Beyond the Stigma: Geography of an Identity

For six days they fled through the underbrush from the Salvadoran army, near the Honduran border. The families pushed on with the slowness of iguanas, having taken the worst of roads, taking ridiculous detours to avoid the soldiers and their tireless dogs. They thought the road would be flanked by men from the Frente Farabundo Martí, but the soldiers had dug their talons into the Frente and stayed behind to protect themselves. Fredi had admired the Frente men since he was a boy. He liked cleaning their rifles and listening to them talk when they came by the ranch. Sometimes a beautiful woman came, armed to the teeth, who put the men in their place, making them whistle under their breath and stand up straight. She was tough with her compañeros, but with Fredi, she acted like a sweet mother.

Something of that sweetness was in his own mother, he says. So small and fragile, she never complained even during the steepest stretches up the mountain path. The only thing that upset her during the journey was the children’s cries. Not Fredi’s, but the babies’. If they made noise, the soldiers’ dogs would hear them. So when they started crying, their dad, a big, brusque man, softened up, speaking to them gently. That frosty night, they decided to camp, as well as they could, on a terrible slope. The soldiers, who are some real dumb asses, Fredi said, wouldn’t expect that. Even then, at six years old, Fredi was already very adept, he remembers.

They split up, directed by his father and the other men. They sent Fredi with an uncle to the highest part of the slope, and his sister with an aunt, a very brave woman from the Frente, to the precipice below. The rest of his family stayed in the middle with others from the community, and with the baby. They were almost at the point of letting themselves fall asleep when they heard the dogs. It was a faint barking at first. The children, not Fredi, started crying. His mother rocked his little brother.

He has thought a lot about that moment, why his father did what he did. And even though he doubts it, he thinks, feels, that his father probably thought it best to stake his life to save the rest of them. “The soldiers opened fire and killed him, and that’s when the massacre began,” Fredi says, now locked up and harassed by a security guard, who grudgingly trades more visiting time for a cigarette and our attention to a short lecture.

With the gunshots Fredi cried at first; later he became quiet. They didn’t let him see the killing. His uncle grabbed him and they continued on, up the slope. “When the sun came up, I didn’t feel anything anymore,” Fredi says. Years later, when rivals from the 18th Street Gang shot at him in Los Angeles, he felt the same way—“nothing, as if I had left my body.” The survivors reunited in a little valley near Honduras. “There were very few of us, and my uncles were crying. Not me. That’s when I became a man, and I soon realized that men don’t cry, or else they get fucked up.”

*

The night Fredi met Nayeli, the Guatemalan girl who would become his queen and the mother of his son, Angelito, he was coming from a mission to reclaim merchandise the 18 had stolen from his gang, or mara, the Mara Salvatrucha. And nothing makes the MS homies more nervous than a couple of assholes walking beyond where they should. Fredi got the order from the boss of his clique, Marcos, a very well-respected and feared jenja.

The jenja is the figure who establishes, preserves, and enforces an unshakable order within every clique of a mara. The cliques are cells, numbering in the hundreds, that cover the territory of Central American migrations and counter-migrations, across the poor countries that expel their people to the United States. The jenja gave the order to attack the 18’s hideout, and Fredi, who since the age of six was very adept, executed it perfectly.

The power of the top jenja, or undisputed boss of the gang, descends vertically through the local and regional bosses over occasionally sedentary bodies like Fredi’s. For every male member of a mara there is also a haina like Nayeli, warlike young women empowered to fight but barred from leadership. And in the center of the mara’s perpetual motion, there are the homies, comrades who just as easily punish the disloyal as they shelter each other against the feeling of rootlessness—in San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Tecún Umán, Ciudad Hidalgo, the Mexican megalopolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco. The homies are neighborhood, family, the primordial group, and the clearest sign of loyalty and permanence. As translocal migrants, mareros don’t confine themselves to any single territory, because they were ejected from their homes long ago, and their feeling of rootlessness is their principal strength. If “stability” engenders certainty, constant movement is the bearer of learning.

Fredi met Nayeli in Orange County, the home of Disneyland, and just seeing her he knew she had two things he loved. First, she looked like the brave, beautiful woman from the Frente, the one who loved to muss his hair on the ranch. Second, Nayeli never stopped talking, even if the jenja himself told her to. And she looked like his mother, skinny and petite. Fredi was 19, Nayeli, 16.

After recovering the stolen goods, Fredi went to Carl’s, a local burger joint, with his homie Pedro, who later died, but that’s another story. “And this beautiful haina served us,” he says. “Green eyes, like mine, but less faded. And Pedro started flirting with her, but she only had eyes for me, and I pretended like nothing was happening and let time pass. So Pedro goes, ‘Let’s go, homie, let’s go, we’re in dangerous territory.’ And I said, ‘It’s OK, wait just a minute.’ In the end, he left and I stayed waiting for Nayeli, who was alone in L.A. because her mom was deported. We’ve been together for seven years and we have a son named Angel, who’s with his mom in the women’s prison. It’s been months since I’ve seen him.”

Fredi was 15 when he joined the Mara Salvatrucha. It was a different time. The MS began in L.A.’s Barrio 13, founded almost entirely by Salvadorans, along with a few Guatemalans. He was tapped to take on the Crazy Riders, a minor but fierce clique. They had ripped off a gold chain from Gato, a homie from El Salvador, whose father had given it to him before he crossed the border. “It was a big affront, you know,” Fredi says. “A family heirloom. We had to find those guys and give them what was coming to them.” Gato was later charged with murder. But Fredi, who always escaped, even in the worst predicaments, slipped away from the police by a hair. He learned in that first test that you can suddenly be left alone, and that even if they lock up or kill a homie, there will be another homie, another brother, in your own clique or in another, who will watch your back. That’s the mara.

The worst of his imprisonments was when he was deported, after the cops saw his tattoos and picked him up. “No matter what I said, they were going to send me back. I told them over and over: ‘American citizen, American citizen.’ ” His uncle had gotten Fredi’s papers in order. And Fredi had grown up, a North American like any other, like his friends in the clique, pledging allegiance to the flag and singing “America the Beautiful.” But it earned him nothing in that time of deportations. Every homie they caught, they locked him up or killed him, and they began forcing people to return to the countries thought to be their true homelands: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala.

Others stayed in Mexico, where the mara became stronger, bigger, another thing entirely. Nayeli left the United States with Fredi, so their son is Salvadoran. Fredi would have liked him to have been born in Pico Union, the immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles where he grew up. He dreams of being released from prison and returning, with Nayeli and the boy, to MacArthur Park, the heart of Pico Union. “You always have the barrio inside you,” he says.

*

Fredi likes to jump back in time to the first of the borders he stealthily approached: the one near Tecún Umán, the last stop in Guatemala before crossing over to Ciudad Hidalgo, on the Mexican side. It was there that don Cato would sit in the mornings in front of a big fan and put an ice tray in front of his legs. He didn’t move, watching the comings and goings at Tijuanita, the bar. “It was a really badass city, good nightlife,” Fredi says. “Lots of Salvadoran girls, even a Cuban one. And don Cato, who was in charge of the place, came to like me.”

Don Cato, a Mexican, was from Tapachula, but had been living in Guatemala for a while. He had been an oil worker and had some money to spare, and he preferred to station himself in a place like Tecún Umán. There, at the starting point of migrants’ journeys, they still had some money in their pockets. The months Fredi spent in Tecún Umán gave him the opportunity to have don Cato as a teacher. His training began with hunting scorpions. He quickly learned how to kill them, throwing a well-aimed stone from afar.

There, Fredi had a new notion of family—his uncle, his uncle’s wife, his aunt, and one of his cousins, who “wasn’t in his right mind.”

His uncle got a job at the railroads and spent those months saving every penny for the trip north. “We had to hire Mexican coyotes, who were some real assholes. I don’t even remember how much it cost, but between the money my uncle put up and the tips I added in Tijuana, we came up with money for an asshole they called El Tepache, and that’s how we went.”

In Veracruz, where they arrived with his sick cousin and sobbing aunt Amparito, everything went better than expected. Fredi had never seen the ocean, and with the port full of oil workers, his aunt set up a stall where the men fought over her hot pupusas. Finally his uncle could rent a big room.

Fredi had room for a dog he picked up off the street. He called it Tijuanito, after don Cato. “Veracruz was fun. From there we went with our own money to Mazatlán, far up north, but also near the water. I think I was already eight years old. Now that I’m talking about it, it seems easy, but within two years they killed my whole family, and I smiled playing in the waves or looking for dough for my aunt’s pupusas. Amparito had a very successful business. She even opened franchises in the United States.”

But the worst stretch still lay ahead, crossing into the United States. He only remembers his uncle’s cousins, all those unknown relatives his father had left up north. It was late at night. Everything was silent. Their relatives stood in a line, with lanterns, waiting for them. He was cold; it was January, and the little jacket he was wearing barely shielded him from the wind in that desert that seemed to have no end.

*

That night, in the tunnel beneath the train tracks in Guadalajara, Fredi was scared. When finally Angelito went to sleep, exhausted by diarrhea, they heard loud voices. Now we’re fucked, he thought to himself. Mexican immigration was conducting an operation with the Centaurs, a special police unit dressed in black uniforms. Since 9/11 the Mexican border police have been very tough, having become the first line of defense.

The police lined them up, about 30 people, mostly young. Fredi and Nayeli didn’t know any of the others, but they all went together into the tunnel to sleep. Everyone knew it was the safest place, thanks to the oral culture of migrations. Fredi had prepared for this moment, having bought fake Mexican passports and practiced his “Yes, jefe,” “excuse me,” and “we’re coming from Veracruz.”

The first in line was a pretty girl. A Centaur gently pushed her with his rifle toward the immigration official.

“What’s your name?”

“Patricia, sir. Estrada. Patricia Estrada, sir.”

“Are you from here?”

“From Guadalajara, sir?”

“Don’t get slick, muchacha. From here, Mexico.”

“Ah, well, the truth is, no, sir.”

“From where?”

“From Honduras, sir, but I have my papers, look.”

The official passed the papers to another functionary, who looked them over with a human rights observer. Both decided they were fake, and she was taken out of line.

“Where are you from?”

“From right here, jefe. I’m Mexican.”

“Do you have your papers?”

“What, I need papers to be in my own country?”

The official got pissed off and said, “We’ve got ourselves a lawyer.” And he added with irony: “A human rights defender!”

They separated him and took him with the young woman and three others.

Fredi held Angelito close. The dehydrated baby wasn’t even crying anymore. Nayeli made the first move.

“Help us,” she said to the official in a commanding voice, pointing to Angelito. “We came from Veracruz and we’re going to Mochis to see some relatives and look for work. We don’t have any money and the boy is dying.”

Fredi took out the passports, which were well worth their price, because the second official in charge and the human rights observer assented. The official himself told them, “Well, all right, while we look into this, you’ll go right away to the Red Cross. They’ll take care of you there while we verify your information.”

With the siren on, they went straight to the hospital. A doctor even came out to receive them. They admitted Angelito without major questioning, and the doctor carefully looked over the boy and verified the dehydration.

Fredi clutched his scapular and decided to say as little as possible. Nayeli was exhausted by the feat of having deceived the Mexican migra, for the time being. That night must have been a busy one, because neither the official, a Centaur, nor the observer showed up at the hospital. Angelito spent three days there recuperating from rotavirus.

In the early hours, waiting outside the intensive care unit, Fredi met El Jabón, a calm guy who had his dying sister in the hospital. “A man’s man, you know?” Fredi says. They began conversing and soon enough became friends, compas, homies.

*

His gang years caused Fredi serious problems with his aunt Amparito. The family, which fed him and sent him to school, had been strong, but between caring for the cousin with Down syndrome and pestering Fredi not to drop out of school like his friends, his aunt lost her morale. He felt guilty, but nothing could make him leave the gang, not even if he had to face a great emptiness. The stupid cousin got all the extra attention that he, clearheaded and smart, would never get.

His friend from the gang had named his cousin El Subwoofer, for the sound he made when he whined. And Fredi defended him from the worst jokes, because in the end, he always loved him. When la migra got Fredi, Subwoofer was sick with pneumonia. Amparito couldn’t forgive Fredi for dropping out of school. He spent all his time with the gang, a real loco, smoking joints and doing cocaine. “In the end, I was really distracted, and then they got us—Sapo, the jenja Motroco, and me. We were coming from a bad fight with Los Ñetas, and they got us.”

“Where are you from?”

“American citizen.”

For two months he was in jail, which was clean like a hospital and sealed tight like a coffin. A Chicano lawyer was assigned to Fredi, who had never liked Chicanos. But they got along, and so he ended up being sent to El Salvador with his haina.

His uncles didn’t show up to say goodbye. They were preoccupied with Subwoofer’s pneumonia, and angry at Fredi—all they had given him, with his father, mother, and brothers dead.

“I’m proud to say that because of my statement, they let Motroco go,” Fredi says. “Like a good jenja, he didn’t have many tattoos, and it was easy to fool la migra. They put Sapo in jail, they set Motroco free, and they sent me away in an airplane, with my hainita and Angelito, who was about to me born. The day I left L.A., I cried from pure sadness, from anger. The simple truth is, it was my country, my home. Pico Union was my neighborhood; the gang, my family. I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone. That’s how I got to San Salvador, with $120, my pregnant haina, and some directions my aunt Amparito wrote for me on a napkin, which she had a neighbor woman deliver to me.”

They arrived with press coverage. He and many others were part of a wave, flying together in groups, relocating en masse. Some had criminal files opened and were sentenced. Others like him had to report three times a week to a police station. He got a job loading and unloading merchandise at the market. “I hadn’t been in touch with the gang, but in a few days some guys from the 18 in Soconantengo thought I was one of them.” How wrong they were. Fredi, a Salvatrucha through and through, had to stab one, he says, because he didn’t want his own homies to confuse him with another gang. “Word got around and soon enough the MS came looking for me, suspiciously at first, but after the first couple of tests, I showed them I was a firm and upright guy. Plus, the tattoos don’t lie. They’re a very strong signal that works like a passport or a birth certificate.”

Fredi was scared when he arrived in San Salvador. It was as if he had arrived on Mars. When he went to live in San Jacinto, a working-class neighborhood that reproduced the gang geography of Los Angeles, with south against north, west against east, MS against 18, he felt like he understood nothing; there were trees everywhere, shabby houses made of metal sheets, street dogs—a world that for an ex-student from Belmont High was a complete otherness.

The hardest thing was knowing his body didn’t belong to him. During his visits to the police, he was interrogated. Psychologists looked over his tattoos, and his fingerprints appeared in a file marked “highly dangerous”; they gave him medical exams and tested his urine for drugs. He learned how to cope with this, how to fool psychologists and police officers, how to tell them what they wanted to hear. Fredi knew that the more times he told them of his father dying on the mountain, the more he repeated that as a child, his uncles had been busy forging their future in the United States while paying him no attention—the happier the psychologists were and the sooner they would let him go. Fredi split into two personalities: the victim who acted for the adults and the authorities, and the veteran hardened by stabs and fights, the loyal and upright homie, tested on the battlefield.

Those last weeks in San Jacinto, Fredi was very upset. The 18 had sentenced him to the “final vergeo”—that’s what they call their beatings to death or near death. They let him know through an 18 member who crossed into MS territory to deliver the message. A warning like this was no game, because in the code of the mara, when one is “sentenced” like this, the homies step aside. The time would come, later, for his homies to avenge him, but for now, he alone had to face an entire clique.

So he decided to return to Los Angeles. Planning his exit wasn’t easy, since his scarce savings could only take him as far as Ciudad Hidalgo, and from there, he’d be on his own. But the mara was generous, giving him money, things for the trip, and a Mexican contact to get passports. His homies escorted him to the border, and shortly enough he was on the bus, safe and secure, on his way north. But he never guessed what could happen in Guadalajara.

*

El Jabón was very worried, because his only sister was on the verge of death and he, ex-lieutenant of the very Boss himself, could do nothing. They had arrived in Guadalajara eight years earlier, he fleeing the Tijuana cartel and she an unrequited love. The Boss had told him he had to leave Juárez, that things had turned very ugly, and that he, El Jabón, was causing problems.

“But so you can see that I trust you, I’ll give you Guadalajara. There you’ll set up a good business for me, because the guys from Tijuana have it under their control.”

So El Jabón moved from Ciudad Juárez, fleeing the other mafias, charged with administering the boss’s business in Guadalajara. He brought three brave, daring men with him, but he always needed new people.

El Jabón quickly adapted in La Consti, a neighborhood so tough, it is said, that the police cross themselves before entering. An intelligent guy, he found a way to hide himself among the toughest. No one in the barrio suspected that El Jabón had come to open an office of the Jaurez cartel in Guadalajara, to take over the market and to show those who had lost out to Tijuana how it was done. The Tijuana cartel was more sophisticated, the bastards: They married the daughters of the local bourgeoisie, and even the country club opened its doors to them. But now here was El Jabón, the veteran of a thousand wars, stabbed and shot, tattooed near his heart.

For months El Jabón worked to soften up the local police, establishing links with local gangs and the barrio dealers. His tactic, and his alone, was to hire locals and heap the white powder on them instead of drowning them in dollars. “Money turns people into idiots,” he would say. “Cocaine awakens the instincts, and this way you’ll have more dealers. If the Tijuana guys go to bed in silk sheets, we recruit the scum of the earth.”

El Jabón liked the skinny kid with the green eyes who slept in a broken chair in the hospital waiting room. He desperately needed to talk to someone about the pain of his sister, dying helplessly. There was no one more receptive, more sensible than a father aching over his son, jobless, illegal, and desperate.

What’s more, Fredi was tough like him. After 24 hours of knowing him, El Jabón said to Fredi, “Well, carnal, when are you going to leave the Salvapussies and join the real men?”

He took $200 from his wallet and gave it to Fredi.

“Go to a hotel with your girl, take a bath, sleep. After all, the baby is being well taken care of, and I’m not going to leave here until they bring news of my sister. These hospital people will do anything for money, and if the kid needs anything, I’ll take care of it. That’s why we’re carnales.”

It was the first time Fredi had heard the word carnal, but in his old memories he knew, he felt, that a carnal is a homie, and that he would trust even his dying son with a homie.

They were so exhausted, they accepted the offer with gusto. They looked for a hotel near the hospital and slept, like Angelito, for more than 12 hours in a row. The pact was sealed.

It was all a matter of gaining Fredi’s trust, so he could begin working—delivering merchandise, making collections, serving as a bodyguard, buying soccer tickets, taking flowers to the sister who never recovered.

Everything ended up well, but Fredi’s journey remained unfinished. His loyalty was with the mara, not the cartel, even though they were his bosses. Los Angeles was in his heart, like the tattoo on his back.

The crafty Jabón gave Fredi enough money to live with a certain luxury. They went out at night to the Tropicana, to the Nile, and Fredi’s green eyes were always a passport. In the stories about narco-trafficking, those that appear daily in the Mexican press—“Narco: 300 Dead,” “Narco: 420 dead”—Fredi played his part. And even though he did his job well, he says, El Jabón never gave him enough money to go to Los Angeles; he knew Fredi’s heart didn’t belong to him, as opposed to his other lieutenants, who would do anything for him. Fredi’s heart was in Pico Union and his Mara Salvatrucha, in the dream of raising Angelito in MacArthur Park.

*

Fredi became sad and unfriendly. The bonanza in Guadalajara frustrated his plans to return to Los Angeles. He looked for MS homies and eventually ran into some. He helped them, hiding them in his house for several days with help from Nayeli the haina. “If you cheer up, let’s leave tomorrow morning,” she told him.

El Jabón caught wind of this and kept Fredi very busy. Deliver this merchandise, make that collection, this guy looked at me wrong so go kill him. Fredi can’t remember how many “last jobs” he had to do for El Jabón.

Robbing a 7-Eleven in Guadalajara is child’s play. His homies, two Salvadorans and a Guatemalan, planned it. The store was near the train tracks and below the northern highway. The night of the hit, Nayeli got Angelito ready and stayed home, waiting, like a good haina, in case her man needed her.

He told El Jabón he didn’t feel well. Since there had been a dengue outbreak in Guadalajara, it was believable that a cold could be a bad sign, and without further explanation he went out to the train tracks. Late-night drivers came in and out with their Big Bites, Pepsis, and peanuts dusted with chile. Fredi went up to the cashier, carrying the M-16 he had “borrowed” from El Jabón’s arsenal, and forced him to give up the money, barely speaking. They never guessed that don Ezequiel, an old guardian of the barrio, a policeman as poor as they were, would show up, ready to defend the honor of his badge.

“Hands up!” he yelled.

Fredi couldn’t believe it.

“Hands up, cabrones!”

Fredi’s gun fired, throwing sparks. More shots followed, and a bullet went into don Ezequiel’s stomach. The cacophony of gunshots, shouts, and unfollowed orders attracted the Centaurs. They surrounded the place and came in, guns blazing, while Fredi lay flat on his stomach. It’s all over, he thought. Everywhere, everything was fucked. El Jabón and the police and jail and Angelito without MacArthur Park and Nayeli, so beautiful, without a man to take care of her.

Don Ezequiel didn’t die, but his wounds were enough to press serious charges: gang activities with aggravated intent to kill. The M-16 is, in Mexico, a considerable aggravation. Fredi felt as if Pico Union had exploded in a play of light, like when he met Nayeli and they went walking from the restaurant and watched the fireworks at Disneyland, all of it unreal, yet happening.