Blood in the Fields: Ten Years Inside California's Nuestra Familia Gang

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Preface

Light has a special quality in Salinas. It is one of the few farm towns in California that isn’t shrouded in a constant dusty smog, and in Salinas the coastal fog and clouds are always playing tricks so its mountaintops and crop rows glisten under ribbons of soft shadows and fiery sunlight. This place where I spend my working days is a contradiction of rural serenity and jagged sorrow, and I can say with honesty that it tears my heart in two. There is so much I admire here: courageous people and a toughness born from decades of labor strikes and standing up to injustice. That is another story I hope to tell someday, but it isn’t the story I am telling here.

This is the story of a great tragedy befalling our nation, of the constant waste of young lives over a shallow and manipulative ideology that gangsters have come to call the Cause. My aim is to open a window into this world—not to mock it or glamorize it or exploit it, but to show it as it is, so we can understand it.

As I write these words, it’s the morning after eight people were shot in Salinas, three fatally, capping two weeks in which nine people were killed by warring gang members and one more was felled by a torrent of bullets from nine police officers. This month’s battles are over control of drug sales in Salinas’s Chinatown. Thanks to another round of law enforcement crackdowns on its leadership, the Nuestra Familia recently lost control of its most lucrative heroin and meth market, and now its rival, the Mexican Mafia, is trying to take over. The battles played out in this rural paradise, as many describe Monterey County, are also taking place all over the United States, where more than 1.4 million gang members lived in 2011, according to the Justice Department’s most recent—and likely conservative—estimates. That’s up from one million as recently as 2009.

The economic forces that fuel rural gangs can be found at the intersection of the drug war, immigration policies, agriculture, and poverty. But how do we as a society respond? In the years leading up to writing this book, I witnessed heroism as well as troubling ethical concessions in the government’s effort to dismantle a seemingly impenetrable criminal organization. I concluded that our response to the problem of gangs often says more about who we are than who they are. One defense attorney in the case that’s central to this book—quoting Kurt Vonnegut—put it this way after an FBI informant took charge of the gang and its violent crimes: We must be careful about what we pretend to be.

It is a truism in law enforcement circles that the laws of unintended consequences will always come into play in operations dealing with gangs. FBI agents and police speak of cutting off the head of the snake but quickly add that as soon as they do, underlings will hustle to fill the leftover power vacuum.

There are, though, some promising approaches on the horizon. One is Ceasefire, a strategy developed not to end gangs but to lower the number of youth homicides in a city. It relies on a mix of violent-crime data and a clear understanding of who the local players are and what they actually want. The most violent gang members are given a clear message by police and the community: the violence must stop. If the gangsters continue shooting, the cops warn they will bring the full force of the law upon their whole crew. But for those ready to change, community volunteers will help with job training, relocation, and other needs. It’s a carrot-and-stick message that actually works.

At this point I am a believer in Ceasefire and other information-driven, community-based strategies. And so I return to our need to understand the logic of the Nuestra Familia and similar gangs if we are ever to put a stop to their violence, because there is always a logic. We can’t forget that for all its tragedy, this brutal subculture is a world that for vast and complex reasons makes sense to those who inhabit it. I saw this more clearly after a winter of studies at Harvard in 2009, when professor Ronald Heifetz told us that inside another’s frame of reference there can always be things that make the irrational seem rational. Nothing could be truer in the case of Salinas and its gangs.

My purpose in writing this book is a simple one. I believe the killing in these streets and fields will not stop unless the logic of the gangsters’ world is known and much better understood. Only then can we begin to construct alternatives.

I first entered the realm of gangs through a strip-mall parking lot. I was on the north side of Salinas, this quirky town best known as the birthplace of John Steinbeck and the setting for his epic novel East of Eden.

A few young men were kickin’ it outside a video store, dressed in red shirts and belts, one in a Nebraska Cornhuskers cap. The guy wasn’t wearing that hat because he supported a midwestern football team. It was the red that mattered, and with the white capital N in front, you’d think this apparel was custom-made for Norteño gangbangers. I wondered if the sports apparel vendors understood or even cared why Northern California had this surprising epidemic of Cornhuskers fever.

A half-dozen Norteños, all in their teens, maybe early twenties, stood in a huddle. I sat in my car ready to drive away, but I did not turn the key. I was supposed to be making a documentary—my colleagues were pitching it to HBO—and I had a job to do. I made myself get out. Walking across rows of parking spaces in front of a chain store’s giant red target, I tried to come up with something to say that wouldn’t piss them off, convinced that any words from me would inspire ridicule or more violent impulses.

The guys froze when I stepped close. They stared, mad-dogging. I’d seen that cold expression before on the faces of Sureño kids who once surrounded me and a co-reporter, circling us on their bicycles like an Old West roundup. I tried to stare back at these Norteños, but their empty eyes made me look away. I struggled to come up with an opening plea, some way to make the absurd case that they should talk to me.

Who wants to be on HBO? I blurted. I managed an idiot’s smile and waited.

They cursed, and then they ran. All except the one in the Cornhuskers cap.

Since that day I regularly hung out with the man called GQ and his homies while they sold drugs, got stoned, and showed off their guns. They generously offered me snorts of crystal meth that I very politely refused. GQ was not his actual street name, but it’s what I called him, and he liked it.

It dawned on me one day that a competitor of GQ’s could decide to pull off a home-invasion robbery the very afternoon I was lounging in his living room watching American Me. I could imagine the headline: SHOWER OF BULLETS LEAVES THREE DEAD. Still, I kept going to his tidy middle-class house because he invited me. He introduced me to his wife and friends as my producer. He told me he decided to let me film him only after he saw the piles of Chicano books and magazines in my backseat. It impressed him that I was serious about understanding La Raza. The books were actually leftovers from the days I edited a Latino literary journal, and I was thankful for being such a slob that I hadn’t cleared out the car in months. Slovenliness had provided my entrée into the Norteño underworld.

GQ was a street-level gangster in his early twenties, a drug dealer who, as far as I know, didn’t go beyond the basics to put in work for Nuestra Familia’s cause. His juvenile criminal file involved a burglary conviction, punctuated by probation violations every time he was caught wearing red. His young kids were always dressed in our beautiful color, as GQ put it.

Despite his loyalty, he didn’t seem to be on the fast track for advancement up the ranks from Norteño to Nuestra Raza, which was a kind of tweener level of gangsters who cycle in and out of prison. And he was nowhere near the top rung of the hierarchy—Nuestra Familia, the gang’s parent company, headquartered in the ultra-maximum-security Pelican Bay State Prison up near the Oregon border.

So GQ remained a plain old street Norteño. He hadn’t been locked up enough to work on the finer points of the Cause. It was in jail, the California Youth Authority, and the state prisons that you were educated in discipline and war tactics. There would be time for that later—right now, GQ enjoyed a simpler life of selling and using drugs. He sent a cut of the action up to the generals in Pelican Bay, though I don’t know if he ever sent the required 25 percent.

On a glorious blue-sky day, we sat side by side in his sunny driveway. He lived in a suburbanish part of town that borders the ag fields. Salinas is the only city I know with farmland right in its middle, a lettuce field metropolis, as hip-hop poet Marcos Cabrera calls it. These fields are an incongruous plot of 450 acres surrounded by a hospital and jail, a trailer park, rodeo grounds, and new middle-class housing where streets are named after Anglo saints—there’s a Saint Edwards Drive and a Saint Albans Court. If, on your way to San Jose or San Francisco, you flew over Salinas at night, you’d see a large black diamond nested in a bed of city lights. The diamond is that farm plot, a drained lakebed that for half a century has been worked by the Higashi, Hibino, and Ikeda families.

From the days of missionaries and ranchers who first took the land from Ohlone natives, the Central Coast of California has a tradition of never straying from agriculture. Nuestra Familia, the mother of all Norteño gangs, hasn’t strayed either. It’s a farm-town mafia with, they say, close to a thousand murders to its name. For three decades, the NF has exerted powerful control over the West’s agriculture towns—Modesto, Stockton, Los Banos, Visalia, Santa Rosa, and Watsonville. And most of all Salinas, the Salad Bowl of the World. The NF has forayed into a few sizable cities, too—San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, and even Berkeley, where the Norte’s red graffiti is sprayed across the People’s walls.

But its strength lies in the rural West. There are NFers in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho, and I’ve met a few up in Washington state wine country—wherever there’s agriculture, this gang seems to lurk.

Thirty years ago, they were derisively called farmeros by their big-city Mexican Mafia rivals from Los Angeles. Nowadays, the Northerners are called Busters by kids who don’t even know the name is short for sodbusters. But Norteños no longer work the fields. Gangsters like GQ are second- or third-generation American citizens who prefer the NFL to soccer, rap over rock en español, English over Spanish. Though the kids involved will deny it, the battle in the streets has turned into a civil war between the assimilated and the immigrants. North versus south, el norte contra el sur.

And there is another, more insidious front. At its highest levels in Pelican Bay, this is a struggle of power between men doing life, men who despite being locked in high-security cells twenty-three hours a day manage to call the shots over the West’s multibillion-dollar drug trade.

GQ is content to help build the drug empire and is not one of the old-school Norteños who romanticize their farmero origins. Conveniently ignoring Cesar Chavez’s doctrine of nonviolence, the old-schoolers tattoo themselves with the farmworkers’ eagle logo to show they’ve put in work for the Cause—their cause, not the workers’. GQ is of a new generation, and though he does have a Salad Bowl license plate frame on his SUV, he does not revere the Chicano-pride legacy of Salinas. He cares little that he lives in a city where the revered labor leader Cesar Chavez was jailed during the 1970 lettuce boycott.

Fuck Cesar Chavez, GQ says. I ain’t never had to work in the fields.

It was still morning, but GQ lit a joint. He told me Sleepy’s girlfriend was found facedown, shot dead in a strawberry field. He offered this casually, sucking in smoke.

Jesus. Sleepy—that’s my name for him—was his closest homie. I liked the guy. He was friendly, eager to show off his fresh tattoos. To be honest, he came across as, well, sweet. At first I wondered if Sleepy was capable of being a serious criminal beyond snorting lines and carrying a formidable piece. Old-fashioned revolvers, Sleepy taught me, were making a comeback, because unlike the semiautomatics, they don’t leave shell casings behind. It was a useful lesson, but I wasn’t convinced Sleepy had ever used the revolver on an enemy. As I said, I liked the guy. But I’ve learned never to judge a gangster by niceness.

Sleepy was on the run, GQ said. The cops say he’s a suspect. But that ain’t what went down at all.

He laughed—a startling laugh, cold and hard as metal. I marveled at how capable he was of enjoying his best friend’s agony.

She was informing for the Salinas police, he said.

Who took her out? I asked.

You know.

I did know. At least in a generic way. The NF kills more of its own than all its enemies put together. He wasn’t going to say more about it. GQ may have a mouth on him, but he follows the rules—never give names or reveal the gang’s business. He turned to look at me as he took his next hit off the joint. It was a hollow, slow, deliberate stare that said, "Just in case you were thinking of talking to the cops …"

After I was introduced to the Norteño gang through GQ’s eyes, I spent the better part of a year being schooled in much the same way an aspiring gangster would be. Lil Mando, whose story fills these pages, was my teacher. I learned how to make a knife from magazine pages and soap, what the letters in the word cause stand for, and why he once believed it was a noble thing to make war with fellow Mexican Americans. After living in the area most of my life, I at last saw that there are layers of cities in every city, each with its own rules and language. I understood the gang graffiti that before meant nothing. I read messages in people’s garments, saw their allegiance in a tiny tattoo of a strawberry or artichoke behind an ear. I had learned the language of the gang, and it was knowledge that would haunt me ever after. At times I didn’t want to know so much, didn’t want to see the red clothes and cars every time I pulled over at a Central Valley rest stop, didn’t want to grasp the warnings scrawled across my own neighborhood’s walls.

Once, with nowhere to go after a depressing day that began with GQ and ended with a shooting in a church parking lot, I went to see my friend Pastor Frank. Frank was formerly a Latino nerd, a software geek who, they say, made money back in the day. How he came to be a pastor in the poorest part of Salinas is a tale I had yet to hear. He balances the flash of his gunmetal-gray BMW with a hand-carved wooden cross pendant and Armani eyeglasses sporting what look like tiny United Farm Workers eagles on the sides. The combed-back, just-graying hair adds to his cool-uncle aura—old enough to be wise, hip enough to be fun.

Frank used to run an after-school program at his church that helped keep more than a few East Side kids out of gangs. For those souls already lost, he was a chaplain at the jail and the county hospital’s emergency room, which is how he came to know so many members of the Nuestra Familia—at one time, he knew the entire Salinas regiment. He never talks about their business or their choices, never judges or suggests they stop. He’s there for their spiritual needs. The gangsters respect him, so much so that one had the courtesy to tip him off that his glasses, with that UFW bird, could be considered gang-related indicia by law enforcement. When they go off to state prison, as they invariably do, gangsters from both sides of the north-south war put him on their visitor lists.

Like me, the pastor had no clue any of this existed before he arrived here. You get to Salinas, and you have your young men like GQ and Lil Mando who think all this is normal, as if every town in America has third-generation gang families, an underground black market of guns, and a mob that rules strawberry fields and dust-covered roads on orders smuggled in coded messages from a supermax prison four hundred miles away. Then you get to know the serious gangsters, polite guys who can carry a grandma’s groceries one moment and slash an enemy’s throat the next, and that’s when you enter a world you can’t describe to your closest friends because there is no comparison, no ground on which to stand.

Pastor Frank and I stood outside his church, the Gabilan Mountains towering behind him. On summer evenings, when the fog clouds roll in to hug the hilltops and circle over this great trough of a valley, the sun occasionally manages to hover above the marine layer, and on the tips of the mountains there’s a glowing stripe of light that makes the whole range luminous. The sloping fields and underskirts of the hills are darkened by the shadow of evening, but the mountains’ upper halves stay lit by the lingering gold of afternoon.

Half is in darkness, yet half is illuminated. It’s the time of day I savor here.

This is God’s country, I said.

I’m glad you recognized it. Pastor Frank smiled. He may have been hinting at another invitation to his Sunday service, an offer I’m always resisting. But he knew what I meant was I love this place, love it as he does, despite the pain that hovers like those clouds.

One day I will ask Pastor Frank how he deals with the constantly broken heart.

Salinas, California

Julia Reynolds

Prologue: Pelican Bay

A hint of dawn seeps through a redwood forest east of town. Regina and her friends pull themselves from bed to prepare for the day’s mission. They pat on makeup and pick out clothes that manage to exude a hint of sex appeal, despite a dress code that could make porn stars look like nuns. As the five women shut their motel doors, the village of Crescent City, still blanketed in the mist of Bear Mountain, hardly stirs. Showers have threatened all night, but the clouds thankfully don’t break into a hairstyle-wrecking drizzle.

Crescent City is the rainiest spot in California. Just shy of the Oregon border, the village hugs a fogbound, rock-lined harbor—a setting that befits the home of the state’s highest-security prison, built to house men so skilled in swift and precise acts of violence they must be separated from all human touch.

The nearby Pelican Bay State Prison is the headquarters of Nuestra Familia. Except on the rare days they use the law library or a visitor treks to this remote fortress, the gang’s leaders stay in one-man cells for twenty-three hours a day. The remaining hour is allotted for solitary exercise in a cement yard the size of a shipping container. With almost no human interaction and eventless hours running into one another, some men in the prison’s Security Housing Unit go insane—a severe psychotic condition doctors call SHU Syndrome.

Others use their time to run one of the most violent criminal organizations in existence.

Regina and the other women make it past a metal detector, pat-down, and wanding that ensure no one carries contraband or wears an under-wire bra. They wait in a bright and sterile visiting area for the men to be called up from the SHU.

One by one, the men file in. None of the five can see the others as he is led, hands shackled behind his back, into his own cage of a room, where he is separated from his guest by thick glass and from fellow inmates by a wall of steel. Once locked inside his box, each man leans forward, slipping his hands through a slit in the door behind him until the handcuffs are released. The ankle chains, however, remain in place. Whenever visitors come, the most eager men only massage their wrists before they pick up phones. The more fastidious ones take the time to wipe the mouthpieces with their sleeves.

This day the visiting area happens to hold five leaders of the Nuestra Familia organization. Pelican Bay exists to make sure men such as these cannot communicate with each other though they are housed a few feet apart. When the men shuffle along in chains, correctional officers watch to ensure no words are exchanged, no notes passed, and no phrases delivered in American Sign Language, in which the men are near-fluent. In the visiting area, every word spoken is recorded and gestures are captured on videotape. But the guards can’t catch everything.

Regina and her companions lean affectionately toward the glass, cradling phones on their shoulders. The men smile and lean in too, their broad torsos positioned to partially block the cameras behind their backs. All but one of the women pulls a small piece of paper from her bra and presses it against the window. Lisa is the sole visitor unaware of the plan—her husband, Paqui, is not in good standing with the organization.

The other men’s nods are barely perceptible. The men and women chat on—about kids, cousins, mothers, small-town gossip, whether their magazine subscriptions have run out. The visiting time flies by, and the ladies promise to return the next day.

That evening their torn-up notes swirl down motel toilets.

The group’s night on the town consists of dinner at a pizza parlor and, for Regina, a dip in the motel’s Jacuzzi. She was nervous carrying her note past the guards, and the warm swirling waters do her good.

On Sunday, the girlfriends return to the prison under Crescent City’s eternal cloud cover. The men had easily come to agreement the previous afternoon with a mumbled comment or a subtle dip of the head as the guards led them from their visits.

The girls settle in, and an inmate bends to scratch an ankle. His fingers tug at a rolled paper scrap and he scoots in close. He flattens his answer to the previous day’s question against the glass. The other men— all except Paqui—do the same.

When he is sure his visitor has read it, each inmate’s palm swallows his note.

Later, a packet will be mailed from the prison to Webster, Pierce and Associates, a San Francisco law firm. The top three sheets in the envelope will consist of an inmate’s carefully hand-lettered habeas corpus petition. The document will say the inmate wants to join a class action over the deplorable conditions at Pelican Bay. Once delivered, the pages that took painstaking hours to craft will be destroyed, the petition never read by any lawyer.

Webster, Pierce and Associates is a Familia front, a fictional partnership with a San Francisco street address and imprinted letterhead but no attorneys or staff. The firm’s sole purpose is to serve as a red line—a covert way to send messages from prison because legal mail is confidential and cannot be read by the prison’s guards or code breakers. In this instance, the smuggled missive will lay down new rules to be obeyed by tens of thousands of Norteño gang members across California. It will be a call to unite all the gangs’ warring neighborhood factions into a giant underground army the likes of which this state has never witnessed.

Right now, though, all that matters to the crew in Salinas is that the five females in Crescent City bring home an answer regarding the fates of the traitors in their midst. Were the traitors’ executions approved?

After another day’s drive through North Coast forests and fog, Regina and her friends reach the warm and welcoming farm country of Salinas, where the regiment receives an order that is simple but explicit: green light.

Book One

EMERGENCE

1997–1998

1

LIL SCRAP KILLAS

Summer 1994

It would have been a perfect day, the kind he’d remember with a tug in his chest later on in jail. Carne sizzling on the grills, oldies blasting their smooth poetry of one true love, and the little kids chasing each other around grown-up legs. Lil Mando wanted to kick it while he could. But he couldn’t, not with Lobo around. As if the man’s whole purpose in life was to ruin good things, that fat pintero stood there with a cup of beer in hand, spewing tales to a gathering audience. When he glanced up from the crowd, Lobo’s half-mast eyes said he brushed off Lil Mando as an insignificant youngster.

The birthmark on Mando’s forehead, usually invisible, bloomed into a dark red. His heart beat as wildly as a trapped bird, but he swallowed and made himself learn, imagining how he’d one day be like those so-called veteranos—but even more, how he would be different. Very different. He was the son of a founder of Salinas East Market, the oldest and bravest Norteño gang, and he understood that greatness coursed in his veins.

They were in Toro Park, a no-man’s-land south of Salinas where in spring the hills turned a glowing green spotted with purple lupine. In summer now, they were a dry gold and the only signs of life were hawks and weathered live oaks and families gathered around picnic tables on blue-sky afternoons.

On the run from a boy’s ranch, Mando joined his friends in that arid spot where the happy occasion was the baptism of his homeboy Gabe’s son—not that it ever took much for a group of Norteños to kick off a pachanga.

When they’d set out for the park, he thought it would be the kind of day he could lock inside his memory so that when he was lying on a bunk in juvenile hall, he’d look back on it with a smile. At the best of these parties, the women fixed shrimp, roast pork, steak, and beans and rice, served in the pink light of afternoon. Great-uncles and grandparents sat remembering México, teenagers whispered among themselves, and the veteranos, back from a prison stint, told war stories near the corner of a backyard fence. Sometimes Mando’s own dad recounted those tales, but on this day that fat fuck Lobo was holding it down.

Lobo was a loud man, built like a bullfrog, all swollen on top with skinny legs. Though he was nothing to look at, the prettiest females appraised him with a cocked eyebrow while the men listened intently, occasionally nodding.

Mando wanted that. Not that he’d ever cover his body with blue-black prison tats or grow one of those horseshoe brochas. The bigger the mustache and the more tattoos, the less of a man, his tía once told him. And he would never strut around in a baggy plaid Pendleton to cover up a beer gut. Lobo may have been a respected veterano, but Mando was younger, smarter, and quicker. And fearless—he knew in his heart he had everything it took to put in the work.

Though a youngster of thirteen, Mando was big for his age and long ago sensed that destiny had made him a soldier. His Mexican grandfather had killed a man defending the family, and his dad taught him he came from a line of proud fighting men. When he was born, an aunt took one look at Armando Tizoc’s tiny face and pronounced his future: he would be trouble, just like his dad. For a boy surrounded by Norteño cousins and uncles—including several who made it into Nuestra Familia—it was an obvious conclusion. Mando vowed to be better than Lobo, to be so good people would listen to his war stories. That day would come, he was sure.

The beer ran out, and the homeboys passed a hat. Lobo was drunk. Mando soaked up the booze and the sun and the girls, but he couldn’t relax. He and Lobo had recently gotten into it again. The week before at a Salinas East Market (SEM) house party where homies fresh out of prison mingled with the SEM youngsters, Lobo was badmouthing an uncle of Mando’s rumored to be in bad standing with the Nuestra Familia.

Your dad’s a good homie, Lobo said, but your uncle fucked up.

Mando didn’t take the bait.

Why’re you telling me? Go talk to him about it, Mando said. He didn’t give a shit about the Nuestra Familia. He was a Norteño, a real gangbanger, not one of those old stuck-up familianos who thought they ran the world. Mando recalled that Lobo had given him the stare that said This ain’t over.

Then, to make matters worse, Lobo tried to get with the only female still available by the evening’s end, and Mando, though barely in his teens, had managed to slip into a bedroom with the twenty-year-old woman. They left Lobo passed out in the living room.

Now, as the beer collection hat reached him, Mando emptied a plastic bag of change into it. When his fingers dove into the cap to wriggle the last coins loose, Lobo told everyone, Look, Lil Mando’s trying to steal the cash!

Mando glanced up, his eyes tiny, distant.

Fuck you, Mando said. I didn’t try to steal shit! His homie from Casitas jumped between the two and urged Mando to kick back. Mando passed the hat, then walked in silence to his friend’s car, where a loaded .380 was hidden. He slipped the gun into his pants. It was time to take control of this situation.

Truth was, he was a born leader, and he’d been a leader since he was first put in charge of his brother’s safety at the age of six. He was allowed to take little Chinto to play a whole block away in Closter Park, and he never forgot the lessons of that day they faced a terrifying surprise just before they made it home to Grandma’s.

Oh no, there’s Buddy in the front yard! Chinto had cried. Grandma’s neighbor had a big husky-type dog that was real furry. Buddy looked like a giant white wolf.

Mando told Chinto, Don’t worry, we’ll cross the street and go around. They’d been taught to hold hands, look both ways, and then cross. But they stood frozen, petrified by the ferocious wolf-beast. Mando took a breath and explained the plan.

We’re going to have to run real fast across the street, he said. On the count of three, we gotta run real fast.

OK.

They held hands, and on three they sprinted as fast as they could, trying to steer around Buddy and all the while screaming at the top of their lungs. Buddy charged straight at them. Chinto tripped and fell down. Mando didn’t know what to do. He kept running. As he looked back, he saw Buddy jump on his brother. He saw blood.

He ran inside screaming, Mom! Buddy’s eating Chinto!

Everyone rushed outside. Seeing the grown-ups’ reactions in the confusion, Mando realized his mistake. The dog wasn’t being mean—Buddy had tried to jump on his brother to play and had accidentally busted the boy’s nose. The relief that came from knowing Chinto was not eaten alive was short-lived.

Why did you leave your brother? Mando’s dad growled.

I came to get help.

He was sent to his room, and then his dad came in and spanked him.

Don’t you ever leave your brother again, no matter what! Big Mando said.

But I thought Buddy was trying to kill him!

"If your brother is ever getting hurt or killed, you stay there and help him—even if it means you getting killed. That’s what a man does."

His dad was young but wise in matters of honor. Mando struggled to understand. It didn’t make sense. Why should he and his brother both die? But the lesson ate at him. He began to grasp the concept of loyalty, not only toward his family but toward his closest friends, whom he would come to love like family. Having their backs at all costs, through thick and thin, no matter what. Even if you both died.

He learned the lesson fast, because whenever Dad was locked up, Lil Mando became the man of the house. It was a responsibility the boy enjoyed, but when something went wrong, he got the blame. Even if his dad was home, when Chinto messed up, Mando was to blame. And when he was to blame, he got an ass whooping.

He started off getting spanked with a belt, then graduated to an extension cord or branches from a tree. Once, on a visit to see family in San Diego, they crossed over to Tijuana, Mexico. After his dad bought the kids candies and toys, the boys felt very clever when they talked him into buying them a souvenir whip, the kind the charros use in the rodeos. The whip became another tool for discipline. The pain from the beatings was unbearable, but if Mando cried he was spanked more because boys ain’t supposed to cry.

Mando didn’t hold this against his dad. His many cousins—with thirteen aunts and uncles on his father’s side alone, he had a boatload of them—all knew the same kind of punishment. It was normal in his neighborhood, and he didn’t complain. In fact, part of him understood it, because it was their volatile tempers that united Mando and his dad. Sometimes Mando found himself slipping across a thin line into a rage so pure and consuming it made him cry uncontrollably, and the faint birthmark on his forehead would turn so red with blood you’d think it was about to catch fire.

It wasn’t long before he had the chance to prove he’d learned his father’s lesson on loyalty. Mando, Chinto, and their cousins were climbing a pine tree next to Grandma’s house. His little brother wanted to reach the top. Mando told him no, but Chinto continued to climb. A branch snapped and the boy fell, landing right on his Uncle Tony’s transmission jack. Chinto’s forehead hit the metal, and it looked as if his whole head split open.

Mando scrambled down the tree. This time, he made sure to stay by the side of his bleeding, wailing brother while the cousins ran to tell his dad. They took Chinto to Natividad hospital, where he had to have stitches but was OK. The grown-ups accused Mando of pushing his brother out of the tree, and he got spanked again. He told himself he just couldn’t win.

Big Mando was a slender but powerful man whose fists flew quick as hummingbirds when the occasion called for it. He liked to hang with the homeboys at the intersection of Madeira and East Market streets, where to this day a pair of rickety open-air markets sprawls onto the sidewalks, their shelves packed with rows of tangerine, scarlet, and green. It’s the freshest produce in an area known for fresh produce. They say that on this corner the gangs of Salinas were born.

The fruit stands were a hallmark of the unincorporated, ramshackle area east of town known as El Alisal. For decades, the district was a mix of shacks, unpaved roads, and seasonal housing for the valley’s migrant farmers whose ranks through the twentieth century included poor whites—John Steinbeck’s famous Okies—followed by Filipinos, Mexican immigrants, and Mexican Americans.

To the dismay of many a Salinas police officer and the city’s old guard, the Alisal was annexed by Salinas in 1963, the year Big Mando was born. A lot of folks weren’t happy about it—the town already had one impoverished, tough neighborhood. A few blocks north of the police station, Chinatown had long attracted whores, johns, drunks, cardsharps, pimps, and junkies of all ethnicities from across the county. In the early 1960s, six Salinas cops tried to arrest two men in a Chinatown knife fight, and some two hundred residents poured out of the bars to fend off the officers. News reports from the time said one man couldn’t stop kicking the cops and had to be put in a padded cell, where he kept right on kicking.

The Alisal, in contrast, had sprung up almost by accident when hundreds of the Oklahoma emigrés memorialized in The Grapes of Wrath arrived in a valley unable or unwilling to house them. Their shacks and sheds were slowly replaced with bungalows and apartments as the workforce changed. The poor whites moved up and out, and the Alisal became browner. Big Mando’s family, originally from Michoacán, joined throngs of Mexicans who moved here to work the fields. In the 1960s and ’70s, the district became known as the East Side, and well-intentioned but overcrowded apartment projects sprouted, their names soon becoming synonymous with prominent gang factions: Acosta Plaza, Las Casitas, La Posada, Los Padres, El Gabilan.

Big Mando, a father at age seventeen, settled his fledgling family near Fremont Street and Madeira. On the fruit-stand corner, he and the guys hung around at day’s end. Like working men everywhere, they drank, got rowdy, and fought. It became their corner, a place to laugh and carouse after a day in the fields.

The youths became known as the Fruit Standers. They were the sons of Mexican immigrants, born in the United States and raised in Salinas, and as they defended their humble corner they resented the flood of new arrivals from México who accepted the lowest wages and the worst work in the fields. Agriculture in the valley and the hospitality industry around Monterey Bay had grown dramatically, along with the county’s demand for cheaper labor.

As native-born American citizens, it was easy for the Fruit Standers to look down on the old-country laborers who crowded their town. On the other hand, the land of their birth treated them as foreigners. The Fruit Standers were caught between two worlds, one run by the white good old boys who, after generations of Mexicans had put food on their tables, still treated them like busboys at the American banquet. The other world was a painful reminder of who their parents were and the rural poverty they fled,