My first paying job (I did volunteer work before that) was when I was 15. I was a locker attendant at a pool in a public park employed by the City of Los Angeles. It was in the territory of the Sotel (Mexican American) gang which I imagine has since been gentrified out of existence. Where I lived was technically in their territory too but it didn’t get bad until you got on the other side of the 10 where my Jr. High School is. It was bad enough that there was an armed guard patrolling at all times. Just beyond that was Stoner Park (Not a euphemism. It was named after a guy with that surname). The park was deep in Sotel territory. It was a twenty minute bike ride from my house.
The serious gang bangers were too old or too involved with other things to be paying at the pool in the summer but their nephews, sons and younger brothers were (obviously I was in charge of the male locker room). I’m sure many of them ended up in the life. My first day there they told me “white boy, if you come back again we will kick your ass”. It was a test and I got some respect for coming back and wouldn’t get my ass kicked unless I was stupid enough to wear a blue bandana.
I got friendly with them and got quite an education on how gangs operated and the culture. Now a lot of it is commonish knowledge through popular culture but this was the summer of 1979. West Side gangs were nowhere near as dangerous as East LA or South Central and I never really felt unsafe because I was a civilian and considered cool.
All of the gangsters got a nickname when they were initiated. Their own name if they were jumped in and Lil in front of a name if they were walked in with the name being the same as their relative who walked them in. Over one weekend there was a shooting and this dude named Macho was killed. Shortly thereafter I was given the job of painting over the tags on the pool building and walls. When I was doing it an older gang member came up to me and said, “I know that you’re just doing your job but can you leave up Macho’s name when you see it”. I gladly complied.
A very good friend of mine, before I knew him, was a major LSD dealer in California and also a pit fighter. Pit fighters are bare knuckle fighters who illegally fight in the back of bars. He spent a year and a half in two maximum security prisons in California in the 80s. The stories that he told were horrific. He happened to be Mexican American but not gang affiliated. He saw two people get killed for snitching. One was thrown over the rail three stories up and one was was beaten to death. In the mid 90s when I first met him, he told me that American Me was the most accurate prison movie ever made.