You’re nothing?” she says. El Ice, the deceased, is watching me.
“No, I’m nothing.”
“Then why do you dress like that?” El Ice asks me.
“Because I like it.”
“But who have you seen dressed like that?” He was trying to find out where I come from.
“Look, I’m from section A,” I say. And all of the dudes are looking at me now. “And my friend Pocholo lives there. . . . He dresses like this with loose clothing (ropa floja). And I like how he looks. But it’s not a sin to dress like this, is it?” And everyone laughs.
“It’s all good, don’t worry.” And he says to Clowney, “OK then, the dude is pleasing to you?”
“The truth (la neta) is that yes, he is pleasing to me.”25
“So then, do it. Let him inside, and you see what you do, but don’t be careless. You know the process to follow. Tell him.” It was about bringing me in, involving me with the gang.
So I’m dancing with her. “Simón carnal (Right on, brother)!” They’re all yelling.26
“Carnal?” I say to myself. These aren’t my brothers, I think to myself, but okay.
Juande went to more parties and brought in other youths from his neighborhood. The fact that he had a gun and knew how to use it impressed other gang members, and he had a natural flair for giving orders and intimidating people. He took part in the business side of things—robbing stores and setting up modest extortion rackets—and became a bona fide member of Los Salvatruchas de Normandy. Eventually he helped raise and discipline other MS cliques.
Juande was one of tens of thousands of youths across urban Central America enamored of the style, the exotic language, and the confidence and coolness he saw in the cholos he met and associated with the image they struck. In the gangsters at that party he glimpsed a vision of himself, a reflection of what he was, he thought, already aspiring to be. The language, the girl, the clothes: “These are my people!”
How did US-style gangsters become the archetypes of “cool” for Juande and so many others like him? Where did this aspirational image come from? In the early 1990s groups of youths naming themselves after Los Angeles street gangs—La Mara Salvatrucha, Barrio18, White Fence, Latin Kings, and so forth—suddenly seemed to be in every major city in the Northern Triangle of Central America.27
When they first emerged before the public eye, politicians, security watchdogs, and the media quickly labeled the maras a transnational phenomenon. Worries of an internationally networked “super gang” mushroomed and persist to this day.28 However, cribbing and copying imported gang styles and structures is not the same as forming a transnational criminal network. While deported gangsters were important conduits for this transnational transfusion, they were not the only ones, and official estimates of their initial presence have proven to be greatly inflated. A series of studies conducted in late 1990s and early 2000s in El Salvador—the Central American nation with the greatest gang presence—seemed to show that less than 17 percent of gang youth had ever been to the United States, and less than 11 percent had even been gangsters when they lived there.29 In Guatemala, where many of the founding gang members were Salvadoran migrants, proportions would have been even less. Flesh and blood deportees would play important roles in founding early gang cliques in Guatemala and across the region. However, whatever respect and admiration they inspired was by no means wholly their own. Their influence took hold through the symbolic power of all things “American” in Guatemalan society. This power stems from long histories of exchange between the United States and Central American societies and reverberates far beyond the street gang phenomenon.
From Hollywood movies to Maytag washing machines, from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, the influence US society has exercised over its Central American neighbors is inescapable. In 1954, to protect US corporate interests, the US government engineered a coup to oust Guatemala’s second democratically elected president.30 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the coup to develop its Cold War playbook and made the tiny country a testing ground for a new kind of psychological warfare drawing on techniques developed in the US advertising industry.31 The CIA would go on to perfect the methods developed in Guatemala and apply them in Cold War conflicts around the world.32
The damage done to Guatemala was deep and lasting. The coup permanently crippled Guatemala’s nascent democratic institutions. Political conflict raged for the next forty years, and US cold warriors lent a hand by training and nurturing right-wing death squads that decimated the moderate Left in Guatemala. The result was a deeply polarized political landscape in which anticommunist demagogues and military men would rule until the return of nominal democracy in the late 1980s. And perhaps ironically, throughout Guatemala’s long history of civil strife, the United States has also been the primary destination for Guatemalans fleeing poverty and violence. The American dream, the dream of El Norte, the land of decent wages and a chance to “get ahead,” is deeply etched into Guatemalan society.33
In the aftermath of the Cold War, US cultural and economic influences over Guatemalan society have only deepened. The nation’s economy is tied to providing raw commodities—sugar, coffee, and silver—to US markets. Jobs in factories making goods for US consumers are highly prized. Customer service telemarketing, employing fluent English speakers, most of them deported from the United States, is one of Guatemala’s most dynamic growth industries.34 Over 80 percent of cocaine bound for the “insatiable North American nose” passes through Guatemalan territory, corrupting security forces and politicians and transforming both urban and rural economies.35 Guatemalan authorities must fight against or collude with narco-traffickers enriched by US dollars and armed with weapons manufactured on US soil.36 Meanwhile, the richest Central Americans go on weekend shopping trips to Miami, Florida. The point is, in both historic and contemporary terms, as both a driver of bloody chaos and the site of sanctuary and prosperity, the United States has played essential—if schizophrenic—roles in Guatemala’s development.
The story of the maras in Guatemala emerges out of these transnational entanglements, but in ways that blend fantasy and reality in endless loops and feedback effects from beginning to end.
Transnational Birth Stories
In the 1970s and 1980s, when Guatemalans and other Central Americans began migrating en masse to the United States, Mexican Americans dominated Southern California’s Latino gangs. For the most part, these gangs looked down upon and discriminated against Central American youths looking to join their ranks. They were too country and had funny accents, making them unfit for the gangs’ standards and easy targets for ridicule. Neither were they allowed to found their own gangs. However, as more and more Central Americans settled in the Los Angeles area, the story goes, one gang saw an opportunity for expansion and opened its arms to these newcomers: 18th Street, or Barrio18. 18th Street was not the largest Hispanic gang in Los Angeles, but it was among the largest and among the oldest as well, claiming a direct lineage to the Clanton 14, a prestigious Latino gang with a history dating back to the 1950s.37
Guatemalans, Hondurans, and especially Salvadorans began to swell 18th Street’s ranks. Joining meant gaining the respect, the companionship, and most of all the protection that went along with belonging to one of Los Angeles’s biggest gangs. But it also meant sublimating their distinctive national identities into the dominant Mexican American subculture. They had to dress like Mexican cholos, speak like cholos, and so on, if they wanted to be accepted. Then, sometime
