The Railroading of Alex Sanchez

Last week, Alex Sanchez, the Executive Director of Homies Unidos, the largest gang intervention program in Los Angeles County and a model for gang outreach worldwide, was denied bail. He has been charged with a federal racketeering count for his alleged role in the assassination of a man in El Salvador in 2006. Bail was denied despite the fact that the community raised over $2.5 million in sureties and property deeds as a guarantee that Sanchez does not pose a flight risk. If he did leave the country, that property would be confiscated. Yet Judge Manuel L. Real denied bail by claiming that the overwhelming community support proves that Sanchez has the resources to flee the country. Being denied bail will increase the difficulty of Sanchez’s legal counsel to prepare his case, and continue to subject Sanchez to the dangers and degradations of the Los Angeles County jail system.

The accusations of the Los Angles Police Department are best seen in light of a history of charges and counter charges between the LAPD and Sanchez. In September of 1999, Sanchez testified before a California State Senate committee investigating police abuse of former gang members. Within months, officers arrested Sanchez for immigration violations, contradicting Los Angeles City Council Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which bars police from enforcing federal immigration laws. In June of 2000, Sanchez’s lawyers filed a federal suit against the LAPD. Federal prosecutors chose not to prosecute him for illegal entry into the United States, but turned the case over to an immigration court. On July 10, 2002, an INS judge granted Sanchez political asylum, the first such verdict in history.

In the current case, doubts have been raised about the truthfulness of federal evidence by none other than Father Greg Boyle, a widely respected Jesuit priest and the founder of Homeboy Industries. Boyle has filed a declaration with the court, pointing out a troubling omission from the transcript in the government’s case. One of the gangsters appears to say, in effect, “Butt out, Alex, you are no longer one of us.” Thus far the court has not responded to Boyle’s findings.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, community outreach efforts, as documented by prominent gang researchers such as Gerald Suttles and Irving Spergel, were instrumental in maintaining the peace among rival groups of young people growing up in impoverished communities. Unfortunately, such efforts have been severely curtailed since the 1980s in light of efforts to “get tough on crime.” As I document in my book, Who You Claim, many gang members are desperately poor and lack access to caring adults who might provide opportunities for legitimate success. Alex Sanchez’s peace-building approach to gangs harkens back to a time when young people were seen as troubled rather than trouble, and provides a model whose success threatens the perceived efficacy of a militaristic approach. The LAPD anti-gang units, known as CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), operate with secret budgets, no civilian oversight and broad public support. Yet within the field of gang research, developed over 80 years of close analysis, experts question the viability of implementing policies that subject individuals to criminal justice processing due to their alleged gang status for two reasons. First, no concensus exists on the definition of a “gang member,” and second, the presence of gang members has not been demonstrated to cause crime.

The court in the Sanchez case has received more than 120 letters of support from gang experts, clergy, academics, and others including former assistant U.S. Attorney and federal prosecutor, Robert Garcia, and past co-director of the Los Angeles FBI office, Tom Parker, testifying to Sanchez’s character and the effectiveness of his strategy. The public at large needs to be better informed about what works and what doesn’t work in regards to gang members, and begin to question why broad community support might be construed as a risk factor.

I am black and beautiful

Lorzeno Ghiberti, Solomon Receives the Queen of Sheba (1425-52)

ה שְׁחוֹרָה אֲנִי וְנָאוָה, בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם; כְּאָהֳלֵי קֵדָר, כִּירִיעוֹת שְׁלֹמֹה.
ו אַל-תִּרְאוּנִי שֶׁאֲנִי שְׁחַרְחֹרֶת, שֶׁשְּׁזָפַתְנִי הַשָּׁמֶשׁ; בְּנֵי אִמִּי נִחֲרוּ-בִי, שָׂמֻנִי נֹטֵרָה אֶת-הַכְּרָמִים–כַּרְמִי שֶׁלִּי, לֹא נָטָרְתִּי.

I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.
Do not think that I am dark,
for the sun has changed my color.
My mother’s sons fought against me;
they made me keeper of the vineyards.

–Song of Solomon 1:5-6 (10th cen. BCE) (שיר השירים)

Listen to a reading of the Hebrew text.

The Associated Press reports:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.” Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Solomon clearly had different ideas. In his canticles, black is beautiful, and it clearly is competition for the local maidens. And exotic and sexy as this passage may be, it was turned into some of the most magnificent and inspirational polyphonic music of the late Renaissance. Listen to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Nigra sum (I am black) for five voices (ca. 1550):



From Harper's: http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005938

Check out Henry Giroux's Youth in a Suspect Society

"In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk."

- Giroux, Henry. "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. x.

"If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized ..."
- Ibid. p. 29.

http://www.truthout.org/091309A

Remembering Edgar Chocoy--Play at John Jay College, Nov. 12-14

Five years ago, a 16-year-old boy was gunned
down in the streets of Villanueva, Guatemala, by members of a
notoriously violent gang from which he tried heroically to free
himself. The regularity with which such murders occurred in
places like Villanueva made the death of Edgar Chocoy at the
tattooed hands of Mara Salvatrucha wholly unremarkable. But the
circumstances of his being on the streets in the first place made
those gunshots echo around the world.
They will be heard in Fort Collins as a play based on Edgar’s
struggle to save his own life comes to the Lory Student Center at
Colorado State University. It’s a documentary look at how a
troubled boy who was trying desperately to change his life was
sentenced to death by a flawed U.S. immigration system.
Chocoy’s story begins and ends in the slums of Guatemala, but
his fate was sealed in a Denver courtroom. His Fort Collins
lawyer, who hasn’t yet seen the play, said knowing his story will
be told on stage brings back a flood of emotions, including anger
and sadness. But there’s also hope and opportunity.
“There was a lesson to learn in Edgar’s death and we haven’t
learned it,” said immigration attorney Kim Baker Medina. “I’m
very glad that they did the play because we shouldn’t forget
about Edgar Chocoy as a person and for what he represents. The
system failed him terribly, and we need to learn about why that
happened and we need to work to see that it doesn’t continue to
happen.”
What happened was that Chocoy seemed doomed from the start. Born into a poor family on the
outskirts of Guatemala City, he was abandoned by his mother when he was six months old and left
in the care of his grandfather, who sold drugs for a living. He’d only met his father once and didn’t
step foot into a school until he was 9 or 10 years old. It was natural that his only sense of family
came from the kids he met on the street. All of them were members of Mara Salvatrucha, and at
age 12, so was he.
Although he wore the baggy pants, the tight white T-shirts and the tattoos that aligned him with
MS, Chocoy wasn’t cut out for life as a gangster. He hung out less and less with the street thugs,
preferring to play with friends in another neighborhood who weren’t involved in gang life. Finally,
he was threatened with death if he didn’t pay the gang an amount equal to $375.
DE NOVO - Part 1: Lil' Silent" - In 2002, a fourteen -year-old boy
named Edgar Chocoy fled Guatemala to escape the largest gang in
Central America, which had put a hit out on his life. He traveled over
3,000 miles, and across the borders of three countries in search for
his mother, who had left him when he was baby to work in the United
States. Detained by the Department of Homeland Security, he pleaded with a
Colorado judge to grant him asylum and not deport him to Guatemala,
where he was certain he would be killed. This new play from Houses on
the Moon Theater Company chronicles the gripping true story of Edgar
and other undocumented youth, many thousands of whom make the
harrowing journey across the border and through the U.S. system of
justice each year. "DE NOVO - Part 1: Lil' Silent" is a documentary
theater piece crafted entirely from immigration court transcripts,
letters, and extensive interviews conducted by the company with so-
called "alien" children (and their advocates) in immigration
proceedings in New York, Arizona, Colorado and Los Angeles. The play
is performed by bilingual actors in English and partly in Spanish.


PRESS:

NEWSPAPER: http://www.fortcollinsnow.com/article/20080327/NEWS/230019754

TV: http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2008/07/03/sharing-secrets-donna-decesa
re-and-jeff-solomon/


HISTORY:
This play is the most recent production of Houses on the Moon Theatre
Co. whose mission is to dispel ignorance and isolation through the
theatrical amplification of unheard voices. De Novo...Part 1: Lil'
Silent had its premiere at Colorado State University as part of the
Cesar Chavez Celebration and at the University of Colorado Law School
in Boulder. This past spring the play toured New York in a production
cosponsored by the American Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights
Program and Human Rights First and was a featured event in the Mayor's
Immigrant Heritage Week.