Joining the Sisterhood of Sorrow

Maricela Acuna heard the echo of gunshots and the crunch of cars slamming together as she waited for her boyfriend, Nelson Garcia, to come home. Alone in their studio apartment in Boyle Heights, the teenager--six months pregnant--stiffened and looked out the window.

In the autumn darkness, she could make out a crowd gathering around Nelson’s maroon Cadillac, smashed against a parked truck.

Maricela rushed downstairs.

As she drew near, she saw Nelson slumped over the wheel, blood trickling from his neck.

“Is it him?” she cried, already knowing.

Her friend Patty Valencia nodded.

“Noooo!” Maricela wailed, slumping to the ground, clutching her abdomen.

Then the labor pains started. That night, she almost lost the baby.

When Nelson died Oct. 10, Maricela, 17, was inducted into a barely noticed sisterhood of sorrow, another gang widow created by street warfare.

Maricela is one of dozens of young women who have lost a young love to this violence in Boyle Heights, an Eastside neighborhood where 23 warring gangs battle over two-block turfs.

At least 80 gang members have been killed in this barrio in the past decade. After the sirens fade away and the blood dries on the streets, their girlfriends and wives are left behind to struggle with a ripping loss.

In a society grown weary of crime and wearier still of gangs, the plight of these young women is often written off as a consequence of their own bad bargains.

But dismissing them does not diminish their pain or its implications for their children.

These young mothers, who have abruptly come face to face with death and loneliness, are ill-prepared for the responsibilities they face alone. They are particularly vulnerable to the pathologies of isolation and anger, and often see their children drawn into the same cycle that claimed their fathers’ lives.

For all the studies of gangs in America, experts say, little attention has been paid to these young widows and their role in the knot of poverty, drugs and violence.

“They’re basically invisible,” said University of Wisconsin sociologist Joan W. Moore, who has studied gangs in East Los Angeles and is one of the few experts to include young women in her research. “When these girls have been left widowed, traumatized by the loss of an early love . . . it tends to have repercussions for their children. It’s one piece of a really sad mess, a tangle of social problems related to the cause of gang violence.”

Several gang experts interviewed for this story said they wished they knew more about the lives of these widows.

“Will you send me a copy of your article when it’s done?” one scholar asked.

What little help exists for these young women comes piecemeal from counselors who see the implications for the next generation.

“I think they are labeled as bad people, and once they’re labeled, society just wants to stay away,” said Nancy Yepes, who counsels gang widows in Boyle Heights.

“But if we don’t support these women with coping skills, and dealing with their anger, we’re going to raise a group of kids in the same environment. These children will feel alienated, and their role models will be the guys in the neighborhood--the gangbangers. What are we as a society doing to support these women to raise the best children?”

‘I Loved Everything About Him’

Maricela, a new gang widow, is just starting to deal with Nelson’s death. She retreated into herself after he died, refusing counseling, and fixating on the corner where he died and on the bloodstains left behind.

Yanira Lupe Rivas understands the dark place where Maricela finds herself.

Only blocks from where Nelson was killed, Lupe’s boyfriend was shot to death in his car exactly six years earlier.

She celebrates his birthday the same way every year, taking their two children to the cemetery to clean his grave.

Lupe, 24, has made the painful journey Maricela is only now beginning. It took her years to finally accept help. And she is just now allowing herself to dream.

These young women’s stories show the aftermath of the carnage, the unseen consequences that linger long after the bodies have been buried.

“There are so many women in the community who have gone through this,” said Maria Sanchez, 28. Her husband and younger brother died several years ago--lost to drugs and gangs. “But it’s a chain: Your mother stayed quiet, and all the women in your family stayed quiet, and so you don’t think to talk about it. You just shut it out completely.

“Most of these young women are trying to do what everybody else does, which is surviving and finding other ways to stay busy. They don’t take the time to say, ‘You know what, I need help.’ ”

A few days after Nelson’s death, Maricela begins a daily pilgrimage to the corner of 3rd and St. Louis streets, where he was gunned down. She brings fresh flowers and lights a row of candles arranged in a shape of a cross. Neighbors watch from a respectful distance as the young woman sits on the curb near the flames and cries.

Intoxicated by quick money from drug sales, Nelson, 19, had become caught up in the Cuatro Flats gang in 1996, according to his fellow gang members and police. He had been shot at least two other times before he was killed.

But Maricela shut out all signs that he was immersed in danger. An introverted young woman who had emigrated from Sonora, Mexico, she chose to see only a sweet, kind boy she had grown up with in the neighborhood.

“I loved everything about him,” she says, standing at the corner where he died. “I loved his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his body. . . . I think I will always love him.”

Maricela begins having a recurring dream: Nelson is alive, but hiding from her. His neck is hurt, but she can’t help him. She wakes up to her own tears.

Maricela moves into her friend Patty’s small two-story house after the shooting. She says Nelson’s mother had changed the locks of the one-room apartment they rented from her and wouldn’t let her back in.

Patty, 24, moves her two young children into the master bedroom with her husband. She and Maricela share the children’s room. When the baby comes, they can squeeze a crib between the twin beds, she tells the younger woman.

Maricela spends her days watching an old home video of Nelson dancing at a birthday party. She pulls Nelson’s CD case out of a closet. The plastic case is coated with blood from the shooting, but she refuses to clean it. Instead, she runs her fingers over the dark red stains.

Sometimes she just retreats into silence in one of the high-backed stuffed chairs in Patty’s living room. She ignores questions and conversations around her. She blocks out the yells of Patty’s children as they race around the house and the interminable blare of the wide-screen TV that is almost always on. Her eyes full, she tugs on her lips and says nothing.

“It’s terrible,” Patty says with a sigh. “I tell her she’s got a baby that she’s got to take care of. She’s got to start to let it go. She has something precious he left her, and she has to take care of that precious thing.”

One night, Patty hears Maricela talking to Nelson in her sleep.

“Look at our baby,” she says.

She is smiling for the first time in days.

Attempts to Ease the Pain

Neighbors try to help Maricela. Patty sells sodas and tostadas in the alley behind her house, raising $500 for the young widow.

Nelson’s homies haul his Cadillac into a friend’s backyard. “We’re going to fix it up for you,” they tell Maricela proudly.

Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works with Eastside gang members, gives Maricela money to buy clothes for herself and the baby.

A doctor told Maricela the baby is going to be a girl, but on a trip to JCPenney, she buys only blue and green baby clothes. She wants it to be a boy so she can name him Nelson.

She gets nothing for herself.

After the shopping trip, she heads to the fatal corner. The day before, Maricela had left fresh flowers next to the candles. She huddles over the votives, struggling to light the candles in the cool fall breeze. Cars slow down to a crawl as they pass.

“Those white flowers have lasted long, huh?” Maricela says.

She lowers herself to the curb and, hand in chin, stares at the flickering flames.

“I just think about him,” she says softly. “Everything about him, what we used to do together and how he’s not here.” She breathes sharply. “I talk to him every night.”

At a baby shower Patty holds in her living room, Maricela whispers through her tears that Nelson should have been here.

Instead, Nelson’s homies pose on either side of her and flash the Cuatro gang sign as photos are taken. She smiles slightly at the camera, her eyes rimmed in red.

Maricela tries not to think about the future. She starts going to a continuation high school nearby, then stops as her due date approaches. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when the baby comes. Someday, she wants to be a radio broadcaster, but she has only a vague idea of what that means.

“I don’t want to think about life without him,” she mumbles when asked about her plans, looking away.

“Nothing means anything to me anymore.”

The baby is born Jan. 18--a girl. Maricela names her Nelsy Marie. She cries sometimes when she looks at her. The baby looks so much like her father.

Having left Patty’s house, Maricela bounces between her mother and grandmother’s homes, hoping to get out of the cramped rooms and into a place of her own. She is determined to go back to school, she says.

“I need to take care of my daughter,” she says.

Meanwhile, she watches the infant sleep and thinks about her daughter’s father. She still goes to the corner, where sometimes she can hear him talking to her.

Old Beyond Their Years

Nancy Yepes, the parish nurse at nearby White Memorial Medical Center, calls Maricela. Yepes knows what can happen when young women who have lost their husbands or boyfriends keep their sorrow bottled up inside.

But Maricela refuses to talk to her.

“I don’t need to talk to anybody,” she says.

It is a sad, familiar refrain.

Four years ago, when a bloody gang battle claimed dozens of lives, the number of grieving family members was at an all-time high. Yepes began group counseling sessions for mourning women. About a dozen came, at first reluctantly, to talk in a small conference room at the hospital.

For the first time, the emotional residue of these deaths began emerging.

“I saw an extreme amount of hopelessness and anger,” Yepes says. “Everyone seemed to be numb. They’re dealing with the shock that this person is never coming back. One of my girls asked, ‘Nancy, will I ever, ever, ever be happy? When does it stop?’ ”

When Maria Sanchez started talking to Yepes after her brother and husband died, she says, “I felt trapped in my own body. I felt at one point I had this empty hole inside of me that couldn’t be filled.”

Efforts to reach gang widows are few. But those people who do try to help encounter young women old beyond their years.

Yepes finds them sullen, distant, filled with anger. Yepes empathizes. Let the hurt out, she tells them. You have a future; you can change your life, she insists.

It is often the first time the young women have heard any of this.

“No one has anyone to speak with because everyone is dealing with the same problem,” Yepes says. “There’s a painful amount of desensitization because it seems like these deaths are normal somehow.”

But through the layers of despair she sees a strain of resilience. She sees tormented girls and young women reaching out to one another.

The women who met each other through the counseling sessions begin sharing advice, baby-sitting and job applications. When one ends up homeless, another young woman takes her--and her three children--in. Two sisters who lose their boyfriend and husband within a month of each other move in together with their toddlers and form a family.

“The challenges the girls are faced with . . . I don’t know if I myself could be as together as they are right now,” Yepes says. “I don’t know if I could laugh and smile like they do. I draw a lot of strength from the strength of these young women.”

Another Funeral, but Little Change

It’s a cold fall night in the projects. A shaft of light from the open door of Dolores Mission Church illuminates a group of somber young men in bulky black jackets huddled on the corner, their breath misting in the night air.

They are here to attend Mass for Salvador “Green Eyes” Mendoza, a longtime member of the Mob Crew gang. Inside, the chapel is already about half full.

Yanira Lupe Rivas sits alone in one of the last pews, watching the homeboys swagger to the front to look at the coffin. Six years ago, they did the same when they buried her boyfriend Richard Ortiz--a.k.a. Sniper--one of the gang’s leaders.

Tonight, about two dozen gang members show up to pay their respects to Green Eyes. Several 11-year-olds with shaved heads and black sweatshirts stroll to the front of the church, cloaked in bravado. Everyone takes turns hanging over the casket, wiping away tears as they look at Green Eyes’ pale, waxy face. His homies have placed a black baseball cap inscribed with the letters “TMC”--the gang’s nickname--inside the coffin.

Lupe stays in her seat.

“I’m afraid I’ll see Richie,” she says quietly. “I keep thinking I’ll go up there and see his body.”

She refused to look at Richard when they buried him in October 1991.

As a gang leader, he was a prime target. That spring, he had been shot in the shoulder and back. It was his second brush with death. Defiantly, he tattooed “I’m Still Here” across the back of his neck.

But on the night of Oct. 10--the same night Nelson would die six years later--he wasn’t so lucky. Richard was driving down Cesar Chavez Avenue with two cousins when shots were fired at the car.

He died four days later, leaving behind his year-old son, Richie Jr., and Lupe, eight months pregnant with his daughter, Justine.

Lupe, like Maricela, was 17 and pregnant. She felt abandoned, left with a searing anger toward the gang lifestyle that widowed her.

Richard’s gang promised to help. Some of the homeboys now give Richie a dollar or two when they see him on the street. But the phone doesn’t ring on Christmas or the children’s birthdays. No one joins Lupe to cheer on Richie Jr. at his football games. Few visit Richard’s grave.

“I have two kids who need a dad,” Lupe says. “He lost his life, and now what is he? Just a memory. He died for nothing.”

Lupe has become a conscience of her community. She lectures gang members who impatiently brush her off.

“They don’t realize who the real victims are,” she says bitterly. “We’re the ones here going through the pain. I tell his friends, ‘You guys are out here killing people, killing each other, and what you don’t see is what you’re killing is their families. Their children. You take them and they’re gone. But the ones who are suffering are the kids. We’re the ones left alone.’ ”

A Visit With Their Father

Richard’s birthday is a week after Green Eyes’ funeral. He would have been 25 years old.

After school, Lupe loads the kids into her cousin’s car. They drive to Resurrection Cemetery in Montebello, a graveyard filled with dead gang members.

Lupe spreads a blanket next to Richard’s grave marker. She pulls out some tissues, and the children begin scrubbing away the mud and dirt caked on the polished black granite.

His homeboys wanted Lupe to put Richard’s gang name, Sniper, on the stone. She refused.

“I won’t let my kids visit their father like that,” she says fiercely.

But she made sure the stone bore Richard’s tattooed creed, his brazen claim to life that haunts him in death: “I’M STILL HERE.”

She looks around to the graves of the other young men buried here.

“This one is a young guy, and this one and this one,” Lupe says, pointing to the dark slabs. “They all left somebody behind.”

Justine, 6, and Richie, 8, find the open green space of the cemetery exhilarating.

“I like being out here,” Justine says with a giggle, as she and her brother take turns leaping over the wide grave markers. “It’s fun to visit my dad.”

Richie stops at a nearby grave, reading the lettering.

“Look, look!” he cries. “This is a guy that got shot in his car too!”

A Dream of Stopping the Cycle

A security guard pulls up. The cemetery is closing in five minutes. The children run back and sit on either side of Lupe in front of their father’s headstone.

Then softly, Richie begins singing: ‘Happy birthday to you . . .”

Lupe and Justine chime in quietly.

“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Dad. Happy birthday to you.”

They look at the stone in silence.

“OK,” Lupe says. “Time to go.”

When Lupe and her children get back from the cemetery, Justine, who had been chattering happily, is suddenly quiet. She clenches the back of Lupe’s sweatshirt as they walk through the Aliso Village housing project courtyard.

“I’m scared,” she says, peering nervously through the dusk. “I’m scared, Mom. I’m scared they’re going to start shooting again.”

Lupe squeezes her hand and hurries the children upstairs into their sparse third-floor apartment.

They live in the middle of turf belonging to longtime rivals of Richard’s gang. This gang knows Lupe was Richard’s girlfriend. They scrawl “BITCH” on her door in large letters. Their girlfriends challenge her when she walks through the projects.

Lupe won’t let her children play outside. She keeps them away from the windows and walks them to school every morning, waiting to make sure they are safely inside.

“I worry about my kids,” Lupe says. “They’ve been to too many funerals. We visit 10 people in the cemetery. That’s too much death for little kids to know about.

“People think because we grew up in the projects, this is where we’re going to die. This is not where I want to die.

“I have to stop the cycle,” she says. “I have to get my kids out and show them there’s a better world out there.”

For Lupe, Yepes’ counseling sessions at White Memorial were a breakthrough.

“That was the first time I talked about it,” she says. “I never realized I was carrying so much guilt. I felt like there was something I could have done. It felt good to get that off my chest, to realize there were people out there with similar problems. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone.”

Yepes encouraged her to go to back to school, so Lupe started classes at East Los Angeles College. But the hours were so long that she barely had time to make dinner for her children and help them with their homework, much less do her studies.

Now, she takes a bus every day to the East Los Angeles Skills Center, where she studies telecommunications and telephone repair. She hopes to land a job somewhere outside the city. But she needs her own tools, and she doesn’t have the money to buy them.

The Struggle Continues

During the evenings, Lupe sits in her apartment with the curtains tightly drawn. She helps Richie and Justine with their homework and allows herself to dream.

“I want to get them a house and a yard,” she sighs.

“And a dog!” interjects Richie.

His mother smiles sadly.

“And a dog.”

Richie and Justine save their birthday money and tell her they’re going to buy her a car. Richie says when he grows up he will work at Food 4 Less and get her free food. Or maybe he will sell houses and get her a big house with a big swimming pool and a Jacuzzi.

“I tell him, no, no,” she says laughing, almost weeping. “I want you to get an education. I’ll work four jobs if I have to to pay for your college.”

She looks at her two children, industriously scribbling away at their homework as they lie on the floor.

“This is all I have, this is my pride and joy, this is what I live for,” she says softly. “For all this pain, I think we’ve gotten stronger. I’m glad we’re still here, surviving.”