Rhyme and Reason: Local Youth Speak Out

By Oliver Lukacs

Oct. 14 -- Santa Monica's mostly invisible youth subculture stepped into the spotlight on Thursday in the little back room of the Pico Youth and Family Center, where a colorful tapestry of voices seldom heard was amplified through poetry.

From uplifting love letters to humanity, to tales of transformation from underage hoodlum drug-addict to grown-up college student, to dark contemplations on death, the more than 40 young poets who crammed into the community center for the 3rd Liberation Poetry Slam were as diverse as their poetry.

"Liberation because it's a type of atmosphere where you can say anything you want," said Alejandro "Alex" Aldana, the leading organizer of the event. Aldana, who grew up in the crime-riddled Pico Neighborhood, said the Center's Youth Leadership Council wanted "to create something to unite the community."

The overwhelming majority of the young people at the slam were Samohi students, many of them from the Pico Neighborhood, and nearly all from Santa Monica.

Dressed in a long black trench coat and black boots, Brain Menendez walked up to the microphone planted at the edge of a pool of light emitted from a lone bulb hanging overhead and dedicated a poem to the staff of the Center who helped him turn his life around.

"These guys gave me clothes, gave me a roof over my head, they gave me everything," said Menendez, who said he was kicked out of his house at 16. Addicted to drugs, he carried a gun to school, "the whole nine yards.

"Now I am going to college and working at John Adams Middle School, doing something positive," Menendez said.

In the poem entitled "Past and Present," Menendez spoke of his transformation:

"Growing up in a world of children it's hard becoming a man," he said. Of the internal struggle many of his peers experience during that process: "I see what's in our heart, but it's hard finding anything when your looking in the dark."

Eliminating that darkness is one of the missions of the center, said case manager Michael "Big Mike" Jackson, who along with the other counselor provide intense service to more than 30 kids in the formative 16 to 24 age group.

"People come in heavy, with negative feeling as soon as they walk through the door," said Jackson, who grew up in Santa Monica with the center's founder and School Board candidate Oscar de la Torre. "They have a lot of energy but no way to focus it, this a good place to focus it, positively."

Speaking from experience as a transformed person himself, Aldana said the slam was an extension of center's mission -- to provide a vital community facility that he says is literally saving lives.

"Individuals could be getting killed on the street if they weren't here," he said.

Charlie Salazar, a 16 year-old Samohi student, takes classes at the center's recording studio, a little room next to the spot-lit microphone, from which Charlie was disc-jockeying the hip-hop soundtrack to the night's event.

Salazar said he had tinkered with the craft of the turntables but had no place to go to do it seriously. "I know how to work this," he said, proudly pointing to the sampling machine and the synthesizer. "Most guys don't know how to do it. I come here to learn. I don't come to mess around. I am going to do this professionally."

Between poems, freestyles, and spoken word recitations Aldana would roll gracefully into the spotlight in his electric wheelchair to provide interludes of his gospel-like messages of peace, love, and social justice, or to say something poetic.

"Hey Charlie," Aldana called into the room, where the D.J. stayed out of sight, "come say something." Silence. "I guess Charlie uses his instruments to speak. Those are his words."

The place was filled with positive energy, and at times, with the help of Aldana's soft-spoken gospel, took on a church-like quality. Random outbursts of praise and applause would explode from the huddled audience (composed of kids, and some young adults who had kids) at the climax of a poem or freestyle.

"Let me articulate a spoken word that will shape your third eye," said Angela Rivera, a 17 year-old Samohi student, who wrote her poem on the spot. "Keep me off mendacious skies that impair my abilities to react. I'll blossom with any of the rest of them, just yank this weight of my back."

Michael Zeltser, a UCLA student studying electrical engineering, electrified the audience with a memorized poem. "I am the cry of a baby alone in the dark. I am the hiss of a bullet that just missed its mark. I am the ring of string about to burst. Every time I die it feels just like my first…"

After that poem Aldana, who plans to double major in sociology and business at LMU after he graduates from Samohi, put death into a sociological perspective.

"It sounds contradictory: that we must die, but it is the way we die that defines us," he said, listing the names of social justice superheroes like Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony, who died or were killed still fighting for their cause.

"I can't change the world alone," Aldana said, "but together we can."

"My message is this: Be aware of what's going on in your own community," said Aldana. "My message is: try to be as sentimental to the issues around you, and try to connect to them, as best you can."