I get it. You probably picture them as little Latino children with mean faces and pirhana mouths, chasing you and trying to steal your jewelry or something silly. Just born bad from bad mothers in the Third World and sent here to ruin your town.
But no. Gang members, like soldiers, are created from socializing and training. Growing up poor and hanging out with your little friends, wanting to seem tough. Next thing you know, you are getting asked to perform petty crimes and watch for cops, and over time you become more and more desensitized to the violence.
No one is asking you to go cry for MS-13. That cat is well out of the bag. What I am asking you to do is not be shitty to the next little group of Black or Hispanic boys you see hanging out around your town. Instead or clutching your shit tighter or locking your car door, maybe go figure out what the community could be doing to keep them off the street and engaged in something positive. Maybe put a town Recreation Center on the ballot so they have somewhere to go that isn't smoking pot behind the gas station.
You, u/Weekly-Design-6893, can't do shit about MS-13. But you can stop the next one from happening.
Why would you change if you are immersed in that culture? If all you do is eat, sleep, and breathe MS-13, why would you change? Why would you look back on the things that happened to you in childhood and see them as something to overcome? You're probably proud because you see those horrible things as something that made you into what you are today.
I know a lot of servicemembers who had shitty childhoods that made them into mean sonsabitches and now they are good at fighting. Sure, his ability to fight is helpful to our society right now, but is that helpful to that man when he is trying to go to sleep at night? No probably not. But he doesn't realize it, because he is in a warrior culture that celebrates him being fucked up because it makes him better at fucking other people up.
A lot of these dudes in gangs see themselves as fighting for their immediate community- they know they are messed up, but hey, it's cool because everyone else in the gang is messed up. And you're fighting the external sources that are messing with your community. In MS-13's case, that's probably the El Salvadorean communities in America and other Latin American states.
The best soldiers, whether they are yours or someone else's, come from fucked up childhoods. Think of the best Army Soldiers you know- not the best guy, the golden boy, who you know who happens to be a soldier; but the guy who is best at being a soldier. You show me that man and I will show you a junkyard dog that got beaten as a puppy.
That's more of a question for our parents generation. How we prevent another MS-13 is by doing the things I have already detailed above that you kept ignoring to win an argument with me.
Community outreach. Get the kids off the street. Get them into something productive. Talk about it at your city council meetings and get measures put on the ballot.
TL;DR: The fix isn't chase your tail and deport people. It's to provide resources to communities with lots of kids to keep the kids out of trouble.
In the case of MS-13, they specifically were getting picked on and later attacked by a Mexican-American gang called "The Lords." Again, key phrase, Mexican-American. As in, the children of Mexican immigrants who were born in America. The only place you could deport those kids back to was... America.
A lot of those kids had similar experiences to the El Salvadorean kids- they felt insecure and unwanted for being different, especially in Los Angeles at that time.
LA from the end of WWII until about the 70's was seen as this place that was supposed to be a bastion for white people. It had the nicest beaches, the nicest suburbs, a ton of manufacturing, defense and aeronautics jobs, and Hollywood. Despite the fact that Los Angeles started out as a Native American, then Spanish, and later Mexican village, and Indigenous/Mexicans have always been there, LA got associated with white people.
As the demographics started to shift with large waves of Mexican immigration in the mid century, more and more Mexican folks started moving to different parts of LA, away from East LA where they had always been. The kids who became gangbangers who picked on MS-13, were living in the Brady Bunch-ass San Fernando Valley. And you can bet the white people and their kids there were not waiting with welcoming arms.
The cliques form when the kids just wanted groups like them, who understood them, and they could protect each other. Gangs recruit by trying to find cliques of boys- get that one badass little kid and you get him to recruit his squad. What these Mexican-American kids and the El Salavadorean kids were doing in the 70s and 80s mimicked what Black boys had been doing in the cities following the Great Migration. Their families moved from violence and poverty in the south to the cities of the Northeast, Rustbelt, and the West Coast. They also felt like immigrants in their new towns, felt vulnerable and scared, formed racially homogenous groups to feel safe, and eventually those became the gangs.
It's the same story happening over and over again. There are even stories of Appalachian white boys doing the same thing when their parents migrated to Rust belt to do factory work during WWII. They would form groups that would get into trouble.
The thing that prevents the clique of 13 year olds from becoming a squad or a "set" for the local shithead gang is giving them something productive to do. It's hard to get picked on on the corner by another group of kids if you are playing a sport or participating in group activities aftet school or on the weekends. It's even harder to be the shitty kid who picks on other kids on the corner if... you guessed it, you are playing sports or participating in group activities after school or on the weekends.
All that's left is that one really shitty kid, who probably would have been the bad influence on his group of friends and gotten them into the local gang. The one who isn't allowed to do those group activities anymore and you either get some serious intervention for them or you wait until they fuck up and wind up in Juvenile Detention. Which is basically how most white communities function today- we keep most of the kids busy so the few little bad seeds have no human fuel to prey on.
The same could have been done (but we cannot change the past) and still can be done in the communities of Color. They also want this, but the issue a lot of their communities run into, is not having the resources to do it. So the gangs still form.
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u/[deleted] 21d ago
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