She was going to visit him that day and talk to him one last time. But when he was moved the night before, she knew she wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye.
Now, it will be at least a year and a half before she will see him and hug him again. Until then, her family of nine children will feel incomplete.
“I tell him ‘I love you’ to death,” Rodriguez said with a quivering voice. “I wanted a son. I would have quit (having children), but it wasn’t in God’s plans. But I don’t want to see my kid dead. I don’t want to see my child in prison. Every time I go, it breaks my heart because it’s not a place a mother wants to see her kid. And this is just juvie.”
Watching four of her youngest play carefree at a park in Sun Valley where she lives, the 35 year old wonders what she did wrong. She hates believing that she couldn’t give Joaquin what he needed growing up, or that she might not be able to give her younger kids the life she wants for them.
She can’t make the drive out to see Joaquin in Ely. She has to worry about her seven other children at home and a daughter who lives elsewhere with two children of her own.
“He’s going to be on a ranch because (Washoe County Juvenile Services staff) think he can still be saved, so they’re going to teach him how to work with cows and stuff,” Rodriguez said. “If that changes him, thank God for it, but then if it doesn’t, then he’s going to be out when he’s 18 and in a gang. Could be dead, could be in prison. Those are the two options for a Hispanic male or even a girl these days.”
Girls of the gang
Rodriguez was one of the fortunate few. A former gang member herself, she was able to navigate away from most of the gang activity she saw, but still has some regrets. While engaging in the “cool thing” to do with her sisters, she wasn’t in it for the gangbanging.
“My sister was locked up half her life,” she said. “I never got caught. I was too smart for that. ... I joined through my sisters. I was the one with the books in school, the nerdy one. They’re like, ‘You’re not too cool to join a gang.’ Whatever, I know I am. I know I’m down. ... I got jumped in by three girls.”
For Rodriguez, being in a gang was like leading a double life. She went to school, read law books and taught her sisters what they legally could or could not do and what they could get away with on the streets. She did graffiti and got into fights. As a member of the West Los gang, she went along for drive-by shootings in the Oliver and Montello neighborhood in Reno where she grew up. Among her gang friends, she was known as Shorty.
“Just looking and seeing, we thought it was funny,” she said. “But then, right after, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what if somebody did get hit? What if you did kill somebody?’ You had that doubt and you had to wait until the next day or that night to find out if somebody got killed or hurt.”
None of it really ever set right by her.
She tried to take on responsibility as a pre-teen, starting with jobs selling or delivering newspapers. She worked at the Boys and Girls Club from the ages of 15 to 19.
At 16, she got pregnant with her first child. Family, whether gang or nuclear, suddenly became important to her.
“A lot of people don’t understand,” Rodriguez said. “People ask, ‘What about your real family?’ In Hispanic families, there are parents that hug and kiss you and there are parents that are like, ‘What the hell do you want? You’re a mistake.’ All the time you hear different stuff. You go toward other people who say, ‘You’re loved, you’re wanted.’ You hear what you want to hear and in time, if you’re smart enough and live long enough to realize it, no, a gang’s not what it seems to be.”
But long after she gave birth to her first daughter, she was still mixing with the gangs, still trying to take care of her sisters and looking out for herself.
Rodriguez, who said she saw her gang activities more as an associate than as an active member, was torn about her involvement.
“If a girl did a drive-by, you would label her as a bad bitch,” she said. “She had to have the balls to do it. I didn’t have the balls to do it, to shoot a gun.”
Mostly, it was having her first child that made Rodriguez realize she didn’t want to be a part of that lifestyle nor pass it on to her daughter. But being in a gang filled the void in her home life.
“You’re looking for family,” she said. “We grew up with a stepmom, who back then, was really Mom. My dad was an alcoholic. We got beat a lot. In essence, to the girls in gangs, you had sister support. The boys were your brothers and they defended you. You had somebody to protect you. If you needed help, they were there. If you needed to run away from home, they were there.”
Near Traner Middle School in Reno in 1997, a fight that Rodriguez claimed was a set-up ended in the arrest of 48 girls. Rodriguez, who was then 22, wasn’t there but that incident was the end of her involvement as a gang member.
Her friends were dying.
Generation breakdown
Rodriguez still maintains contact with her gangster friends, but generally avoids any strong ties so she can be a better mother to her children. Now her goal is to try to provide for her children as best as she can. After her job at the Boys and Girls Club, she worked at a Winner’s Corner, followed by employment at a warehouse where women could get their nails done, she said. That was her last job and she hasn’t worked for nine years, yet thoughts of her old friends still loom in her mind.
“I see them and it’s like, ‘Hey, come around, but the gang stuff stops while my kids are around,’” she said. “We don’t want this life for our children. None of us do, not even the OGs (original gangsters) want this for their children. If you love your child enough, you don’t want this.”
That’s why Rodriguez regrets what happened with Joaquin. As often happens at the junior high age, Joaquin changed the way he dressed to be stylish and cool. Those changes drew attention from police who began questioning his involvement with graffiti. Rodriguez said the experience drove Joaquin to being jumped into a gang.
“He got accused of tagging the school,” Rodriguez said. “It turns out it wasn’t him and the reason they know it wasn’t him is because he can’t write that good. Right after that, he joined West Los.
“I don’t blame the police officer all that much,” she said. “But I do blame him because he labeled my kid in front of the school. After that, he thought he was a badass. I asked the vice principal in front of the officer, ‘Do you think my son’s dressed bad? Do you think my son’s dressed like a gang member?’ He said, ‘No, your son’s one of the well-dressed kids around here.’ But after that, he was labeled as a gang member.”
Eventually, Joaquin stole a car in two separate incidents, his mother’s the first time and someone else’s the second time. It was the second incident of grand theft auto for which Joaquin was convicted and is now serving his sentence.
It hurts Rodriguez that her son turned the blame on her in the aftermath of that episode, she said. She tries to understand Joaquin’s train of thought, but inevitably, she said, it’s always her fault that he ended up in his predicament, according to conversations she had with him during visits to Jan Evans.
“Usually, it’s my fault he’s in there because (Joaquin says) if I would have let him go to a party, keep getting drunk and not brought him home, he wouldn’t have stolen my car,” Rodriguez said. “The second time (I visited with him in jail), it’s my fault he’s in there and I turn around and I go, ‘No, you have fault, too. I’m not going to let my child go get drunk, go kill someone because he’s driving.’ ”
Attempts were made to send a letter to Joaquin via Rodriguez to ask about his circumstances, but she informed the Tribune that he told her that since he’s working to be on his best behavior, he worried that writing a letter about his gang affiliation could get him in trouble.
Nowhere else to go
Rodriguez said that for her, being a part of gang was a way to lash out against the family support she never received.
As a parent, she now wants to fill that gap for her children, which often means providing them with meaningful activities that can teach them valuable skills. Those are harder to come by or to afford or the programs just disintegrate, she said.
“They were teaching kids how to fix bikes. It’s something my (10-year-old) son would love,” she said. “He was at a bike club during school, now it’s finished. He learned how to change a tire and he’s 10. ... He’s 10 and has helped his 5-year-old brother change a tire on his bike because I don’t know how to change a tire.”
She sees nothing for her kids to do and can’t afford to pay for their involvement in youth activities to distract them from future gang participation. Rodriguez lives on welfare, receiving a mere $600 a month to support herself and her children.
“With the Boys and Girls Club, it’s $15 and I understand for a lot of people, it’s not a lot,” Rodriguez said. “But for a mom that has nine kids and all of them need shoes, socks, everything plus school stuff, $15 is a lot of money for me to come up with for four kids here who can’t even join the Boys and Girls Club.”
Rodriguez, who knows local youth gang activist Roberto Nerey, was supportive of his efforts with the former Fourth Street Youth Center, run by the defunct Gang Alternatives Partnership.
“I think there’s nothing for these children to do, literally,” she said. “If there’s something for them to do, they’ve got to pay for it. ... A lot of people talk, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, and I get excited and for what? There’s not enough funding, supposedly, but there’s enough funding to fix a freaking road that costs, what, $1 million? What’s worth more? A road or our children’s lives?”
All in the family
Joaquin isn’t the only relative of Rodriguez’s who is having gang issues. For the last four years, her niece, Bianca Belts, has been entangled in troubles of her own. Now 17, Bianca has spent most of her life in foster homes and never found a sense of stability or support from the families with whom she was placed. Allegations of rape led police to determine that Bianca’s mother, who has nine children, could not physically take care of all them. Now she has siblings all over the country and even in Mexico.
But Bianca never took well to the foster home environment. She remembers one such home in which she didn’t feel safe — or welcome.
“I was younger, but then I started getting into foster homes where they were bad,” she said. “I was in a foster home with a cop. Then there were little things (that I asked for). ‘Can I pick a movie?’ ‘No, my kids come first.’ Things like that. That’s not where I wanted to be. They didn’t care about me. They’d have me wearing flip-flops around in winter. No shoes.”
Bianca has run away from those homes many times, and she finally ran into a crowd that became her family, she said.
“I started gangbanging when I was 13, putting it down for blue (Crips), putting work down, just representing South Side, but then I got jumped in and just got done doing a year (in jail),” Bianca said. “I’m not in it no more. I’m actually happy that it happened.”
When she sat down recently for a conversation with local anti-gang activist Roberto Nerey, Bianca talked about her young life when she associated with the South Side Locos and eventually was jumped into the 18th Street gang. She opened up to Nerey to help him understand why she is the way she is.
“You’re a beautiful girl, you’re 17, you’ve got the whole world ahead of you,” Nerey told Bianca. “One thing I can say is I’m happy you’re out (of the gangs).”
Bianca said she wants to sing, but that she understands it would be a difficult career to break in to. But it’s what she wants after she came to understand the violence of gang activity when two of her cousins were shot and wounded on May 18 in Sparks after a gang drove up beside their car on York Way and Simms Circle.
“Two people got hit and I didn’t know who it was and me being in that gang and me representing, I said (to my gang), ‘I hope you guys got them.’ Then I went home and found it was my two cousins,” Belts said. “And I was like, ‘Wow.’ That hit me real hard in the face because now I understand what we do to other people’s families, what we do to other kids that bang. I understand the pain and all that stuff.”
She was also a witness to two gang beatings.
“Recently, one of my own homeboys got stabbed right in front of me and my other homeboy got his face stomped in so bad by five people and we couldn’t physically help him. It was just me and another girl,” Belts said.
The war no one wins
Bianca is articulate about her gang. She knows the ins and outs, having been indoctrinated from a young age,
In her gang, there are certain rules, a code, that everybody lives by to keep them safe and from “getting crazier,” as Nerey put it. For example, 18th Street members won’t get involved in drive-by shootings, she said.
“You’re driving in a car and you’re shooting this way, who are you going to hit? You don’t know,” she said. “Why should they be forced to become part of the gang? It’s against the code.”
Most gangs have certain reputations for their code, whether the rules are directed toward innocent citizens or other gangs. Because of this, peace treaties among the gangs become especially important, according to Bianca.
“You have gangs and ‘clickas’ (cliques) and they hook up together to make them bigger and stronger and more powerful,” she said. “There are a lot of peace treaties at the moment. Two gangs will be cool. As soon as someone steps outside the rules, the peace treaty is broken and then it’s war. In winter time, it’s kick-back time and we go into hibernation. We still put in the work, but not as much. But in the summer, you’ve got the shootings and stabbings. You’re around more people who talk a lot of crap and get mad. It’s a war that no one ever wins.”
Belts describes gangs as dysfunctional families.
“Of course we are (dysfunctional),” she said. “We’re running around doing stuff we’re not supposed to. We’re fighting, shooting at people, doing drugs.”
These activities, though, provide power to the individual and to the collective gang, Bianca said.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Bianca said. “A lot of people look up to you, respect you. I liked to have that type of power, but I found it in a different way.”
The future
Bianca’s “different way” of having power came when she decided to take control of her life — or when it was decided for her. Because she’s spent most of the last few years in and out of Jan Evans Juvenile Detention Center and served time in Las Vegas and Prescott Valley, Ariz., Belts hopes to change her ways so she can have a better life.
Her aunt, Rodriguez, has been fundraising to send some of her children and Bianca to a church camp, but it costs $600 per child.
“(My aunt’s) sending me to church camp in California,” Belts said. “I got tricked into it but then I started going to church. … Yesterday, I went there and it was weird to me. … It seems to me things happen for a reason. A lady prayed over me and the things she said pertained to my life. How could she know what I’m going through, understand the hurt? She said, ‘I prayed God would heal the hurt and that He will treat you as a daughter and be the father you never had.’ I feel like she knows my whole life.”
Bianca tries her best but it’s not easy for her. She hopes that one day she’ll find the kind of stability she never had at home.
“I have no problem with being good,” she said. “It’s hard to stay in one place and have people you don’t know. It’s like moving into a home with someone you don’t know, take a shower in that house. You have to start all over again and make this bond with people you don’t know and start a new school with new friends. … I just want one place and just be able to go home.”
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