaction with other migrant groups – mexicans in their majority –  the creation of ethnic gangs (pandillas) and a few model interventions on the same foundations. In the end what helped me enter the world of the youths associated to the pandillas was the fact that, in the United States, they were Salvadoreans and I was Mexican, all of us Latin Americans.

After a many decades of Central American immigration into Los Angeles, according to statistics cited in your book, Central American youths are no longer a minority, if compared to anglo-saxons, afro-americans, asians or native-americans. Why do the maras still have a role of self-affirmation today?

Today the Mara Salvatrucha is one of the largest Central American gangs in California and El Salvador. Originally, the MS13 would exalt their ethnic roots over other groups, such as Mexicans, Afro-americans, Native-americans or Russians. The name is one that is carried with pride in one’s nation, of being Salvadorean above all else. That is how they are born and that is where their identity derives its strength.

Now, although the pandilla grew exponentially over the past 15 years, in Los Angeles there is a gang culture that predates the Mara Salvatrucha: the pachuquismo and the cholismo are direct predecessors of the MS13 or the Barrio 18 gang, this last one known as Mara 18 in the media, that came out of the Eighteen Street Gang.

M 18 came into existence in the 1960’s by mexicans and chicanos especially, the story of its origins is a good example to talk about the transformation of the pandillas in the begining of the 21st century, and to differentiate among the pandillas regionally, since what we see in Central America today with the MS13 and the Mara 18 is a scenario that comes out of the gang culture as its was developed in Northamerica, but it becomes more acute and potent in Latin America because of poverty, marginalization, violence and the lack of State presence.
 
Have these groups changed?

Concepts such as friendship, carnalismo, solidarity, respect and support or understanding have faded into the background. I am not saying they are dead, but this structure of high social capital that the pandillas are, have become centers for bigger and lesser crimes.

This is a second generation mareros, youths who do not have a direct link with the migrations of the 1980’s into the United States, but that have adopted their notion of what it is to be young in Central America through the cultural packages that are sent through deportees, these are youths who in face of a lack of options – lack of jobs, of education- sees gangs as the only possible venue for self realization.

En California es otra historia. La lucha interétnica por el espacio es la constante: barrios, escuelas, trabajos segregados socio-espacialmente son el eje de la cotidianidad. El cine desde Zoot Suit, American Me, Blood in blood out, y recientemente Wats up rockers, muestran como este rito de paso ha trastocado la cultura de las comunidades latinas en USA.

In California, however, its a different story. There are constant inter-ethnic struggles over space: neighborhoods, schools, jobs that are segragated socially and geographicallly, this is every day life. It comes up in many films about Latino communities in the US, among them Zoot Suit, American Me, Blook in blood out, and Wats up rockers are a few examples.

The crack down on maras resulted youth prisons outnumbering  community schools in Los Angeles county. Does this reinforce the cycle of exclusion-violence-more exclusion? Does repression work when it comes down to making Los Angeles a safer community?

Governments define their policies for youth on the association of youth and violence. That is to say, they maintain and promote areas of social control and limit their creativity. Prisons and mano dura policies have shown that they are not appropriate to face the problems of gangs. In the United States we are looking at a culture that has gone from the 20th to the 21st century and is just as strong now as when it began; a structure is being maintained in which economic, racial, ethnic, work, religious and political segregation includes all of society; security resides in cultural respect and violence is greated by ignorance and a lack of understanding of the other. In Northamerica there is heightened emotion when a new neighbor arrives, whether we are talking about Asians, Hindus, Salvadorean, Nicaraguans, or the new Colombian neighbour that is moving into the next door apartment, this opens up an opportunity for confrontation, as absurd as it may sound, it is real.

Please describe for us the experience of George and the Homies Unidos in California, based on taking advantage of the maras’ structure to disseminate positive values and offering opportunities for education and social inclusion in general.

In the mid 1980s the Homies Unidos were created by founding members of a number of gangs in the Los Angeles areas, veteran gang members such as Alex Sánchez who had lived in a gang since his teenage years, and who like him, decide work in youth intervention to lower the rates of violence both inside and outside the gangs, as well as to influence young people to stop drug abuse.

The model adopted by the Homies Unidoes is used by other organizations such as Father Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, and both share the notion you must work with young gang members by respecting their identities and respective memberships. The interesting thing about Homies Unidos is that they do their work both in Los Angeles and in El Salvador, they have a workshop and carry out a couple programs in social reinsertion with jobs, school and political activities in both the Northamerican and the Salvadorian societies.

Is there real support for such initiatives in society?

From the point of view of the community and the governmental institutions- by which I mean the police – the work of the Homies Unidos is not treated with great credibility, and in fact they interfere in the work of the organization. A couple of months ago, the FBI arrested Alex Sánchez, director of Homies, accusing him of maintaining connections to the MS13, where he had indeed been an active member over 10 years ago. Additionally, in El Salvador, more than one of the directors of the Homies Unidos have been killed since it was created, and its members have been killed, murdered both by the police and by members of active gangs.

The migrations are not going to stop, nor are the deportations... What could change in the model that we are using to address the violence created by the maras?
 
The international migrations will not stop, on the contrary, they are more diverse, there are new destinations both in the interior of Northamerica and in Europe: ethnic gangs are multiplying as an alternative for disillusionment: Latinkings, the Ñetas, Trinitarios, Mara Salvatrucha,  Sureños, Norteños, all of them are based on identities and socio-cultural designs that express an instatisfaction with nations, the world and its systems of domination.

The Mano Dura policies do not bring youths into the national dream, they on the contrary, desintegrate the personal dreams of the Latin American youth, this was true for the societies of origin and it is true for the host societies. The United States is becoming more Latin, the hispanic population will be the largest ethnic minority in Northamerica by the middle of the 21st century, the second generation citizens are transforming the cultural map of America, and its mobility implies in change that is both visible and imperceptible, and are deeply ingrained with dilemmas and contradictions around the profound adjustments of the global societies. Simulated democracies, social inclusion through exclusion, these are scenarios that today, in the height of globalization, teach us what the future will be like.

Translated by Lis Horta Moriconi

Read Further:

Nothing stops a bullet like a job, an exclusive interview with Father Gregory Boyle, of the Homeboy Industries.

In Spanish:

Maras en Centroamérica

 Jóvenes y violencia 

Versión online del libro

Migración y Desarrollo