We tried creating some sense of financial stability by selling drugs to our communities. There were also daily police visits, as well as drug sales and overdoses.
They tried to make others feel hopeless in order to gain a sense of power. On a daily basis, I saw men and women transmitting their pain to others with a false sense of pride. I would say we had between 80 and 120 people in ours, although some were in jail. There were eight gangs in my neighborhood. He was already involved in gangs and eventually, at the age of 14, I joined him. He was like a big brother and made me feel some sense of connection and safety. I needed a father figure, and I leaned on my older cousin. On the right: Debora has since left the gang and runs an art academy with Homeboy Industries. On the left: Fabian Debora as a young man, when he was in an L.A.
So you run out of the house and you fall into what's there gangs become your refuge. You look to your father but he's not there you look to your mother and she's in despair because of the poverty and not having your father there to support her. But during that time, in the '80s, with the crack cocaine epidemic, the Rodney King trials and the riots, it was very difficult for a young man to be himself without being bullied or oppressed-not only by the gangs, but by poverty in general. I was a graffiti artist and all I wanted to do was art. It was hard growing up in these projects and trying to be yourself. This put my father on the trajectory of incarceration, which left me to grow up in the projects without a father figure. He had to provide for his family, which led to him transporting drugs from Juarez to El Paso, Texas and to L.A. My father, being an immigrant, kept finding himself at a dead-end, struggling to find work. We came from Juarez Mexico, a border town, and arrived in the housing projects in L.A. I didn't think a better future was possible for me, as a first-generation Mexican American who had watched both his parents being denied opportunities as immigrants. A sense of hopelessness sucked me into gang violence in the Boyle Heights housing projects.
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