by Pat McCaughan
Until recently, Luis Garibay spent Monday nights working at Hope in Hollywood where as many as one hundred Los Angeles-area youth aged 12 and older showed up for b-boy/b-girl ("breakdance") practice sessions and a different kind of church. There, amid the vibe of Run-D.M.C. and other old school break beats, amongst the soul claps and appreciative cheers, the fancy footwork and head spins on a worn gymnasium floor, hearts opened up space for acceptance, relationship and transformation.
For Garibay, 27, it was payback.
"When I was growing up, there were no jobs, no Hope in Hollywood, nothing to keep young people interested. Nothing," he declares emphatically. Consequently, by age 7 he had gravitated to living la vida loca, the "thug life," and gangbanging seemed not only acceptable, but normal.
"Everybody fell into it. The homeboys would say, ‘I’ll give you 25 cents or a dollar. When the cops come, just let us know,’ " he recalled. By age 13, two older brothers had died in gang violence. Garibay escalated to smoking pot, selling PCP. Later, he graduated to guns and jail time.
"It rolled, like a snowball," says Garibay. "I just rolled into it. I ditched school, I never paid attention. I was too busy thinking, how am I gonna get home, will I get jumped? Sometimes, I thought about going back, learning a little trade, but it never happened. Everything got too busy. But this is different."
From Boston to California, programs like Hope in Hollywood and individuals like Garibay strive for a "different" way to stem the sacrifice of young people to gang violence and drugs, the thug life frequently glorified in popular culture.
Few statistics exist to confirm their suspicions that gang activity, which peaked in the 1990s, is on the rise again in large urban areas like Chicago and Los Angeles. They all assert emphatically: There simply aren’t enough such programs to go around. Funding is scarce, says Jaime Edwards-Acton, the rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, which hosted the breakdance program, formally known as the Jubilee Consortium Inc., a West Coast version of the Houston-based Youth Advocates Inc.
This particular Monday night Edwards-Acton, on "cigarette patrol," wrestles with how to tell b-boys & b-girls the program will fold in a few weeks when funding runs out. Ironically, its insistent priority on developing relationship over traditional services doomed it.
"It’s a hard program to get funding for because people are so preoccupied with providing services. What we provide is relationship and, through that, transformation." He says these Monday nights are a way of being church.
"The community gathers," he said. "It’s a celebration about expression, health, wholeness, fellowship, creativity, music, and then they go out again. I see a lot of parallels with what happens in church. The goal is transformation of young people’s lives."
Unlike some youth advocates, he believes that instead of popularizing violence, hip hop is a way to reach the African-American and Latino youth likely to become its victims.
But Kenneth Johnson, executive director of Boston’s Ella J. Baker House, calls it "globalization of thug life."
"Youth violence occurs in the absence of youth development," says Johnson, who supervises a host of programs from life coaching skills to homework help and job referrals, yearly serving more than 2,500 youth ages 8 to 21, including ex-offenders.
"They have a whole new set of values, a worldview almost like religion in intensity and scope," says Johnson, a Harvard graduate who left the private sector three years ago for public service. Baker House, founded by the Azusa Christian Community in 1988, was declared a "Boston miracle" for its role in helping decrease homicides and other violent crimes. It was part of a Ten Point Ministry coalition forged by Eugene Rivers that has spread to such cities as Baltimore, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis and Tulsa.
Johnson says the advent of thug life was sparked by economic and educational disparity, media images of violence, faltering family structures and the lack of involvement by churches, whose voice is still "silent and ineffectual."
"I have seen ‘learning disabled’ youth recite with exact precision a very complicated series of misogynist, violent rap lyrics, which tells me their cognition is just fine. It’s not Shakespeare, Proverbs, or poems. It’s DMX or Tupac."
The late emcee (rap artist) Tupac Shakur is considered to have popularized "Thug Life," the name he gave to a rap group, an album, and later tattooed across his stomach.
Seven years after his 1996 murder, Shakur remains an enigmatic figure, a larger-than-life cultural icon, considered by some a martyr to societal forces that spawned his lifestyle. His songs, "In the Event of My Demise" and "How Long Will They Mourn Me?" seemed to anticipate Shakur’s untimely death at 25.
Still, Internet chat roomers speculate that he is alive. Previously unheard music, a biography, and Tupac: Resurrection, a documentary, are all slated for release this year. A museum in suburban Atlanta is under construction as a memorial by his mother, Afeni Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party. Nikki Giovanni, a 1970s forebear of hip hop who recorded her poetry, dedicated a poem to Shakur and tattooed "Thug Life" on her forearm. They’d never met but she said "it was a way to say that this young man cannot be forgotten."
Emmy-winning HBO director Lauren Lazin previewed her documentary about Shakur at the Sundance Film Festival and in a March Rolling Stone interview said she was motivated by "this welling feeling for Tupac among younger viewers … identifying with him, feeling connected to his story."
Shakur, in a 1995 L.A. Times interview, said he was a revolutionary, not a gangster, but the media did not get "who I am at all. Or maybe they just can’t accept it. It doesn’t fit into those negative stories they like to write. I’m not down with people who steal and hurt others. I’m just a brother who fights back. I’m an artist," Shakur said.
When asked why his music popularized violence, Shakur replied: "A perfect album talks about the hard stuff and the fun and caring stuff." He characterized law enforcement, religious and political groups as gangs. "Everybody’s got their own little clique and they’re all out there gangbanging in their own little way."
Still, Mister Davey D, a San Francisco Bay area deejay and webmaster and friend of Shakur, says that the slain rapper is more a symbol than a martyr.
"People miss him because he kept it real. If he talked about violence, it’s because it was real. What about the promoters and the media conglomerates who produce it? The radio stations that decide which music to play on the air? The media glorifies all kinds of violence, including [the TV show] The Sopranos," Davey D says. "Why don’t they talk about Tupac’s social activism?"
Cristina Verán, a New York City journalist, says hip hop inspired her to consider journalism and other creative expression. "It isn’t coming from outside. It’s not a government or charity program that came and taught kids how to have that voice. It’s something that came from within them, something really powerful."
Similarly, hip-hop cultural values extend well beyond media images, to "the concept of making something from nothing," says Verán, a contributor to Vibe magazine, the book Hip Hop Divas, and The Vibe History of Hip Hop, published by Crown Publishing Group.
"What’s promoted on television – rappers with yachts and supermodels and platinum jewelry – is a negation of the original aesthetic." That original aesthetic is so exciting for youth in the city because "if you couldn’t afford $300 shoes, you could take an ordinary pair of shoes and paint or do something unique to them that came from your own mind or creativity."
Johnson believes many impressionable youth both identify with and consider Shakur a martyr, an identification that invites desperation and nihilism. "Anecdotally, we hear of an increasing number of attempted suicides by some black and Latino youth, which could represent undiagnosed mental illness, but also may represent this desperation," he says.
Johnson says the violence will stop when everyone – the church, record producers, rappers, individuals – take responsibility.
"Record producers and artists say that hip hop and/or gangster rap is a morally neutral witness or observation of life, that they provide a product people buy, but aren’t responsible for how it’s used. That’s ridiculous. They are amoral in the sense that they want to make money or make believe that there is some positive value to gain from this type of art that often devalues the positive things about black folks," says Johnson. "We all make choices.
"Most poor black youth are not violent," says Johnson. "But the question remains, what is the role of personal responsibility and effort for each of us?"
Unfortunately, socially progressive hip-hop alternatives – which have existed in the culture for a quarter-century – don’t garner the same appeal. "Its voice seems inauthentic. They have never been able to match the scope and depth and vigor of the hip-hop gangsta rap thug life worldview which, among other things, is about money, things – less about relationships. It’s you and your buddies against the world," Johnson says. "They don’t know how to talk with youth in their idiom and be believed."
In Chicago, Dorothy Papachristos, a Loyola University social worker and founder of Communities Dare to Care, believes she’s discovered a relevant way to talk with at-risk youth. "It’s called mother love," says Papachristos.
Her focus is "to get kids out of gangs, to reconnect them to families, communities and schools," even taking rival gang members, two at a time, into her home, offering structure, love and respect, with just one caveat: They have to share a bedroom.
She estimates thousands of young people have passed through programs she oversees, including basketball camps, mentoring and tutoring staffed by Loyola students, counseling and anger management. But there simply aren’t enough programs or funding. "Society’s approach is incarceration, zero tolerance, not intervention and prevention," she says.
"Our budget?" She laughs. "We get maybe $10—15,000 through donations. Our average yearly spending is $75,000, through begging and borrowing." Local churches donate office and program space.
She got involved after gangs torched her Rogers Park family-owned restaurant. "I had to see who they were," says Papachristos. "I found them, and I said, ‘Oh my God, they’re just children.’
"You have to have somebody in your life spiritually that keeps you going. They had nobody, except the gangs who give them a sense of family. But they don’t realize what they’re getting into. The two major things kids in gangs want are structure and love, a place to belong. They aren’t stupid; some are very smart. No one’s ever taken time to develop them."
She mourns those lost to prison; two were murdered a few months ago. "I tell them, when they’re on the street, gangbanging, selling drugs, there are consequences. I haunt them. I yell and scream and take away their drugs. I get involved in their lives. One told me he had a gun in his hand, aimed at a policeman across the street. ‘I could have killed him,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t because I knew you’d be disappointed in me.’
"Another young kid stopped drinking. He said, ‘Every time I pick up a bottle of beer, your face is at the bottom.’ They fall, I pick them up. No one else has done that for them. They always ask what they can do for me. I say go do it for somebody else."
She, too, thinks rap has detrimental effects. And like Johnson, she believes mainline churches have to change: "Somebody once said that, if every church opened their doors one day a week and did something for kids, we’d have no more gangs."
In 1988, the Dolores Mission in East Los Angeles, with seed money from hip-hop radio station KPWR 106FM, started Homeboy Industries Inc. Its five businesses now employ 70 young men and women, former rival gang members who work side by side.
Operations Director Carolyn Gold said program founder Gregory Boyle sought a new approach after burying nearly 80 young people killed by gang violence. Homeboy Industries does graffiti removal, silk screening, maintenance, recycling and has launched a capital campaign to rebuild a sixth business, a bakery, that was damaged in a fire. Its Jobs for a Future program offers counseling, referral and community service opportunities to more than 600 youth monthly, including ex-offenders and gangbangers.
Gold says the agency is a symbol to the city that its population is worth the effort. "Not all gang members are shooting people or actively hurting others," Gold said. "They want to do something different. Given other opportunities, they would.
"If the prison system did more rehabilitation and training, rather than just sending them back into the same environment with no new skills, they’d be more equipped to be productive when released. And there’d be more money invested in doing what we do."
Money is also on Edwards-Acton’s mind at Hope in Hollywood, who hopes "to regroup and begin again."
Bruce Ham, 20, the program’s youth advocate, says it was "an acceptable way out" of drugs and depression for him, and for many young people. The Houston-born Ham says the music attracted him; the relationships sustained him. A mentor helped him apply for college, fill out financial aid forms. Now he does likewise, accompanying youth to job interviews, to HIV-tests. One youth’s brother died.
"We hung out a lot," says Ham. "One day, he said he’d considered suicide but changed his mind. He thanked me for hanging out with him. ‘Now, I want to live,’ he said. They come here because they know they’re accepted. No matter what they wear or look like."
Garibay also understands relationship and paying it forward.
"I needed help to change my life. My brothers were gangbanging; it was impossible to get out. I thought I was going to die too," he said.
He got help when a neighborhood church sent a member to his school to recruit volunteers to make repairs. Garibay responded; the relationship developed. Later, the church member visited him in jail and offered him a job. Garibay jumped at the chance and has never looked back.
"When you live it, you are blinded by the violence. You can’t see beyond it," said Garibay. He participated in a 2002 Diocese of Los Angeles anti-violence initiative called Hands in Healing. It brought youth together with public and private advocates across the country to seek alternatives to violence.
"Now, I can see it," he says. "I never thought I’d get out of the neighborhood. The incredible part of Hands in Healing was that here I was, driving all the way out, across the country. It made a big change in my life."