The Power of Words

By Constance Tillotson
Special to The Lookout

March 17 -- School Board member Oscar de la Torre holds court with a group of young Latinos who are lounging against a pool table.

One of the teenagers has just come into the Pico Youth and Family Center from the street, where a group of gang members tried to jump him.

“It’s not about reaction,” said de la Torre, the center’s executive director. “It’s about mediating the conflict instead of resorting to violence. You talk it out. It is about the words.”

The young Latinos are former gang members who attend the center, which provides at risk-youth from the crime-riddled Pico Neighborhood and other parts of the city an alternative to hanging out on the streets.

Two weeks earlier, the upscale beachside city was rocked by the fatal shooting of Eddie Lopez, an honors student and star athlete at Santa Monica High School. Lopez was standing outside a mini mart on Pico Boulevard when an LA gang member ran up and shot him.

The killing refocused attention on the gang violence that also took the lives of Johnathan Hernandez and Hector Bonilla at a private party a year earlier. None of the victims were gang members, police said.

De la Torre, who grew up in the Pico Neighborhood, believes the City has long neglected the problem.

“Eighty percent of all gang homicides have occurred in an eight block radius of the Pico district,” said de la Torre. “If it would have been the homeless or dolphins they would have done something about it.”

De la Torre believes more youth are joining gangs because of the “oppression” of Latinos by the City.

The repression, he said, began when the city eliminated council districts, robbing Santa Monica’s poorest neighborhood of representation. Since at large elections began, no one from the Pico neighborhood has been elected to the council.

If the neighborhood was disenfranchised politically, it was divided physically in the 1960s, when 2,500 of the neighborhood’s residents were displaced to make way for the 10 Freeway. Since then, the neighborhood has been synonymous with gang violence.

The neglect continues, de la Torre said. Police Chief James T. Butts, Jr., focuses the department’s resources on the upscale city’s tourist destinations at the expense of its poorest area, de la Torre said.

“Police Chief Butts is in denial that there is a gang problem,” he said. “Real acts of violence in this area do not get the attention because our life is not as valuable as those in the tourist sections.”

Chief Butts said it is the media that chooses to focus on the tourist areas, not the police department.

“I completely disagree with him,” said Butts. “I take it deadly serious when any crime occurs… We are resolved to solve any crime that occurs.”

Most of Santa Monica’s gang violence is perpetrated by gang members who come from outside the city, Butts said.

For those who do live in the city, the Pico Youth and Family Center was started in 2002 to help keep at risk youth off the street by offering a safe environment where they can acquire skills to set them on a different course.

The impetus of the center came four years earlier, when five homicides took place in October 1998. A peace march, started by de la Torre, led to three years of lobbying the City Council to expand funding to support the center. In 2001, the city gave two grants totaling some $360,000 to start up the center.

Michelle Castillo, 18, has been coming to the Pico Center throughout high school. She saw her brother and sister fall into gangs and jail and decided she would not take that path.

She has taken advantage of many of the classes offered by the center, which offers free tutoring from UCLA students for college preparatory exams and a host of computers complete with individual instruction. Now college is just around the corner.

“I just got accepted to Mt. St. Mary’s,” said Castillo. “It was my first choice. I am getting a degree in psychology. I want to work with juvenile delinquents.

“They will know they can talk to me because I have been around gang members and people in trouble all my life,” she said. “I will be able to relate to them because we come from the same environment.”

The center also helps those searching for a job to put together resumes and learn interview techniques.

But for the service to be fruitful, de la Torre said, local employers need to step up and take a chance at hiring youngsters who may have a criminal record, but are now trying to turn their lives around.

“I believe in transitions in people,” said de la Torre. “I’ve seen a heroin addict turn around, get a Master’s degree, and is now teaching.

“For someone to change, get off the streets, stop selling drugs, the employers out there must be willing to believe they can change too,” he said. “Otherwise, it just perpetuates the problem.”

Some job applicants referred by the center have “flaked” on their jobs because of a relapse to drugs or a lack of social skills, but de la Torre said “never, ever has one ever stolen from their employer.”

Help from former gang members is the most proactive way to help combat the gang violence, de la Torre said.

“Being a part of a gang becomes your identity,” he said. “So instead of feeling like you are just a high school drop out, or a low life combined with a lack of a father or abuse you have gone through, being part of a gang makes you feel you finally have power. You are someone.

“It takes a person who has lived this to understand how to stop the pain that these young men are experiencing,” de la Torre said.

Counseling is also a big part of the center. St. John’s Child & Family Development Center provides access for those in need of support groups, culturally relevant healing practices and anger management.

“Indio” and “Lucky,” not their real names, are both 18 and have been coming to the center since it opened four years ago. Indio was just released two weeks ago from a three-month jail sentence for carrying. He has been in and out of prison since he was 14.

“What I like most about it is that I am greeted when I come in,” Indio said. Even when I leave, someone will look up to tell me good-bye. It makes me feel good.”

Lucky agrees that it makes his stomach feel “warm” that people care. He currently is going to a college for cement welding.

“It is a safe place,” said Lucky. “Gangs have respect for this place. No one comes to cause trouble.”

One of the most popular features of the center is a music studio where youth can learn production and recording techniques from professionals. A CD, “Best of the Westcoast Underground” was recently cut and is now for sale. Luminaries like Russell Simmons have dropped by.

Many programs are still in development, and de la Torre feels there is strong support from the City Council, although he sees City staff as the roadblock. But with the hiring of City Manager, P. Lamont Ewell, de la Torre sees progress on the horizon.

“Our message is that instead of fighting against each other,” said de la Torre, “we need to come together to fight the issues.”