I can understand better why a few of my students are so damaged, so broken, so unable to look in the mirror and believe there’s someone alive looking back at them. I just finished reading Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and can see many parallels between some of my students and the life Rodriguez described living.
I met Rodriguez at a book signing at a conference in 2002. He read from his book of short stories he had just published. I read the stories and was intrigued, but I had no idea this man had lived through so much as a gang member. While the stories are interesting, now that I’ve read his first book, which describes everything from the way he messed his pants in school because he didn’t know how to tell the teacher he needed to use the bathroom to how he shot at people and witnessed acts of violence that only make sense to people who have been robbed of the ability to see a purpose for living. So I’m left wondering why I didn’t read this book before. YES, I know gangs are bad. I know they provide a sense of community for people who see few alternatives to gang life. But this book somehow dissipates the dissonance in my head about how someone could really want to join a gang.
One of my students, I’ll call her Mordida, bit another very sweet girl yesterday. The police were involved. She bit and kicked and pulled out clumps of the kid’s hair. One school official commented, “The victim is lucky she still has her bicep, the bite was so strong.” This student was AWOL earlier this year, then came back to my school and has made appearances about once a week. Two days ago she showed up and whined, “I don’t have anything in my journal–I’ve hardly been here. I don’t know what to do.” I felt angry. She didn’t know about all the great writing we had done because she was busy doing whatever she does… I know she arranges some of the infamous “skipping parties” a lot of our students (especially the Latino students) go to to get drunk, maybe stoned, among other things. I asked her calmly, “A que veniste?” I wanted to know why she bothered to show up to class. She really didn’t have an answer, at least not one she could share with me.
So yesterday after school she jumped a sweet, quiet girl I know who has only arrived in the U.S. about four months ago. This morning the school found out about it. I checked the electronic attendance. Mordida had an all-day excused absence programmed in it. Funny, I thought. Security and administrators were involved. The victim hadn’t arrived, either. Then Mordida turned out to be at school after all, just there to find her friends and cause more trouble. She had called her own absence into school, and she must have faked an adult voice well enough to convince the office staff it was really her mother.
What I understand about Mordida is that something is very wrong with her world. She has been in big trouble for the five years or so. Somehow her world must be as corrupt and polluted as Rodriguez’s was. I don’t know if she’s in a gang, but the lifestyle she’s following is just as dead-end. Rodriguez’s world was (and in some ways still is–it’s our world, too) a place where injustices were perpetrated by all the people with power. Rodriguez’s high school was two in one–one for the affluent kids, another for the poor kids. Sounds painfully familiar. Mordida knows which school she belongs to. I guess I can see why she wants to lash out against it–just bite whatever comes along and hope that will provide some flavor to her painfully dark life.
No, my school isn’t a place where most students are afraid of what might happen to them because of gangs. Most of my students don’t know people who have been killed in gang violence or drive-by shootings. But there are some students who flirt with these dangers, and some of them, like Mordida, fall quickly into patterns of behavior with no easy exit.
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