In the course of my practicum for the graduate program in social work at San Jose State University, I have been providing social work services to Silver Creek High, one of the high schools in San Jose, California's East Side Union High School District. I grew up in a school system only twenty minutes from the East Side, but worlds apart. Nothing I read in books or saw on television prepared me for working here. What I have seen and heard, just in the course of one school year, has completely reordered my world and opened my eyes to truths that no one can understand unless they see it or live it for themselves.
One of the services I provide Silver Creek is running an anger management class. In exchange for hopefully providing them with skills they will use, these students have taught me about the world they live in. It isn't a world I recognize. It is a world filled with violence and uncertainty. More, these teens have shown me just how much is wrong with the society they grow up in.
San Jose likes to bill itself as the "safest big city in America." Soon to surpass Detroit in size, San Jose is poised to enter the "Big Ten" list of American cities. For all its size, however, San Jose is an interesting jumble of geography, its city streets suburban rather than urban. The downtown center of San Jose is comparatively small, much smaller and spread out than San Francisco, for all that San Jose's population dwarfs that of its northern neighbor.
San Jose lives by another name, too: it is the self-proclaimed "heart" of the Silicon Valley. Just the very name conjures up visions of dot.com gazillionaires and once-gazillionaires zipping by in their BMW convertibles. And to a large extent, this is true. Homes, even small ones, sell for huge amounts of money. A two-bedroom, one bathroom house can go for six hundred thousand dollars or more. Many people make absurdly large amounts of money. And so many others make so much less. The neighborhoods of the East Side of San Jose typify a kind of social dissonance beating in the heart of suburban prosperity.
From the foot of the hills on the East Side, where Little Saigon, Mayfair, Alum Rock, and other neighborhoods reside, you can look in to the hills and see beautiful homes going up in Evergreen, Silver Creek, and other areas. The parking lot at Silver Creek High is a mish-mash of old beater cars, kids' bikes, and brand-spanking new birthday presents - even the occasional Lexus. But the vast majority of the teens in these high schools will never make it out of the neighborhoods they live in. They'll live the rest of their most-likely short lives here, always looking up at the new developments springing up near the Silver Creek Country Club or in the foothills of Alum Rock or elsewhere. It's a real estate reminder of their place in this world - the Silicon Valley executives and their doctors and lawyers, looking down on their neighborhoods from the hills, forced close by lack of space, but truly apart.
San Jose has recently experienced a spate of gang violence. Mayor Ron Gonzales announced that the city is launching a gang task force to combat the rising tide. That same week, there was a brawl involving some twenty people in an East Side neighborhood, only a few streets away from the high school I intern at. Guns and machetes were drawn, and a young man was killed, his mother placed in critical care.
Machetes are the signature weapon of a vicious street gang known as MS-13, or the Sureños, who have been much in the news of late (including an article in Newsweek) and are the focus of a federal investigation. Their activities are the primary motivation behind the recent "Gangbusters" bill winding through Congress. These young men (and women) wear blue jerseys and caps. Blue is one of the two colors forbidden on some campuses (including mine) on the East Side. The other is red, which signifies the Norteños, another Latino gang. But these are not the only gangs operating on the East Side. There are Asian gangs, primarily Vietnamese and Chinese, as well as the prototypical Crips and Bloods.
As much as violence within the neighborhoods has captured some media attention, the violence in schools has been successfully kept quiet. In October of 2004, a student at Silver Creek H.S. was shot and killed after the Homecoming bonfire. Another teen challenged him to a fight and, while the two and a third prepared to go at it, a fourth teen stepped behind the first student and shot him in the back of the head. Within a few days, the three teens involved had been captured or turned themselves in. But the damage was already done to the school. Students began showing up in white bandanas, and school administrators did not know whether this was a spontaneous gesture of solidarity or a precursor to something more violent. Fortunately, it proved to be the former. The victim, a popular student at Silver Creek, had ties to a local street gang, which were duly buried in the media.
School being in session is no protection for these children. While attending a training at Independence High, one of my fellow interns came across a teen getting "jumped" by a group of others right on the school grounds, right in the middle of class. A student at one of the continuation schools in the district was stabbed in the middle of class with a pencil.
In March of this year, a student walking out of his class at Oak Grove High was jumped by another student. While he was defending himself, two other teens (not students at the school) walked up behind him and assaulted him with a baseball bat and a samurai sword. This occurred during a passing period, and it is estimated that perhaps some four hundred students witnessed some or all of the brutal attack. One student described the scene: "The blood pooled out of him just like in the movies." That student survived the attack and was sent to the hospital. It is suspected, though not confirmed, that the attackers may have affiliation with the Chinese Triad or some sort of auxiliary. All that is known is that the student was seen arguing with his initial attacker over "business" not long before the incident.
On March 25, several students and non-students were involved in a brawl at the park across the street from Silver Creek High. One of the participants was stabbed multiple times. According to one participant that I talked to, the fight was Latino versus Vietnamese, over a matter of "disrespect." Had I not spoken to this young man, I never would have known it occurred. The news certainly doesn't seem to carry anything on the increasing violence in the schools here.
Several of the students in one of my anger management classes are known to have gang-affiliations. Administrators confiscate red and blue sweatshirts, jerseys, and hats by the box-load, but it makes little impact. Everyone knows who belongs to or hangs with which gang. Just this past week, I asked some of my students about this brutal, alien world they live in. It is a world where, as harsh as it sounds, the rule of the jungle applies. I have no wish to dehumanize these children who are, in so many ways so wonderful, but the world they live in seems so animalistic to my inexperienced eyes. Respect and intimidation are the foundations their lives are built on. I cannot even try to challenge these bedrock rules. When I asked, "Why do you care what someone thinks?" another student answered, "You can't understand, Jim." She looked me right in the eye. "That's not an option for us."
For some, it's all they've ever known. In these neighborhoods, you need to belong to a pack to survive, and that pack requires respect to survive in its environment. This respect is achieved through violent domination. It really shouldn't sound so foreign. After all, reading a few pages of any history book should tell you that it is the most natural instinct for young men (and now, increasingly, women): join the pack, survive; failure to establish dominance means death. They teach it to young Marines so they can better serve their country - sublimation of the self to serve a greater good. It is the same here, with its own culture and code of conduct. And the cardinal rule appears to be, "Don't let anyone disrespect you."
This loyalty to the pack trumps everything, even family. One of the students I see, Rudi, told me about his spring break. He went to a family reunion in Fresno, wearing his Norteño colors. His cousins and uncles from the Los Angeles area are Sureños, and they were furious with him for disrespecting them by wearing red to the reunion. Several cousins even threatened him. Blood in the veins, it appears, is one thing; blood on the streets, is something else entirely, and all the thicker.
This is the world more and more children are living in, but with no real solutions in sight. Everyone has a task force, a lá Laura Bush, and everyone has ideas. Have a mother and a father. Go to church. Go to school. I submit that none of this will matter so long as they are faced with a society that doesn't give a crap about them.
The East Side Union High School District is one of the school districts selected, in a deal brokered by the state of California with the federal Department of Education, to be ruled out of compliance with No Child Left Behind. East Side has an operating budget running in the red by millions. In order to make up this money, since San Jose voted down a parcel tax to raise more funds for the district, the board of supervisors is toying with laying-off staff. Fully two-thirds of the teachers in the district received pink slips in the same week that the student was attacked at Oak Grove. ESUHSD serves over 20,000 students. At Oak Grove, to a student, the question poised on their lips was "If the teachers aren't here to protect us, who will?"
Much hullabaloo has been made over falling school scores and the state of American education. We try to tell these teens that they need to care about their grades, that they need an education to be something, to be successful in life. But why should they believe us? They live a life where they watch their parents (or, more frequently, parent) struggle to make ends meet, working their asses off and going nowhere, all the time in sight of those palatial homes going up in the hills. They have no fear of dying because they expect to die young. Why should a student care about his or her education if they've grown up around violence and drugs and death all their life? Who has time to care about their math test when they have to worry about catching a stray bullet or getting jumped on their way out of algebra class?
But then, that's one of the amazing things about these students: So many of them do care. They take their tests, they go to class, some even do their homework. They are so wise. At their young age, they have seen more of life and death than I have for all that I am a decade older than they are. They are filled with rage. Rage at their parents, rage at their peers, rage at teachers, all of whom so infrequently care about them. In the end, their rage gives them hope ("No one's gonna beat me down!" as one girl put it), even in the face of all this hopelessness. But their rage is undirected; they expect to die in some stupid, pointless, and probably violent manner. "When your time comes to go, you just go. No two ways about it," said Rudi.
Rudi is fifteen years old.
-Jim
Cross-posted at Los Punditos.