In the inner city of Los Angeles, it's the parents who dream of seeing their kids leave and the children who refuse to abandon the old neighborhood. & Ginetta Robinson wants her 17-year-old son out of his gang and out of the house, even though the place he is likeliest to end up is jail. "I'd rather see him locked up than dead," she says. Ramona Penuelas, a housewife who immigrated to America in search of a better life, plans to take her 14-year- old son back to Mexico once he gets out of juvenile detention. Zuela Menjivar is from El Salvador, and her dreams for a more prosperous life are so earnest that she has a subscription to FORTUNE magazine but no washing machine. She can't keep her 14-year-old away from the gangs. Once she screamed at him, "I'll send you to Salvador, where you can really fight with guns!" Unimpressed, her son shrugged. "Why should I fight someone else's war? I got my own to fight."
South Central Los Angeles looks a lot like the rest of the city -- smog- filtered sunlight, palm trees, pastel-colored stucco apartments. It doesn't look like a ghetto. The gang writing on cement walls, criminal samizdat that cops read for news of a planned attack with the expert alacrity of CIA cryptologists, is fastidiously printed; it bears little resemblance to the loopy graffiti of New York City.
South Central is best understood with eyes closed, because then unnerving sounds eclipse the familiar Los Angeles sights. Police and ambulance sirens, the insistent sputter of hovering police helicopters, blaring car alarms, the rapid pop-pop that no resident mistakes for a car backfiring -- all blend together into an incessant white noise of menace.
More than 500 gangs, with some 80,000 known members, infest Los Angeles County. The best known are the Bloods and the Crips, the two largest, predominantly black gangs, and the most bitter of rivals. Bloods and Crips break down into small neighborhood sets, and it is not uncommon for one Crip group to fight another Crip group up the street, for Blood to fight Blood. There were 462 gang-related murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach the carnage of Beirut or El Salvador on a per capita basis, it is higher than that of Belfast or Burma. The U.S. Army has begun sending doctors to train in the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Watts, because there they can get 24-hour-a-day experience treating the kind of gunshot wounds normally seen only in battle.
"Little Ducc" went on his first "mission," a drive-by shooting, as an observer when he was twelve. Freshly inducted into a local Crip gang, he drove in a sedan he describes as a GTA as casually as if he were saying GTO or MG, though it is police parlance for "grand theft auto" -- a stolen car. He is 14 now, in juvenile detention, and mainly remembers the noise. "A lot of yelling, some shooting, and then the police sirens." He never knew what prompted the attack. His "homeboys" had brought him along to test his mettle, and he acquitted himself well.