Gangster to Soldier the Life

¶ … Gangster to Soldier

The Life of Jose Pedero Gallera

Is it possible to get a little taste of how it is to live in "D-Town?" Jose's "hood" in Dallas was the barrio. Jose's parents came from Mexico, as did most of their neighbors. Jose's parents worked hard summer and winter. In the summer Jose's father plowed fields, planted crops and picked them for the big farms around Dallas. His mother cleaned the houses of rich people year-round. When he was very young, Jose always had something to do. On Sundays his parents took him and his little brother Paco to the park, where they would eat a picnic his mother made and play on the grass, which was not to be found in the neighborhood where they lived.

Jose's father was solidly built and sun burnt, but was a very loving father and threw the ball for his sons, or let them ride on him like he was a horse. He told the boys stories of when he was a boy in Mexico and they didn't have a horse, but a burro that helped them haul wood, since they lived up in the mountains. He told them about his "abuelos" who still lived there, as far as he knew, and how some day they would be able to go and visit them.

But Jose grew and after awhile he didn't want to go to the park on Sundays. He just wanted to hang out with his friends and not his parents. He had started hanging out with friends on the streets after school when he was twelve. By the time he was fourteen, he was smoking and drinking, whenever he could bum a cigarette or share a bottle of tequila. The high school was full of people just like him, but some of them were richer than others and wore expensive clothes.

When he turned fifteen, his parents threw him a quinceanera, inviting all the neighbors and friends to celebrate his birthday, but Jose left the apartment before it began and did not return until night. His parents would not speak to him for a couple of days, so he told them that he had other important things to do that day. In actuality, he felt ashamed of his parents and neighbors and just wanted to hang out with his real friends. He didn't want his friends to meet his parents or their friends, so he didn't even tell them about the party. He was anxious to be accepted by the gang. Some of them were older and smoked pot and took drugs.

Jose wasn't sure he wanted to do drugs; he decided he would try it some day, but not right now. He had started smoking cigarettes when he was fourteen and held off of doing party drugs until he was almost eighteen, a long time for someone like him, he thought. He had a reputation of being "clean" and trustworthy to his friends and they liked him. But they still wanted him to be part of the gang, and do the things they liked to do on the weekends and after school.

Most of his life centered on listening to music on boom boxes and hanging out, now that he was accepted by the gang. They all met after school every day and, since most of their parents worked, they had until suppertime to do whatever they liked. They mostly went to a little smoke shop on a corner about three blocks from school and stood around. Sometimes girls would walk past and some of the girls would stop and talk with the gang members if they knew them.

At first Jose was not interested in girls. Girls frightened him, since he felt himself becoming stiff and tongue-tied when he was around them. He knew he liked them, generally, but if any specific girl tried to talk to him, he would find some excuse to move away. Then, one day, he saw a girl he knew from school. She came up to him and started talking to him. He noticed how black and long her eyelashes were and they had little sparkles on them. Her black eyes snapped and twinkled when she talked, her red lips looked luscious. He found himself talking to her easily and she was laughing at the funny things he said, even when he didn't mean them to be funny. He noticed her body and the way her clothes fit her tightly in just the right places. Her name was Marialuisa.

Marialuisa said "If you are over 21, there are a lot of clubs you could go to here in Dallas. My uncle owns a club. My favorite artist is Play n Skillz." Jose didn't actually know what it would be like to go to the clubs, though he had heard about them, but now he wanted to be 21. He wanted to impress Marialuisa, so he said he had been to a club already, the Tijuana. He had actually only seen the Tijuana from the outside when his mother took him with her to shop one day, and they had to go past it. Jose could smell the smoke coming out of the open door as they went by and, since the door was open, could see inside. It looked little and dirty.

Marialuisa was part of a dance team called the Sweet Sensation that danced salsa. There were a lot of dance teams in Dallas. Jose had seen both the Sweet Sensation and Latin Illusion. He had preferred Latin Illusion, but after talking with Marialuisa, he knew he would like her team the best. He felt he was not good enough for her.

The members of his gang wanted to go out at night and "borego." It was thrilling to steal along the side streets of his barrio in the middle of the dark night, force a window open or find a door unlocked and enter someone's house. Sometimes there were people asleep in the rooms and that scared Jose. What if they awoke? But so far nothing had happened.

Sometimes they took things and the older boys confiscated the items they managed to take out (boom boxes, televisions, jewelry) and sold them, usually to pay for the drugs they took. The older boys were really good to the younger ones. They didn't let them talk to the drug pushers and they didn't really encourage the younger members to take drugs. But when Jose was old enough to go along with the older boys, when he was about sixteen, he found it wasn't really that much more fun. The drug pushers the boys met seemed evil and pushy. They wanted him to take meth or crack, but something stopped Jose from ever doing it.

Jose was not aware of the enormous city around him until he started venturing out of the barrio with the older boys. He and a few others wandered into neighborhoods that had huge houses and green lawns, shadowed by stately trees. They took trips into the downtown area with its huge buildings, where he found the men in suits to be contentious, heard bitter and dramatic stories of Latino men trying to become successes, who had experienced paranoid hardball. He experienced ugly racism when more than one person told him to go back to Mexico. If he went back to Mexico, thought Jose, he wouldn't know how to communicate, because his language, though it was Spanish, was hard for the new Mexican immigrants to understand. He heard about the right-wing politics in Dallas and the bombings that took place in the districts where whites tried to stop housing desegregation.

Meanwhile, Jose's parents were worried about him. He had skipped school so much that the authorities were sometimes coming around to look for him. His mother cried one night and told him that gangs were bad and that he needed to stop hanging out with them. Jose knew she could not understand the close friendships and the way the other boys treated him, respected him and trusted him. There were younger boys joining from time to time and they were impressed with him, so he knew he was worth something.

However, he did worry about not getting an education, because he knew that it had been a dream of his parents that he would graduate from high school. They had only attended a year of school each and could barely read or write. Sometimes he would have to interpret what people said to them in English, their understanding of the English language was so poor. He knew his parents worked hard and had come to live here because of their dreams for him and his little brother.

He vowed he would go back to school. He was seventeen now and when he returned to the classrooms of his high school, he was older than the other students, yet didn't know what they were talking about. Going back to school didn't last long. He gave it up and returned to the streets, where his gang members hung out and fenced stolen goods for money.

When he was eighteen, one day his little brother, Paco, came to him and said he wanted to join the gang. Jose looked at his little brother, four years younger than he, with a round, innocent face and big, black, trusting eyes. Fear and anger rose in him.

No way!" he said. "You just stay away from those gangs. You're too young, you don't know what you are asking. You should go to school and make something of yourself, not waste your time with a gang!"

As soon as he said it, and saw the tears start to come up in Paco's eyes, he knew what he had to do. He was not setting a good example for his brother. His brother saw him smoking and drinking sometimes, and glimpsed him on the streets with his "hermanos." Paco knew he snuck out at night and sometimes came home early in the morning to sleep all day while his parents were gone.

He had to leave home. But before he left, he told Paco that he was sorry he had been a part of a gang and that he expected better things from him. Then he took some money he had been saving and bought a bus ticket to California. He had heard that California was better than Dallas, especially for immigrants. The laws allowed immigrants there to get medical service and go to the schools and get welfare. Texas was difficult for immigrants. Texans hated Mexicans, it seemed, so much that they managed to keep any services from them, including medical services, though all were supposed to be able to get emergency treatment.

When the bus arrived at the vast and echoing Greyhound station in Los Angeles, Jose was frightened. It was so big and full of people. He kept his money balled up in his fist and his fist in his pocket, he was so afraid that someone would steal it. He had to find somewhere to go where it was safe and there were other Latinos. He asked around, then took another bus fifty miles north to the town of Oxnard, and there he felt more comfortable. He got a job right away, after spending the night in a motel, working in the fields. He worked all summer and saved quite a bit of money, staying in a room that he rented by the week. He was maturing, he thought, taking responsibility for himself. Working outside was healthy and his fellow laborers were jolly. They were all hard workers and most lived clean lives unhindered by smoking, drinking or drugs. Jose did not feel pressured to do any of the things he had felt he must in the Dallas barrio. After a few weeks he got the nerve to call his parents and they talked for what seemed a long time over the phone. His parents were very happy he was alive and doing well. Jose even met a girl, one of the day laborers, who was very pretty and smart and they spent a lot of time together.