“Though the groups often banded together in the civil-rights struggles of the ’60s, immigration trends in subsequent decades caused strains. By the ’90s, many historically black neighborhoods turned Hispanic. A lot of the tension is developing as the groups are coming into conflict on a day-to-day basis. There are struggles over resources, representation in politics, education.”
–Stanford history professor Albert Caramillo, Newsweek, February 4, 2008
When the throng of youths, about 15 in all, sprint across Lamb Boulevard, I sense something is wrong. After spending a day canvassing for signs of black-vs.-brown conflict, visiting the places where African-Americans and Hispanics had been attacked, beaten or killed—one by the other, often in crimes viewed as racially motivated—I find what I’m looking for.
On Bonanza, a block west of Lamb, a group of young people—in junior high, maybe high school, all seemingly of Hispanic descent—mass near the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) building. About 20 yards away, a handful of black girls warily eye them. I make a U-turn. Apparently, I’ve missed a preliminary altercation between the groups, but have arrived just in time for Round 2.
As the groups move closer to each other, motorists flit in and out of convenience stores and bus-riders trek to and from Citizen Area Transit benches, oblivious to the tension. Briefcase-carrying businessmen, men carrying armloads of papers with grids and workers in hard hats and overalls leaving the IBEW office give little more than a passing glance to the teenage scrum before getting in their vehicles and driving off—unconcerned or, perhaps, unwilling to mettle.
Theirs are untrained eyes. My sense, nuanced by decades of watching interplay between young blacks and Hispanic, is that trouble—big trouble—is brewing.
Suddenly, like a scene from a movie, school district cops and Metro police swoop in, cuffing three black girls and detaining 14 Hispanic youths.
As expected, cops aren’t forthcoming about what’s going on. The crying girl provides a telling clue. Latina, short and Barbie petite, she’s holding an ice pack to her face. Another frazzled girl, presumably her friend, unleashes a wellspring of tears when she sees school police. She sobs her way through the story. They were jumped. Family members arrive minutes later, hugging and consoling the girls. Other young men glare at the girls, malice in their eyes. The black girls sit stone-faced, defiant, remorseless—complaining about the tightness of the cuffs. Someone related to one of them jaws with a cop and storms off as they’re taken to juvenile hall.
While still on the scene, I phone school police headquarters. Sgt. Darnell Couthen calls back. Though I’m sure he isn’t trying to make light of things, Couthen jokingly refers to the fight, which I missed, as a “big party.”
Since things are still under investigation, Couthen can’t/won’t say what started the fight or if it was racially motivated. He doesn’t have to. A girl on a bike sitting by a water-dispensing machine confirms it, followed by a Metro cop, who nods when I ask. “You hit the nail on the head.”
The scrap didn’t make nightly newscasts or the daily papers, likely because it didn’t meet the if-it-bleeds-it-leads level of newsworthiness. This incident may have ended with bruised cheeks, but a string of racially noteworthy altercations has ended in worse ways.
On Halloween, black assailants armed with pipes and sticks attacked Hispanics at the intersection of Bonanza and Pecos, killing one person. Police say race was the primary factor when two Hispanics, one brandishing an AK-47, gunned down 14-year-old Devonta Toms near Bonanza and Lamb last February. Witnesses allege one gunman said, “Just kill the niggaz, cuz.” On April 2, a jury sentenced 28-year-old Eugene Nunnery to die for his role in a September 2006 crime spree that left two people dead, both of them Hispanic, and one wounded by gunfire. Nunnery’s crew specifically targeted Hispanics in home invasions and robberies. These are but a few of a growing number—nearly a dozen—of crimes in which race was identified as the motivating cause.
But are these sporadic flare-ups or signs of a growing racial enmity? Or is this something altogether different, a natural demographic progression, Las Vegas’ turn to experience what other cities across the country, like Chicago, have experienced, the same sort of bumpy, imperfect transition that brings with it both progress and pain, like Irish gangs in the Windy City terrorizing German, Jewish and Polish immigrants who started coming in the 1870s, or Polish and Italian street factions battling in Chicago’s “Little Sicily” in the 1900s, or violence between white servicemen and Mexicans in Los Angeles in the 1940s, or elsewhere across the American landscape?
If the latter is true, is anything being done to mend fences and prevent a repeat of history, to prevent this city—young by municipal standards; a quarter to a third Hispanic; possessed of only a few well-entrenched ethnic neighborhoods, including the predominantly black Westside—from embracing the type of residential apartheid that’s made it (if you believe the media hype) unsafe for blacks and Hispanics to enter into some neighborhoods in neighboring California cities?
Much as is happening in Compton and South Los Angeles, traditionally black areas in the Las Vegas Valley—Donna Street in North Las Vegas, Cindy Sue Street near Texas Station, portions of West Las Vegas—have begun to trend Hispanic. Racial violence has erupted as a consequence in parts of LA, exacerbating already deadly gang beefs. Local law-enforcement sources hesitate to say if what’s happening in LA is migrating here. Off the record, they say historic feuds are intensifying, as are tensions in both diversifying black neighborhoods and areas controlled by black gangs.
“We do have some stuff going on,” says a source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We do have two gangs (one black, one Mexican) clashing. I can’t go into detail exactly what gangs they are and what they are fighting about.” Metro spokesman Jose Montoya says gang detectives haven’t seen a racial pattern to gang violence. It’s more about affiliation, he says: “Are you a Blood, are you a Crip?”
This sort of see-no-evil approach irks Ramont Williams, progenitor of one of the city’s most troublesome black gangs, the Donna Street Crips. Williams has spent the past half-decade mentoring former and current thugs. Two of his projects—both are grown men with gang allegiances; one is a black Blood from California, the other a long-time member of one of the Valley’s largest Hispanic gangs—joined him for a speech to nearly a dozen Rancho High students several weeks ago. His speech to teachers and school officials after the presentation lasted nearly as long as his talk with students. He walked Rancho’s halls as a student a generation ago and remembers when blacks were the North Las Vegas school’s biggest minority. According to school-district data, Hispanics constitute 72 percent of the population, blacks 10 percent.
“It’s growing [racial animosity between blacks and Hispanics], and no one wants to deal with the issue,” says Williams, who’s known as a gruff, doesn’t-play-well-with-others, straight shooter in gang-abatement circles. “Soon Hispanics won’t be able to go to certain parts of the Westside, and blacks won’t be able to go to certain parts of East Las Vegas. Innocents will be targeted. The powers that be aren’t trying to embrace the people that are in the streets trying to help and the people who are part of the problem. We may be able to influence folks, even if it’s one or two people, to make a change.”
Targeting schools might be prescient, a nip-it-in-the-bud response. Racial skirmishes in state prisons often portend street-level violence, a high-ranking prison official says, and the rivalries can easily spill onto school grounds. “You see it a lot in California. And you have some of those same gangs—Surenos, Nortenos and Crips and Bloods—in the state prison system.”
Racial divisions are also evident in juvenile hall as well, says a confidential source who worries that older gangsters are recruiting impressionable youths to be foot soldiers in a racial war.
Similar to their counterparts in South Los Angeles, Clark County School District campuses have served as flashpoints for race-related violence. Rancho’s had its share of tense moments, but it’s not alone. In April 2005 a fight between black and Hispanic students spilled off campus and down the street to a convenience store. In December 2005, a black Desert Pines student shot a Hispanic student in the leg. On December 11, Nicco Tatum allegedly shot six students as they de-boarded a bus near Alexander and Walnut (injured were David Macias, Jesica Garlisazo, Daniel Jimenez, Alexander Rios, Michael Sardinas and Mark Smith). A fight precipitated the shooting. A day later, on December 12, police used pepper spray to quell a cafeteria fight between black and Hispanic students at Canyon Springs High School. In February, a brawl between groups of black and Hispanic Western High School students ended with 15-year-old Victor Bravo shot in the arm. Sixteen-year-old fellow student Tevin O’Neal, who is black, has been charged in the shooting.
How many skirmishes of the kind I stumbled on do we never hear about?
State Assemblyman Ruben Kihuen has spoken to nearly a dozen schools, including elementary and junior high schools, in the past month, delivering messages of hope and unity. County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly joined for a presentation at Canyon Springs. “I went to Rancho in the mid-’90s, and there was a lot of racial tension then, but it was more gang-related. You had the San Chucos and 28th Street, and you had Bloods and Crips, but they were each other’s biggest rivals. So I talk about my background and how I was tempted to join gangs and be a troublemaker and join in the racial situations, but I didn’t.”
Andres Ramirez has a story similar to Kihuen’s: Raised around gangs in California, but blessed with the internal constitution not to fall victim to the allure. A veteran political consultant who runs his own consulting firm and garnered 42 percent of the vote in the 2005 contest for North Las Vegas mayor, Ramirez is a key Democratic strategist. He’s worked on the campaigns of local black politicians. With more Hispanics coming into traditionally non-Hispanic neighborhoods, he says tension is likely. But it’s myopic, he says, to only focus on negative outcomes, and he doubts there’s a palpable sense of fear on either side—that blacks will attack the newcomers or that Hispanics will bring down the quality of life. The fact that a Hispanic man owns Mario’s Westside Market, a West Las Vegas staple that serves a largely black clientele, proves peaceful coexistence is possible, he says.
“There were initial concerns about making it in West Las Vegas. Not anymore,” he says. “There are lots of instances of peaceful co-habitation and interaction. We have new players with the hybrid gangs—everyone coming together for mischief—so it’s easy to scapegoat black-brown tensions. There isn’t a festering feud growing between the two groups.”
Both he and Kihuen say the media has fed the myth of a rift, particularly in the political arena. Says Ramirez: “It’s a myth that Hispanics won’t support black politicians. State Senator Horsford gets a lot of support from Hispanics. County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly gets a lot of support from Hispanics. Black and brown meet during the joint Chamber of Commerce events. They teamed up for the January 19 Democratic presidential debates. We don’t have historical structures and prejudices of places like Los Angeles, so we can do some things.”
State Senator Steven Horsford says self-segregating behavior was common during his time at Clark High (he graduated in 1991). The difference now is that racial discord has, in some cases, become so problematic that watching your back takes precedence over learning. He sees the violence as part of a larger narrative, one that’s symbolic of the disproportionate number of minority students suspended, expelled and put in special education classes and behavioral schools.
So long as violence is confined to a handful of schools, he says the community can turn a blind eye. “This is not a problem for a few schools or a few neighborhoods. It’s a problem for the entire community.”
Alex Alonso might be the foremost source on black-brown tensions in inner-city Los Angeles, having chronicled racially motivated violence among LA’s black and Hispanic gangs for half a decade. He dislikes the attention paid to race-related gang violence and says the attention it gets—composing a marginal percentage of LA’s 216 gang murders in 2007—overshadows the larger problems of gang violence.
“It’s a big issue to those who are victims of it. The circumstances surrounding that victimization, that becomes paramount to you, so I’m not trying to downplay it,” says Alonso, who’s pursuing doctoral studies in urban geography at the University of Southern California. “But it’s not a big issue in LA. Reporting is the big issue. There are not 10 cases in the last 10 years where you can find evidence of ethnic cleansing, as a New York Times story called it. If you call it ethnic cleansing, people will listen. I can name every single black-vs.-brown incident and can give you 20 incidents of black-on-black and brown-on-brown violence for each one. This is the bigger issue. The other issue is the dysfunctionality of the families, as well as the self-hate young men have. What we’ve seen is a masterful manipulation of what we really need to be talking about. And it will happen the same way in Vegas. The dialogue will become a bigger story.”
Alonso is equally disturbed at how conservatives have injected illegal immigration into the conversation and how some blacks have joined the brigade. Last month’s murder of coveted Los Angeles High running back Jamiel Shaw—18th Street gang member Pedro Espinoza has been charged with the slaying—has become a political tool. After immigration officials said Espinoza might have entered the country illegally, Shaw’s family asked for a crackdown on illegal immigrants.
“I don’t want to demean the Shaw family, because they’re grieving, but usually Hispanic assailants are U.S. citizens. Members of the Avenues gang [a Hispanic outfit accused of beating and killing blacks in the Highland Park area] are American citizens,” Alonso says. “Many of the members of these gangs don’t approve of the racial violence. It brings unnecessary heat. And the now the issue of illegal immigration has now divided the black community in LA. A black man, Jim Spencer, has aligned himself with the Minutemen, who have used incidents when illegal immigrants commit crimes to rally blacks around the issue of illegal immigration. Rep. Maxine Waters disagrees with Spencer.”
Williams, who’s gone sour on many organized efforts to bring the races together, sounds a conspiratorial warning against hoping for an ebb in local tensions anytime soon. “It’s just like with the gang issue. Just like gang suppression has been turned into an industry and people have parlayed it into jobs or political appointments, the same thing is going to happen here. If there is no gang problem, you can’t get federal funds to fix what isn’t there. When the racial violence becomes a problem, then they’ll get money to fix it. In the meantime, it’s heading in a direction where it won’t be safe for people of any race.”
At the National Association of Ethnic Studies in Atlanta two weeks ago, UNLV anthropology professor Rainier Spencer participated in a panel discussion on Latino and black unity. Neither group can afford to embrace separatism, he says, because they generally share the same interests and are fighting against the same power structure. “There are problems certainly,” says Spencer, who founded UNLV’s Afro-American Studies Program. “Junior and high school students do stupid things and can have pack mentalities that are unfortunate, so some of this about immaturity. But some of it is silly. From the black perspective, Latinos are the largest minority group in the country, and they’re growing. There’s this perception of watching another group zoom past them. So now you have blacks supporting the conservative regime, which they wouldn’t do otherwise. That’s a real case of divide and conquer. That’s like black people being for racial profiling as long as it’s of Muslims.”
Solidarity has, in many cases, been displaced by suspicion. In recent studies of Southern cities, Duke professor Paula McClain found that blacks often believed “Latinos stole jobs,” while Hispanics frequently regarded blacks as “slothful and untrustworthy.” Crimes that may not have any racial underpinnings take on larger significance, Alonso says.
For some, the story of Blanca Gonzalez, a 39-year-old mother of two killed by Calvin Lee Kirkland on March 28, could trigger animosities. Kirkland told cops he was drunk and accidentally mishandled the gun; passengers in his car say he deliberately fired the .38 Special that night near Charleston and Nellis. Authorities haven’t said if the crime was gang-related or racially motivated. Or the sad case of Faustino Sigala, fatally shot in October by a black assailant at Martin Luther King Park, might ignite hostilities. Authorities say the assailant’s friend thought Sigala pushed her son off of a swing. On his way back from a nearby store on June 9, 2003, Benito Zambrano-Lopez ran into Tyrone Williams, Julius Bradford and Steven Perry. The trio beat the 48-year-old day laborer; Williams shot him three times. Authorities say robbery was the motive. Mace Yampolsky represented Bradford, who’s serving 40 years in prison and is eligible for parole after 20. Yampolsky says race didn’t factor in the assault.
“That wouldn’t be my interpretation,” says Yampolsky, who’s since withdrawn as Bradford’s counsel. The case is on appeal. “What happened was they were walking by. One of the guys starts messing with him. The Hispanic guy is winning. Two guys jump in. Tyrone Washington pulled out a gun and shot him. Someone apparently called Zambrano-Lopez ‘beta,’ a derogatory term for Hispanics. There was some testimony about the derogatory term. So I could be wrong about the race issue.”
Neighborhood demographics in this town change every five years, Ramirez says, and immigration will play a major role in shaping the texture of the community. Years ago, you only saw whites living along Green Valley Parkway, he says, but now the neighborhood is mixed. Same thing for the Lakes neighborhood and affluent areas. As more whites move Downtown and the inner city becomes more diverse, Ramirez thinks tensions will be inevitably be quelled.
Today the neighborhood near Rancho and Owens is quiet. A few homeowners out watering lawns either refuse to talk about the case or say they know nothing about it. They say the neighborhood is diverse, though several black families have moved out. Over on Page near Bonanza and Lamb, where Devonta Toms was killed, several residents of the Oasis Apartments offer curt responses to queries about racial tension in the area. “18th Street”—the largest gang in Los Angeles—has been tagged on a wall near Edwards Elementary. At Lubertha Johnson Park in West Las Vegas, a Hispanic man frolics with his three children. Over on Hart and Revere, four black men lounge in a front yard, watching a stream of cars go into Enrique’s Auto. One says three Hispanic families have recently moved into the black neighborhood. “They’re nice people. Don’t cause any problems.”
Just five years ago, the faces at the West Las Vegas Library were predominantly black. Now Hispanics constitute a larger population of users, which goes to show that rips in what author Nicolas Vaca called the “presumed alliance” can be mended. In Los Angeles, a wide range of organizations have been beating the drum on the topic of unity, Alonso says. But the people who most need to be involved—the kids and gang members likely to engage in racial hate crimes—aren’t. Here, efforts like the Safe Village Coalition have united blacks and Hispanics in the cause of attacking youth and gang violence. Are those most likely to act out hearing the message?
My guess, sadly, is no. This is no slight to economic teamwork practiced and preached by local ethnic chambers of commerce, bridge-building efforts by the likes of County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly (hosts a leadership forum for Hispanic students; he’s black), partnerships like the one with the 100 Black Men of Las Vegas and the Latin Chamber of Commerce—they co-hosted the January 19 Democratic presidential debate—and the rainbow coalition of community and church leaders composing the Safe Village anti-violence campaign.
Simply put, gang members and race-baiters have little interest in coalition-building, their allegiances to a violent, misguided sort of racial politics outweighing common sense. Any sense of compassion is deadened by an all-consuming desire to assert dominance or gain revenge, rendering conventional appeals to humanity ineffective. History shows us that society is the real victim of these types of racial hostilities—stereotypes are reinforced, hatreds are justified, blood is spilled, lives are lost. Unchecked animosities then spin so out of control, morphing into something so uncontainable that it’s like trying to bottle lightning or recapture air released from a balloon. Soon the negative energy takes on a life of its own, becoming a story unto itself—the Crips vs. the Bloods, for instance—weaving a narrative of self-destruction that’s easy for the perpetrators to defend (“I fight them because they killed my brother”) and to perpetuate (“They’ll kill me if I don’t kill them”). The more strife caused, the less those involved will care about the real reasons groups of people fight—some disagreement or skirmish that occurred a half-century ago; economic conditions breeding animosity, causing people to cling to a perverted sense of racial superiority to express their dismay.
We’re at this point with gangs. We’re not there with racial violence. At least not in the Las Vegas Valley. Not yet. I hope things get better and not worse.
Kihuen says reaching kids at younger ages is one solution, and I agree. Alonso says race-related violence will resolve itself when bigger issues like poverty, poor education and access to medical care are resolved. This is cause for pessimism, considering our leaders lack the political will to address these issues and we, as Americans, have come to accept that ours is but a ceremonial position in this representative democracy. Our elected officials listen when they want and give us their ear only when we yell loud enough and persist long enough.
Besides, it’s unclear to me how universal health care and fixing the holes in No Child Left Behind will prevent the types of scuffles that took place near Bonanza and Lamb two weeks ago. Are we so programmed into our daily routines that we don’t notice groups of kids menacing each other? Do we not care? Or do we not care because of the skin color of the combatants?
Damon Hodge is a Weekly staff writer.