It Is What It Is

By Anonymous / Winter 2023

I’ve known strong men, hard men, and strong women. You can tell by what they don’t say. The quiet places conversations go when the words are worthless. There wasn’t a higher honor than to sit lower-than-eye level in the organic shape my father and his friends would make on the staircase in front of one of the childhood homes back then. I learned story and the power of connection and shared history. The cost for admission was being the one to get the beer from the fridge for whoever was empty. I was the oldest boy, 7 or 8, and I felt like a good little soldier - watching these men with their tattoos and scars just laughing while skillfully ‘telling a thousand lies’, as they called it, back then.

This reminds me of the words of Takaki and Zinn, and the methods of Steinbeck. They either extolled the neglected histories of the societally insignificant or wrote their stories, like sneaking in the truth through the backdoor. Shout out Grapes of Wrath. I’ve long felt that we are what we tell ourselves and identity is formed by narrative. This notion gained rebar during this course. I think it worthwhile to spend a decent amount of one's life inspecting conditions and culprits, sifting through ideas and words, searching for a bit of gold or some lesser metal with a nice shape at least. I’d like to explore that a bit more here. With a few accounts from the lives of my Father and Tio, I’d like to cut open some roots of the family tree and watch how the sap gathers.

The plan here is time-travel. I’ll go into these stories, these memories, and narrate a touch like a ghost. If the personal is political, there are seeds of revolution in the tales of our forebears.

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Look at them. They are young and they are brothers. In the ‘all in’ way that can only come from lack and grit. One has a bit of curl to his hair and darker skin. That's my Pops. He has higher cheekbones and a quick jaw, his eyes are dark and bright and never far from his younger brother's location. The other, my Tio, was light-skinned and light on his feet. The boy was quick. They played soccer forever each day, even when the sun gave way to sketchy streetlights. They didn’t know they were poor quite yet. But they knew other hard things. Already having attended a few funerals of their friends' older brothers, it seemed like a mismatched reality. How does a kid in the apartment next to you, who you make kool aid with and was still nervous around girls, take that last breath in a pool of blood? We are in the mid 70’s and we are watching my Pops stand in front of my Tio, half-heartedly blocking the image. But it wasn’t an image, not a damn photo. It was real as the heat in summer. That kid was just crumpled, like how a marionette would look if all string were cut midway through his dance. My Pops always said the world was supposed to keep death for the old, and it wasn’t something to be feared, more like an old friend you forgot you knew coming back and bringing you home for the first time. That’s how it should be, he’d say, righteously.

Now, let's take a beat here. It is near impossible to get the knot out of my throat as I recall this layered memory. I’d always be a bit angry at my grandfather for not getting my Pops and Tio away form the neighborhood, but where the fuck where they supposed to go? My grandfather was something of a soccer legend in his city, but he grew up in the 50’s hearing stories of becoming a bracero, which was a program that brought in low-wage labor from Mexico to fill the void born from WWII. He knew the only way to have any better of a life for himself and his future family was to find a way into the US. That ticket came in the way of being signed to a traveling soccer team. On one of his travels, he was told they were heading to Seattle, WA. He went, managed to allude his handlers, and made his way to find work in the apple orchards. He didn’t speak English, but the other workers helped him enough. He’d eventually make it to CA, where he’d work those fields and he saw the beginnings of the mood shifting, paving the way for people like César Cháves and Dolores Huerta. But he didn’t have the heart for a movement, he had the colder methods of a hustler, and made those tactics work for him and his small family.

Taking this larger view, I can understand the good and bad of the nuclear family, the pitting of the small unit against the others small units, and the system at large. This sense of survival at all costs, had costs. It brought my Pops and Tio into a world not shaped for them, but in spite. The life and ways my grandfather lived caught up with him. Those old ghosts came to live within his children. I actively can see the decisions of my grandfather and their impacts on myself, and his great-grandchildren as well, yet, we can see the decisions were forced as well. Simple economics, really. There is always a hungry mouth that needs feeding, and always a dangerous way to make that happen. There is a world I envision, one that my grandfather joined the labor movement and used his skills there - you know, wore the pin and had the picket signs, I can see it clearly, his big smile. If nothing else, his smile got him far in life and with people.

Let’s travel to another time, when the young boys of the previous tale grow up a bit. They are still teenage boys, but they look like young men. They never leave the apartment without immaculately ironing their shirt and pants with starch and running the combs that never left their pockets throughout their hair a couple hundred times. My father was 17 when he became a father. My Tio, a year later, at 17, followed suit. It could be said they were children having children, but they left the ways of children years prior - they became men not by age, but pain. They both have been in and out of jail, they both were founding members of the gang, they both never left the other behind. ‘You go, I go’ was a thing my Pops always said. He’d laugh and say, back then, even the darkness of an alley was afraid of them when they were together. You have to remember, they didn't romanticize the ‘gang’ life. It wasn’t like the rap shit on tv in the 90’s/2000’s. It was kids that grew up together, with their fathers not always around, that had to band together by dint of location and safety in number. When you don’t have a dime in your pocket, and the small neighborhood is the closest thing to community you got, then it is no surprise they make a world of it. The tattoos of addresses and zip codes, block names and cities and counties, even cardinal directions. It’s as if the idea of ‘home’ was in their hearts, but they knew it wasn’t like tv, this shit wasn’t a Hallmark movie.

This is when their lives changed. Over time, the fistfights turned into shootouts. More dead bodies and fatherless boys dying leaving their brand new sons in the same position. I was in my mothers belly and the time was coming. I was a quick birth, under 2 hrs on New Years Eve. My Ma brags about how easy it was, how calm she felt. But all the ease and calm went faster than it came. The insane parts of these turf wars and gang battles is that once they begin, they don’t end until the price is paid back. It’s endless, it needs to claim every aggressor as the next victim til they are all dead or in prison. It was a night where the receiving end of retribution was my Tio. My father was en route to visit me at the hospital. He wasn’t there long. A youngseter from the neighborhood was sent to get him. My Tio had been shot and he wanted my Pops with him. So, with his feet feeling like bricks, he tells me it was slow motion and his head was just spinning. He got there and piled my uncle into his 63 impala. The revenge wasn’t over. More cars of the enemy came and unloaded clips. My Pops body took 7 bullets. There, in that car, the little boys that used to play soccer forever gurgled blood thinking of their sons and the mistakes made.

Here is violence and need are blended together. Similar to my grandfather, my Pops and Tio had to find ways now not only to make money, but to keep themselves and their families safe. We know the plans of different neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego were sliced and diced up to protect the wealthy and usually white and the scrap parts of the inner city were left for the poor and usually brown. This is the type of things that happen when people live on top of each other, when their schools don’t have the materials that explain how their barrios came about, some would say, civilly engineered. My Pops never heard of Marx, but he knows exactly what it is to stretch a meal with a cousin or a friend who’s minimum wage job fired him after the boss called him a lowlife spic. I loved the writings of the thinkers that talked against bastardizing the criminal. It was during the time of eugenics and the ideas of Galton were getting around. A detractor said in a more poetic fashion, that it was degeneracy or ill blood that made the criminal, but the social circumstances he was dropped into. The argument was simple and compassionate, almost. Something to the effect that if the mind of these criminals were given to bodies with means and security, they’d be geniuses by any other name. I’d agree. It takes an amazing mind to be born into such scenarios and not lose oneself entirely. It takes master level creativity and imagination to know that there must be a way to escape, if not for themselves, for their children. But, then again, for each of these there are dozens that treat it more like fish treat the ocean. Like there is nothing more, how could there be?

Back to the scene. The outcome left my father with a ‘zipper’ down his stomach where they opened him up like a duffel bag to remove the bullets and similar scars around his abdomen and forearm. He lived, so did my Tio. But the anger at being responsible for what happened to my Pops caused my Tio to react as expected. More deaths and no longer jail time. It's a prison. For life. How can you tell a person that started life 18 years ago that he will finish it within a cement cage? I don’t know, but our country does it all the time. My family joined those that lost a member to the carceral state.

The loss of his brother killed a part of my Pops in a way the bullets could only dream of. His partner, his side-kick, the kid he never took his eyes off, was gone. That this looming government can just take your brother forever, the real forever, not the playing soccer forever of his childhood. It took years, but we finally left the neighborhood and moved to the suburbs when I was just old enough to feel freedom for the first time. Clean streets and quiet nights to sleep safely in with the windows open. I think about the cost and the ways it all could have been avoided, and not.

I feel it begs to be compared with the military state of the world. I think it natural to think different levels of magnification have similar results, like the fractals of a snowflake when you zoom in or out. What is the difference between a gang on the streets and that of the American military?

They both have geographic locations to whom they swear allegiance to and defense of. They both have strict hierarchies born of time and acts done in the name of the group. They both have garb/regalia, signifying their groups and bone fides.

They both have weapons and recruit young men to use them against other young men. They both start from necessity and then stay and grow for money, using the myths as marketing.

They both have codes of conduct and internal methodologies of course correction. They both put the whole above the one, the group above the individual.

I get reminded of Chomsky and his understanding of the techniques the evil geniuses like Bernays and propaganda formed to manufacture the consent of the populace. It was just or even more insidious within the various gang cultures in southern california. It becomes more politically once you enter the prison system. Like normal American citizens who are beaten over the heads with lies from their government, so too the upper brass of the California gang systems controls the outside from the inside. The parallels of these two entities is a decent place as any to pull apart the story told to us by those in power. To enter a space of understanding that the teenager from Iowa who’s fathers’ fathers’ father was a military battle boy and that so too the youngsters today in east los angeles are the next generation of their families ‘military’, I think we can begin critique through the lens of compassion. My Pops and Tio were transitional lives for my sisters, brothers and cousin. We are living lives they could not imagine when they were our age. It is the bittersweetness of internal family progress, respect and love for what was necessarily done for the next generations elevations, but with the knowledge and respect to understand the responsibility is ours to never go back.

As I think of these acts done by and to my family, there is a pull of pain and pride that floods me. And also, on another level, if for a second I could reach outside myself and my position in this family- I feel unspeakable regret for the fact that my sense of loyalty and love were a product of their antithesis. By way of treating these stories as the microcosm for the greater social situation we find ourselves in, I believe there is hope to be had. Maybe not directly for my generation, but hopefully the next. The tools are there for the taking, if we could just take them.

I’d like to end with a lighter note. My Tio is up for parole and deportation in just under a decade at the age of 65. He will be forced to go back to where my grandfather stole himself away from all those years ago. My Pops plans to buy land and build a large house to retire into with my Tio. He tells me he is excited just to sit and reminisce when the time comes for him and his baby brother to be together again. I wonder if that’s what the great preachers of peace thought about when they spun the gold tapestry of their speeches. I wonder if MLK imagined a home in heaven to retire too with his family, both blood and otherwise. I feel like they did. They knew, like we know, the journey is fraught, but it must ‘bend towards justice’.

I get the tears forming when I consider what time of man I’d be if either of my younger brothers were taken from me the way my Tio was from my Pops. But they weren’t, my Pops made sure of that. I think about what my nephews will be like and the system they will grow up and into. All I know, Is as long as I live I will make sure they are not seperated. And I stretch the idea further, if it was possible to see one another as brothers, then we could extend that sentiment: Never let us be separate. That is the highest calling, that death of the the sin that is separation. It is what it is.