I bought my pho; she bought hers, and we moved off to the side to talk. She remembered that I used to hang out with “that Southern boy,” and that I’d been studying Latin. I asked her where her family had gone after eighth grade. She explained that her father had hurt his back and couldn’t do farm work anymore, so their family had come to L.A. looking for industrial work for her mother and aunt.
Then she said, “Did you ever get to West Point?”
I’d felt my mouth drop open slightly and couldn’t answer right away. First, because she must have heard that secondhand; I knew I hadn’t told her about what had been, back then, an unlikely dream. Second, because it brought up the fresh pain of saying, Yes, I was there; no, I didn’t finish.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was at West Point for a while.”
She said, “So what happened?”
“Didn’t make it all four years,” I said. “That’s a story for another time.”
Sometime after midnight we were in her car, or what I thought was her car. I was driving and she was in the passenger seat, leaning forward laughing, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wedged between her thighs. I forget what story I’d been telling or she’d been telling, just that we were both laughing and laughing and then she’d said, “Slow down, okay, esa? You’re speeding. We can’t afford to get pulled over.”
And I’d joked, “Why, is this car stolen?”
And she’d said, “Yeah, it is.”
That was when I sobered up and really looked at her, and I realized that what I’d been registering as a birthmark high on her cheekbone wasn’t; it was three tiny dots, the tattoo that symbolized la vida loca, the gang life.
At that point I had a choice: I could have drawn on the battered last of my West Point ideals, said, This isn’t cool, and then found a place to pull over and walk away.
Instead, I said, “For how long?”
Serena knew I meant how long had she been in the life. She said, “Since I was fourteen.”
I said: “I’ll slow down.”
That was how I learned what happened to her in the eighth grade.
Gang life is popularly associated with the cities, but it’s been in the rural areas a long time. In our small school, Serena had drawn the attention of Lita, a leader in a girls’ gang. She recruited Serena, who’d said no, she couldn’t, her parents wouldn’t understand.
The next day, Serena heard that Lita had called her out. Serena’s refusal to join had been a loss of face for Lita, a slur on her pride. From now until Serena gave in and let herself be initiated, no day would pass without the prospect of a fight with Lita or one of Lita’s girls.
Serena wasn’t stupid. She chose to have sisters instead of enemies.
“Looking back,” Serena told me, “it was the best thing that could have happened. I wouldn’t have wanted to come to L.A. a total virgin. When I got here, I knew the life. Well, sort of. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like in L.A.”
What most people don’t realize about urban gangs is how small their individual territories actually are. Many people have the vague idea that Gang A is on the East Side and Gang B on the West Side. In truth, the part of L.A. that Serena and her family moved to was like a checkerboard: Various Latino gangs-or rather, small splinters of the gangs, called sets or cliques-were spread out in small pockets throughout. A gang member could walk for only a few blocks, be in enemy territory, then a few more blocks and be safe again. Bitter, fatal rivals lived right on top of each other. It was impossible to ever feel truly secure.
It also made the question of gang allegiance an open one. Regardless of who controlled your particular stretch of your particular street, there was always a chance you could claim a different clique or an entirely different gang.
But virtually every young person claimed. Everyone needed protection, familia. Those who had no gang affiliation were in the worst of all worlds: considered untrustworthy by everyone, always at risk of being attacked, with no one backing them up.
Serena’s older brothers immediately claimed the 13th Street clique, or El Trece. Serena wasn’t unwilling to follow in their path, but this time her qualms were different from the ones she’d cited to Lita. She looked at the neighborhood girls who had affiliations to Trece and didn’t like what she saw.
“They weren’t really down,” she told me. “They were just hoochies who slept with the guys. They didn’t even get jumped in. They said they didn’t have to, they were ‘already down,’ whatever that means.” Her voice had filled with scorn.
It wasn’t anything you could have made a high-school counselor see, but Serena Delgadillo was an overachiever. One short year after she tried to refuse Lita’s initiation, Serena shaved her head, borrowed her older brother’s flannel shirt and chinos, and went to Payaso, the leader of El Trece, and asked to be jumped in. Her brothers vouched for her toughness, and Serena, bloody and bruised, became a member of the gang.
Serena had to prove herself over and over again, backing up her guys, stealing cars, driving getaway, lying to the cops, and doing a six-month stretch in the California Youth Authority camp. It was the ironically familiar refrain of a woman in a man’s job: She had to do twice as much as the guys to get equal standing with them. Through it all, she kept her head shaved and her clothes masculine. Sometimes the cops mistook her for a boy.
“I have a picture,” she told me that night, “but it’s at my house.” She looked up at me, slyly. “Unless you’re afraid to come to the hood to see it.”
“Let’s go,” I’d said.
She lived in a one-story house of pale yellow stucco, with an orange tree in the yard and bars on the windows. A motion-sensor light flashed on as we walked up the driveway. Not surprisingly, the dead bolt on the front door was probably the newest and most expensive thing about Serena’s home.
It wasn’t dark inside, though it was dim. We came into the kitchen, and Serena peered over a cracked Formica counter into her living room and then raised a finger to her lips. I followed her gaze and saw a rumpled sleeping bag. It rustled, and a girl stuck her tousled head out and looked at us.
“Quien es la rubia?” she said. Who’s the blond girl?
“Nadie,” said Serena. No one.
The girl withdrew back into her nest.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” Serena said mildly. “Are you hungry?”
We didn’t talk much while she cooked, out of consideration for the girl sleeping in the dining room. As she heated water to boiling and poured in some short-grain white rice from a ten-pound sack, I looked around the kitchen. There were photographs on the refrigerator, and the subjects were all male-some school pictures, others obviously taken to establish gang cred, as the boys posed with guns and cars. All, though, were bordered with colored paper. On the margins were roses and virgenes and the initials q.d.e.p.
“What’s q.d.e.p?” I asked Serena.
“Que descansa en paz,” she said quietly.
“These guys are all…”
“Dead,” she confirmed.
“No girls?”
She said, “I’ve got the roll call for my hermanas on my leg.”
“Your leg?” I echoed, not understanding.
She hiked her right foot onto the counter and pulled up the cuff of her pants so I could easily see the tattooed letters qdep high on her calf, and underneath that, two names: Tania and Dreamer.
I asked, “How did you decide whether to use the given name or their gang name?”
“Well, Tania didn’t have a moniker,” she said. “She wasn’t in the life, she was just kicking it with some homeboys who were on their porch and got blasted in a walk-up shooting.” She put her leg down.