Gangsta's Paradise

High School is a complex and ever-changing minefield of cliques, in-crowds, out-crowds and bullies. But the high schools of inner-city Los Angeles are run by a different kind of clique. Cliques with guns, tattoos and turf. Your clique is not determined so much by whether you are a jock, a nerd, a preppy kid or an outcast. It has to do with race, deep history and "where you're from".

Gangs. Gangsters. Gangbangers. OGs.

“Where’re you from?” This is the forbidden question. In gang-heavy cities, this is how turf is defended and fights are instigated. The answer is not "Los Angeles," "Pasadena, " or "the Valley." The answer to this question is more likely something like: "Hoover street Crips, where’re you from?!" or "White Fence, Boyle Heights, homie, where you from?!" I used to make the mistake of asking new students this question as a way to start conversation and get to know each other. They’d look back at me, cock their head to the side and respond: “Where’m I from? Or Where am I from?” They would chuckle and say, “Miss, I don’t think I can answer that.” I quickly learned to ask this question differently, the way they would ask me or how they would ask one another: “Where do you stay?” I find this phrasing particularly interesting, as it implies a certain kind of transience and instability inherent their situations. This suggested impermanence is often very true to their lived experience, childhoods moving in and out of broken homes, crashing with friends, being assigned to different foster families and “placements” or living “on the run”.

About 90% of my students claim a gang. It is tatted on their arms. It is tagged all over their assignments. It is etched into their desks. These gangs don’t only organize the power dynamics “on the outs” they also are fully active inside the prisons and in my classroom. On the streets, these gangs have been killing each other for years in a vicious cycle of violence. What happens when you force all of these rivalries to coexist locked up together?

This summer, I ran two five-week programs with about 40 students in each summer module. The latter of my summer programs has proven to be one of the most challenging classes I have ever taught. I’ve seen students of different races, neighborhoods and gangs coexist quite peaceably, and even form friendships. But this summer, in addition to some staffing difficulties and a rocky start on an experimental curriculum, I had one of the most overtly segregated and underhandedly hostile classes I’ve even worked with at Camp. African American students sit on one side of the room, exchange high-fives and swap boisterous stories of street victories or disturbingly debaucherous pastimes. The Latino students sit on the other side of the circle, slouched quietly or resting their heads on the desks, once in awhile listening in or dropping racially charged insults under their breath. This is the notorious “black/brown rivalry”. The moment students arrive in camp, they are sized up; they will side with their race and then subdivide into their racialized gang affiliations. The black students dominate this class only slightly in numbers but overwhelmingly in the forcefulness of their presence and in “juice”. Juice is how much pull you have with probation, camp or school staff, teachers and other wards who may have some power, such as those working on kitchen or laundry duty. (Even my students tell me “I have juice” because I am allowed to come and go freely around the camp and bring in whatever I want.) Essentially “juice” is social capital.

On a given day, a dominant Latino student or a high-ranked rival black gang member will join the class, and the power dynamics are subtly shifted. Those knocked from the top of the hierarchy act sour and those rising from the usually more subordinate group get giddy at the idea of a little taste of social revenge.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to teach a class.

But to do so without an awareness and sensitivity to these underlying factors is futile. Our curriculum is designed to address these issues head-on by teaching about conflict resolution, talking about education as a form of oppression and/or liberation, critiquing our relationship to and perpetuation of stereotypes, and attempting to build community, trust and respect in the classroom as an exercise for the wider world. We are talking about heavy issues and in a way trying address the cycles of racism, violence, and incarceration that gangs so successfully perpetuate. For me as a teacher, it is better to work with this reality than to deny or condemn its presence.

My experience goes beyond practicing an awareness of the gang culture. It is also a challenge for me to understand what this social phenomenon is all about, trying to see it from their perspective and withholding my judgment even despite my strong convictions about violence and my academic perspective on gangs.

Gangs enter in in the absence of stable families, strong communities, functioning schools or accessible and healthy alternative activities. This is taken in conjunction with the heavy marginalization that these youth experience, both in their experience of structural violence, systemic classism and racism and in some cases xenophobia.
Maybe you live in a country where your language is disparaged. Maybe you feel discriminated against because of the way you look or speak. Maybe you feel constantly disrespected by peers, employers, school principals or patrolling police.

We all experience a human need and desire for community, acceptance and social protection. In these communities, gangs serve this purpose. And for a teenager in a less-that-safe neighborhood, this protection and “family” is all the more crucial for survival. Perhaps it is just a matter of reframing how we think and talk about ”gangs” and addressing their social, economic and political causes rather than just the negative symptoms that we read splattered across the front pages.

A Day in the Life

We pull up through a wooded area with a smoggy view over the Inland Empire. Past the rusted gate, we turn into the pot-holed parking lot which is always more crowded than I expect. The Probation Officers' luxury sports cars sit ironically alongside our rickety mini-van. We unpack the day's supplies, count the number of pens (to be sure we leave with the same amount that we walk in with) and make our way to the barbwire-lined fence. We ring the buzzer and wait for the POs to take enough notice and allow us in, past one heavy metal gate and a second smaller entrance. The officers take little interest in us, even as we sign in and eagerly greet and nod our way through the camp office.

The Camp office operates as a buffer between the gated entrance to the facility and the actual entrance to the camp. There are always a few wards lingering around the office, the result of “write-ups” and other disciplinary measures which send them out of the classroom to waste their day away on a hot bench. We often recognize these kids as the regular “trouble makers” or students of a former class; they usually fill us in on the day’s gossip—“Heeeey, Soto went on trans, got sent to the box for jumping some vato in the dorms”. Translation: One of our students, Soto, started a fight with another ward and got sent to another camp for 24 hours lock-down in isolation.

We walk slowly through the heat. Past the baseball and soccer fields which are never used but are kept perfectly mowed. Past the asphalt lot and busted-up basketball hoop where they spend their “rec” time. Past the dorms, piled high with bunk beds. Past the American and State of California flags. We pass through the outdoor corridor of school buildings, brown bricks blocks of classrooms, to our classroom.

We usually arrive a little earlier than our students. We set up the room and might chat with the teacher if they are there. About a third of the time the class is overseen by a substitute who is usually pleased that we will be doing his job for the day. All the regular camp teachers know us pretty well by now. I spend time meeting, planning and debriefing our programs with them throughout the year. Certain teachers are more ambitious about how they use their class time than others, but they are always happy to scrap whatever they had planned for the next few months and hand the class over to us for the semester.

When it comes time to move the wards from class to class or from lunch to the dorms, a whole network of communication radiates from the camp office. This is to avoid having too many boys in the yard at a time. Wards are forced to run from post to post while officers supervise and bark orders, making sure that the boys make "sharp corners" as they zigzag towards the appropriate classroom or end point. Any student who does not sprint or pivot cleanly at the corners is sure to be held back for punishment and likely written up. So in the process of getting the kids to class, they often end up missing the class completely and attain a bad mark on their record. This process of running the wards is called "movement". When they reach our door, they are lined up and shuffled into the classroom into assigned rows of seats. After a quick and abrasive roll call, we join the boys in moving the desks to form a circle. This is the layout we use for all of our classes. The format breaks down the assigned seats which predetermine and pre-punish the "trouble makers" and eliminates the hierarchical dichotomy between teacher and student.

Finally, the classroom is ours. The officers are gone, the teachers bury themselves in their computers and tune out our presence. For one hour and forty-five minutes we are together and the space is ours. Amid the heat, the hurt, the hyperactivity and the good old-fashioned teenage hormones, we somehow needed to find a way to differentiate our space (and in some ways ourselves) from the camp. And so we always begin class the same way, with a moment of silence. As I always tell the boys, "This is not a prayer or a somber silence. This is just meant to shake the day off, calm our heads, leave the drama at the door, and clear the room for the journey we are about to take." A student volunteers to start us out...

"Hands flat on the desk, feet flat of the floor, back straight 'cause it feels great, clear your head and just breath." We sit in a bone-chilling and precious moment of silence until someone speaks: "Make some noise..."

Borrowed Voices

In 1999, Pitzer College first developed its partnership to the Camps with a program called Borrowed Voices. This program has since evolved through many staff people, many institutional changes and through hundreds of Pitzer volunteers and Camp AP high schoolers. We continue to adapt and expand upon this programming and develop additional programming in collaboration with our students and the teachers and staff.

In the Borrowed Voices community-based learning program students of Pitzer College teach a ten-week poetry workshop to the incarcerated juveniles of Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige High School (Camp AP). The program culminates with a final performance wherein Pitzer students perform the writing of their Camp students, borrowing their voices for a night to share their stories. Over the past few years, the relationship with the probation staff has been so strong that the Camp has released up to ten of our students to come to Pitzer and take part in the event. They are able to take the mic for themselves and their peers who are stuck locked up for the night. This provides a unique venue to publish and publicly perform all the work that is developed over the ten weeks and to give voice to a population which is usually kept hidden and silent. Through the Borrowed Voices performance event, the writing and the stories developed throughout the program can be shared with a broader audience and the impact of the program is extended beyond just its participants.

The fundamental goal of the program is to create space for humanity, creativity and self-expression in an unjust and failing system of marginalization, discrimination and dehumanization. By bringing together university students and incarcerated youth, Borrowed Voices facilitates mutually educational and beneficial relationships between these typically separated populations. The philosophy of the Pitzer program allows both the youth and Pitzer facilitators to be teachers for, and pupils of, one another. This empowering process is based around exchanging of life experiences, creating empathy across boundaries and validating different kinds of knowledge and learning.

A second goal of the Borrowed Voices program is to introduce and practice literacy, writing, performance and public speaking. These curricula serve academically but also build confidence, self-awareness, and life-skills for success outside of the correctional institution. For students who have been failed by the school system, this serves as a second chance to re-engage and re-define their education. The curriculum allows the youth to play a role in designing the structure and content of the classes, encourages them to teach one another and share their common and individual experiences. The program teaches them to practice different forms of creative expression including poetry, spoken word, art and music. Student facilitators run classes in small groups, incorporating lessons on alliteration, metaphor, allusion, hyperbole, and other literary devices while drawing parallels between hip-hop and modern and classic literature. As relationships and trust develop between participants, this can subvert traditional patterns of marginalization and inequality, empowering students to see themselves differently.

Over the past year, we have turned this program down a newly political path. We have added curricula which speak directly to issues of marginalization, community organizing, racism and cycles of structural violence. We taught lessons on the presidential election, local propositions, and political processes which lead to legislature and policy change. We introduced organizations and LA-based activists who organize local community movements and provide progressive services to traditionally under served populations. We asked our students to reflect and write creatively about manhood, conflict resolution, their education, and their home community's assets and deficits.

Alongside Borrowed Voices, we have introduced other types of programming: art, cartooning, theater, life-planning/college prep, yoga, gardening meditation, and others. This creative programming is developed according to the particular skills of the Pitzer facilitators and the interests of the Camp AP teachers and students.

In addition to strengthening classroom curricula, I am working to develop two new branches of the Camps which will hopefully live long beyond my time teaching there: a prison library to give them access to relevant and interesting reading materials and a re-entry program to maintain the level of learning and maturity that the boys develop in our classes when they return to their home communities.

Teaching and developing programs at the Camps is always an unpredictable process, but I have high hopes for the long-term potential of what we do. It is frustrating to walk up this seemingly never ending hill, knowing full well we might fall to the bottom before we reach any notable view points, but in working in the California correctional system, it is all there is to do. I suppose we can enjoy the view along the way.

Camps Afflerbaugh-Paige

La Verne is just about 10 miles north and west of here, past the Vons grocery store and the 210 freeway. Just 35 miles east of Los Angeles, at the base of the rolling San Gabriel mountains you will find a relatively wealthy neighborhood which is 77.1% white and boasts of a median income of $46,587. A bit further up, past the golf course and Steven's Ranch, you will find the County of Los Angeles' juvenile probation camps Afflerbaugh and Paige, housing approximately 200 wards of the state at any one time. This facility incarcerates males ages 13-18 for sentences which range from 3 months to 18 months long. Camp Afflerbaugh and Paige differ in only a few ways, namely that Paige houses those incarcerated for slightly longer sentences (and hypothetically more "severe" crimes) and Afflerbaugh has a larger total population, but for the most part, these camps are operated similarly.

Within the facility wards are shuffled from the dorms to "line up" to the cafeteria, to the office or the counselors, and for about seven hours a day, these boys are required to attend high school within the camp, at the Camp AP High School. Their heads are shaved, they are all dressed in baggy denims and county-issued BC shoes and they are counted between each movement of the day. They are called wards, taggers, teenagers, minors, gangbangers, b-boys, fathers, sons, delinquents, criminals, boys and men, but when I see them, they are students.

For the next year I will be teaching at Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige and training and leading teams of college student teachers-in-training. I will be charged with preparing curricula, balancing the interests of the school, the camp students and the college students, and designing programming with an eye towards the long-term social justice implications of our work.

Despite most efforts to make the wards identical and identity-less, there are several systems of differentiation and hierarchy at play in the camp. The wards of the two camps are kept separate in most cases due to racial rivalries and neighborhood hostilities except for within the high school where students are mixed into classes together. The camp receives them from juvenile halls who receive them from the courts, who receive them from the police. Upon arrival, the school administers a series of tests and breaks the students up into fifteen "groups" according (supposedly) to their academic levels. But these tests are not without flaws. Aside from the uniforms, the harsh disciplinary measures and the fences around the facility, the high school attempts to operates just like another other LA high school. School is comprised of English or Language Arts, social students/history, science, math, and P.E.

To teach within a juvenile camp is to teach at the mercy of the penal institution. Wards are incarcerated first, students second and it is manifest in the many ways that the camp asserts power over the school. Students on work crew attend school every other day, alternating with work days clearing brush out in the hillsides or mowing the lawns on the grounds. Students come and go from groups at the discretion of the POs (probation officers). They are moved to the "box" for a week at a time for any disciplinary issue. And students who earn the pedigree to work in the kitchen crew (KPs) or laundry, show up ten minutes late to each class with bags of oranges or packaged pastries stuffed into the elastic waist of their pants. On any given day, there will be new transfers from juvenile hall or other juvenile camps, and students who have been released with the termination of their sentence. The classroom dynamic is in a state of constant flux.