So what happened was I tried going to
Piotrowski Park. I played Little League baseball over there. At
this time, I wasn’t involved in gangs. I was just a kid that loved
sports. I was a pitcher. I think it was at the age of 11 that I got
put on the Pittsburgh Pirates team. And the Pittsburgh Pirates team
uniforms are the colors of the gang in my part of Little Village.
It wasn’t even the gang colors, but it was something that was very
similar to the gang colors.70
So I went to the other part of Little Village
to play a game. I pitched a real good game and I’m walking home. I
get to the boundaries of both gangs, where this is this side and
this is this side. And the gang from the other neighborhood
approached me. And I’m like, “Aw, man.” I had a friend, and he was
a chubby kid and he just took off running. So that already invoked
suspicion on them. They’re like, “Well, why’s this guy running? He
must be a gangbanger.” And I didn’t run, you know, ‘cause I didn’t
feel like I had to run.
And the ringleader asked me, “What you be
about? What gang are
you in?”
I’m like, “Man, I don’t gangbang.”
They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, but what’s up with
them colors, man?” I was 11 years old and this 16-year-old goes and
slaps me and he takes my hat. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, you’re in a
gang, punk, with those colors on.” He took my baseball jersey too
from me. I’m like, “Aw, man.”
And that was like my first taste of what it
was to be affected by gangs. And it invoked hatred in me for the
other side of the neighborhood. I came home and threw my glove
away, like threw it in the garbage, and my mom’s like, “What’s
wrong with you? Why you throwing your glove away?” I just stopped
playing baseball altogether. I’m like “Man, ‘ef’ baseball.” I mean
that’s how much that day affected me. It just—it planted a negative
seed in me, is what it did, and that seed upon time, you know, it
grew and it grew and it grew.
From that point on, I didn’t go to the west
side of Little Village. I didn’t go back over there. At all. For
nothing. And that’s where the park was at.
I really wasn’t gang involved up until I hit
my freshman year at Farragut High School, but my stepfather was one
of the major players in the community. He was already involved at a
young age in gangs; I think about 14 or 15 years old he was already
involved. Everything that he did, I pretty much did; I wanted to
emulate him.
And when I hit high school, it was like a
culture shock. You got the Gangster Disciples, you got the Vice
Lords, you got the Travelers, all African-American gangs. And the
guys that were already involved in the Latino gang from my
neighborhood in Little Village, they pretty much just cuffed me and
took me under their wing. There was this one guy in particular, he
seen me in the lunchroom like my second day. He’s like, “You’re
gonna be cool; you’re with us. Don’t worry about it.” He was like
this big muscular dude; it was probably like his fifth year in high
school, and he probably had like sophomore credits, and he just
took me under his wing. From that point on, it was like, “All
right, well, I guess I’m gonna be involved.” I didn’t really have a
choice.
He was one of those guys that, you know, if
there was a fight, he’s right in the middle of it. If there’s an
argument, he’s coming, he’s showing up. That’s just who he was—the
guy that always managed to have his hands on anything that happened
in the school in terms of guys getting into gang fights. Nobody
would mess with him. And ‘cause nobody would mess with him, nobody
would mess with me.
I was with him once when a well-known rapper
came to the school to perform a concert. So I sit down and the
concert starts and some back-and-forth banter starts going on in
the stands. The blacks and Latinos be gangbanging to each other.
Signs here, signs there. All it took was one swing and it was over.
Everybody started fighting.
And that was my first experience, man. I hit
a couple people. Our assistant principal got hit with a chair; it
busted his head right open. I got a black eye; I got a fat lip. It
really started to invoke that hate, and that seed was already
planted from the Latino gangs, but now it was planted from the
African-American gangs. That really took me off course. It put a
bad taste in my mouth.
It was tough, man, because I played
basketball and all the African-American students, they would see me
in the gym. And I had a real good friend that was a black student—a
real good friend. I mean, we used to hang out after school by the
gym and we would play ball. Saturday mornings, me and him would be
the first ones there. And in my junior year, there was a big fight
and everybody’s running around the school. They were taking
students and locking them up. I’m walking in the hallway and he’s
coming up the stairs. He’s got a big old bandage on his head, and
he’s just bleeding profusely. He’s like, “Why the ‘ef’ your boys
got to do that, bro?”
I just looked at him, and that’s when I knew:
I just lost a friend. And it wasn’t even something I did. It was
something the guys did, but I didn’t try to repair that
relationship. I left it alone. That’s just the way it was.
I didn’t have a father growing up. I was
about five months old when he passed away. And my uncle through
marriage was a positive person in my life. He’s like one of the
biggest influences in terms of why I do this work, because he was a
social worker, too.
He loved working with the kids and he took a
real liking to me, even though I was heavily involved in the gang
in the neighborhood. Basketball was always something that attracted
my attention—and my uncle, he fueled that passion, man. He would
come to the block in his little Honda. He’d double-park in the
middle of the street and jump out in front of my house, which at
the time was like the epicenter for all the guys. But he had no
fear.
He would be like, “Hey, I’m looking for my
nephew.” People would pull out guns on him.
They’d be like, “Man, what you looking for
him for?”
He wouldn’t be afraid of the guns. He’d push
them out of the way and go knock on my door: “Man, we got a game!
Get your shorts. Let’s go, man.”
I’d be like, “Man, I don’t wanna go play
right now.”
“Bro, we got a damn game, man. You got a
commitment to me. You’re gonna stick to it. Now get your ass
up.”
And I always had this tremendous talent to
put the ball in the basket. It was a God-given gift, you know. I
mean, people that know me can tell you I’m just one of those guys
that just picked up the ball and it seemed like it was second
nature to me. So my uncle seen all that, he seen all the potential.
He never really pushed me to get out of the gang, but he just told
me, “You’re gonna see that eventually all this stuff is not gonna
get you anywhere, but basketball is gonna get you somewhere.”
And, I mean, it did. There was a Latino
tournament that was strictly for the Midwest and it was like a
20-city tournament, so every month there was another tournament to
go to. So I started getting exposed to all this other stuff that I
just didn’t know was out there. Here I am living in Little Village
and closing my mind off to all these options, ‘cause I thought just
the gang life was all there was for me. And getting out there and
seeing Latinos doing all kinds of other stuff just blew me
away.
My son, to this day, has about 50 to 60
trophies that he just has put in his room, ‘cause now he’s starting
to like basketball and he thinks his dad is like this big-time
star. And I tell him, “I never made it to the NBA, and I didn’t go
to college to play basketball, but I did make a name for
myself.”
I even got offered to go play in Mexico on a
professional team. There was a scout that had came to watch
somebody play, and I ended up dropping like 50 points on the guy,
and the scout just forgot about the dude and came to ask me. But I
thought, “I don’t wanna go live anywhere else, especially not for
no three months. I’m making money doing my side stuff in the
neighborhood.” It just didn’t seem like it was an option to me. I
closed myself off to it.
I was in high school for four years. I had
credits, enough credits to be maybe a sophomore at most. It wasn’t
a big deal to me. The gang culture and the gang life just took a
real hold of me for a lot of years of my life. A lot of years, man,
I lost a tremendous amount of friends, and, as I lost my friends,
my hate for other gangs just grew and grew and grew.
I was on probation for possessing the
cannabis. I spent about two months in the county jail. I was
sentenced to two years’ probation, but I was off of probation after
a year and five months. Being on probation, you know, it started to
change my attitude a little bit about not wanting to get into so
much trouble. But what helped me decide that this road I was on was
a destructive one and it was gonna end my life, is when I had my
daughter.
At the time, me and the woman who is my wife
now had broken up, and she had left the city, and I was just on
this destructive path. I was just like, “I lost my girl and I loved
her.” So it made me drink even more, party even more, go out there
and even be more of a … Then her mother called me.
She’s like, “Come to the house. I need to
show you something.”
I’m like, “Show me something?” ‘Cause I
always had a good relationship with her mother, and her mother
always kept in contact with me.
And she says, “Just be ready to see something
that’s gonna change your life.” And I figured, like, she had money
or something. And she opens the bedroom door, and there’s
the—there’s the little baby, my daughter Leslie.
And I’m like, “Who’s that?”
She’s like, “That’s your daughter.”
“That’s my daughter?”
It blew me away. By looking at that baby, I
could already tell that she was my daughter. She had the same
birthmark as me, everything. But I had so much anger in me that I
was like, “No, man. I want a DNA test.”
She’s like, “If you don’t stop, I’m gonna
slap you, ‘cause that’s your daughter.” And it hit me like a ton of
bricks, man: “I’m willing to die for what I believe in, but am I
really going to do that now that I have this little girl in my
life?”
I went and I signed up for GED. And it took a
while to get my GED, I can’t lie. Because I had so much stuff going
on in terms of just being in the neighborhood and dealing with
stuff. I got my GED, and I got hired by a display company and,
like, within a year that job just took off for me. I went from just
being the driver for the company to getting the manager’s job. That
was my really first job-job, you know, and it took off from right
there.
I started working on the railroad. I got the
call from CeaseFire,71 and I still don’t know how they got that
number. They wanted somebody that could get in there, get in touch
with individuals in Little Village, and let them know that they’re
trying to promote a culture of nonviolence. And I started doing a
lot of detachments for them, which was kids that wanted to get out
of gangs. I knew everybody in the neighborhood, and I would say,
“Look man, the kid’s not going to pose a threat to you. Let him get
out, man.” Kind of negotiate some things. And I started pulling
kids out. Not a lot of kids out, but four or five kids out of a
gang a year to us is a huge number. Ultimately, God has his hand
over who stays and who goes, but the threat of being killed by gang
violence shoots down once you’re not in it.
And it just sparked something in me. It just
did. It always felt like there was a burden in my heart, ‘cause I
would be in the community and I would try to volunteer and do
things, but I also knew that in this line of work you cannot, you
cannot
, have one foot in and one foot out. Kids see through
that. The kids that you work with are gonna see that.
I’ve been on board with the YMCA’s Street
Intervention Program for I’m gonna say about four to five years. My
days here, they can just be overwhelming. During my mornings, I
could be at court or I could be at the high school or I could be
checking up on one of my kids and making sure he went to school or
talking to one of the school counselors. At night, I do
recreational activities and run peace circles with the kids. I put
in at least 65 hours this week. For people like me, it’s important
that we make time for our own kids, ‘cause we don’t want to lose
our kids while we’re trying to save somebody else’s. I try my best
to call my kids at least three times a day and talk to all of them,
see what’s going on, tell them, “Daddy will be home late so just
make sure you take a shower, get ready for bed, and I’ll kiss you
when I get home.”
My weekends I try my best to just dedicate it
to my kids. Even during the week, if I can sneak away, I’ll tell my
boss, “I gotta go home for a little while and help my son with his
homework or I gotta see my daughter, who is in the choir.” She
sings like a bird. I don’t know where she got it from ‘cause I
don’t have that voice and neither does my wife. But I like being
there to support her. So those are our days, man. We just do all
this and that. All of it.
—
Interviewed by Mollie
Diedrich
Endnotes
69 Estrada left the YMCA shortly before this
book went to press. He and Jorge Roque both now work for CeaseFire
and for New Life Community Church in Little Village, where they
mentor young people who are on probation.
70 The Pittsburgh Pirates’ uniforms are black
and gold—the same basic colors as the Latin Kings.
71 CeaseFire was founded by Dr. Gary Slutkin,
an epidemiologist who maintains that violence should be treated
like an epidemic and can be prevented by
stopping the behavior at its source. The group—recently renamed
Cure
Violence—was the subject of The Interrupters, an award-winning 2011
film by Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz.