dump, where the vultures pick at his exposed limbs. He is a hapless victim who, in a moment of blind rage, strikes out against a figure of state power. Later, he dies ignominiously, doomed in Asturias’s allegory of life under military dictatorship.20
Though Gato’s life today seems far more stable and secure than were his days leading a street gang, he mourns the past, when, he says, “things were better because we were in charge.” Regardless of the facts, Gato’s story is also an allegory—an allegory for a lost or imaginary past in which his community stood up against abusive police to defend its own. Today, such sentiments of solidarity seem sorely missing, replaced by far more brutal and opportunistic modes of competition and survival. However uncertain and violent the past may have been, from the perspective of the present this history arcs toward one particular certainty: things are far worse now.
Emerging out of a past roiled by social movements that once seemed to hold the promise of a better future, the maras have since eclipsed them. This was brought home to me at an international conference on the maras hosted in San Salvador, El Salvador. It was March 2012, shortly after imprisoned leaders of the Barrio18 and the MS in El Salvador had announced a truce, dropping the national murder rate by an unprecedented 60 percent.21 This was big news, and I found myself mingling with journalists, scholars, and members of law enforcement from all over Central America, as well as many from the United States and Europe. José Luis Sanz, an investigative journalist with El Faro who has spent more than a decade delving into the gangs and their histories, addressed the cosmopolitan crowd. “In a matter of years the gangs have achieved a virulence beyond anything else that has followed,” he declared. “Probably not even . . . the epic revolutionary movements of the 70s and 80s spread like such wildfire, leaving its mark on so many generations in such a powerful way as the gang phenomenon has done.”22 This awe-inspiring ascent was intimately entangled with the circulation of bodies, images, aspirations, and violence between the United States and Central America.
MADE IN AMERICA?
Pavón Prison, Guatemala City, 2012. A dozen or so prisoners gathered around cement tables in the prison courtyard, stringing plastic beads on fishing line to make tiny, floppy-eared dog ornaments. Juande, former leader of the MS clique Los Salvatruchas de Normandy, was in charge of the arts and crafts workshop. He slouched on a bench, wearing an immaculate, bright yellow hoodie. He was thirty-three, the age of Jesus when he died on the cross.
“If you make it one more year,” I joked, “you’ll prove you aren’t Christ’s second coming.”
He flashed a gold-rimmed smile, as if to say “what a farce.” Since age seventeen he had been in and out of prison seventeen times. When we met, he was a decade into what he hoped would be his last stint, a twenty-five-year sentence for homicide. In three years he would be up for parole. With a wry smile, he proclaimed that he did not commit the murder for which he was sentenced. But there were plenty of others they never pinned on him.
Juande had a way of holding himself that let you know he could pound your face into the pavement without thinking too much about it. I saw him once feign a back kick hard to the chest of another prisoner who had appeared suddenly behind him. He was quick and flexible for such a big guy. But he always claimed he had left it all behind.
“When you’re up in the mix, you got to be tough on the street,” he said. “You don’t ever show weakness. They’ll take advantage of you.” He jutted out his chin at the other prisoners crowded around the table, then looked down at his hands. “But when you’re lying down in bed you think of all the ways they could kill you. And when a homie dies—well, you don’t cry. You find out who did it, and you make a mission to go kill them. And if you can’t find out exactly who, well you know which gang. Eventually you find out. Nothing stays secret.” For all his aggressive talk and performance, I found Juande to be capable of great patience and generosity. In prison he was Calavera’s closest confidant, and other inmates respected him as a fair and disciplined leader. Over the years I have come to call him my friend.
In the 1990s, Juande said, his family struggled financially, but his sister had a decent job as an accountant for a Korean-run factory, and she provided him with pretty much everything he needed. He was into stylish clothes. “I already had my loose pants, my Nike Cortezes, which was the style back then.” When he was fourteen, she offered to pay his way to the United States because he was getting picked on by a group of guys in the neighborhood. Either that, or to buy him a gun so he could protect himself. He chose the gun because, he said, he didn’t want people to think he was scared.
After we’d been hanging out for almost a year, Juande told me the story of how he joined up with the MS. We were sitting out on the prison patio, my recorder hidden beneath a baseball cap between us, the sun blazing on the concrete as a cool breeze wafted through. His storytelling style was always intensely cinematic. I felt like I was listening to an improvised script of West Side Story set in Guatemala City. He was fifteen, he said, when he first made contact with MS—back in 1993, when hardly anyone in Guatemala had even heard of MS or 18. There was a girl in his high school that he really liked, and he was always bothering her, trying to get her to pay attention to him. He performed a snippet of their courting.
“‘I can’t go with you,’ she would tell me.
“‘But why? You’re a woman and I’m a man.’
“‘No! It’s that there are other people behind me.’
“‘What, your parents don’t let you have a boyfriend?’
“‘No, that’s not important.’
“‘Then what? You don’t like me?’
“‘No, I like you. I just can’t.’”
He kept pursuing her and pursuing her. Finally, she told him that if he really liked her, he should come to a party where she would be:
When I got there, I saw at the back of the room a ton of cholos standing around. But since I had come for her, I went in, and walked to the back of the room, and found her.
“Right on,” I said.
“You came.”
“Like I wasn’t gonna come?”
So I was in the middle of all the cholos, and they’re watching me, right. I see that they’re riding with beanies, baseball caps, earrings, all tattooed. They dressed like I dressed. “These are my people!” I thought. I’m looking at them. The guy who had the command (ramfle) in those days was El Ice, may he rest in peace. El Frio of Normandy.
“Yo, morro, come here.”23
“What the hell?” I say. I thought that . . . well, in Guatemala faggots (huecos) are called morros, but in El Salvador morros, or bichitos, are boys or kids. Like “huiros” or “patojos.”
“No,” he says. “It’s just our slang (calua). Like saying, ‘yo patojo.’”24
So I come up to him. She’s standing there with him.
“And so you like Clowney?”
That’s when I learned that she was Clowney of MS of Normandy. She had hidden it. Later I saw the letters “MS” underneath her bellybutton.
“This was why I couldn’t pay attention to you. Because I am the Clowney of Normandy. And who are you?”
“My
