Article and photos by Jacob Beizer.
9:30am | On Saturday, July 31st, the walls of Centro CHA, a community social services and advocacy organization at 727 Pine Avenue, are adorned with paintings by the Messengers of Peace, a group of five artists who have devoted their lives to gang intervention. Danny Flores, Manny Velasquez, Carlos Sanchez, Ken Machaca and Daniel Martinez use canvases and brushes, along with a heavy dose of past experience and brutal anecdotes, to try to persuade kids to avoid street life and make better choices.
The artwork is beautiful, combining traditional Hispanic styles with the kind of modern art one sees on the sides of bridges and buildings. But the point is not to glorify gang culture. The paintings feature tragic narratives of kids searching for identity and finding it in the wrong places, resorting to crime and violence, and dying too young.
It is that search for identity that Danny Flores sees as one of the main challenges of gang intervention. Kids want an identity, they want to establish themselves, and often the only option they think they have is street life.
“When I was growing up, everyone was a gang member,” says Flores, a single father and gang interventionist with over 20 years of experience. “Nowadays, you have your punkers, your artists, and so we’re trying to get them to grab on to those things instead.”
The traveling exhibit has made its way throughout Southern California, including Santa Monica, East Los Angeles and Norwalk. The artists themselves hail from all over.
In his years of community service, Flores has seen art play an instrumental role in removing youth from the streets and giving them hope for a better future. “It just chills them,” he says.
Flores and his partners in Messengers of Peace are certainly chill. They walk the hallways, introducing themselves to visitors and sharing stories of their past troubles and their turnarounds. Occasionally you see a tattoo underneath a sleeve, or a scar from a knife that came almost too close. But any remnants of those days roaming the streets of Pico Rivera, Culver City, Norwalk or West Los Angeles seems to have been projected onto these canvases, which bear no prices because the Messengers of Peace work for free.
“If somebody wants to buy one, fine,” says Flores. “But we don’t get paid to do this.”
Because of the recession, getting paid to do any kind of gang intervention work is becoming less and less common as cities cut such programs to balance their budget. As a result, more resources are spent on suppression of gang violence rather than prevention. Manny Velasquez, whose massive murals probably took up half of the available wall space, was once in charge of the Community Youth Gang Services for part of the San Fernando Valley, an area that stretched 163 square miles (by Velasquez’s estimate, most CYGS centers had only a few square miles to cover). Over the years, he has helped 200 kids make better decisions by finding alternatives to gang life.
Among the many visitors at Centro CHA is Deputy Chief of Police Robert Luna, who praised the Messengers of Peace for donating their time and effort to such a worthy cause, given the budget cuts in prevention and the Police Department’s focus on the suppression of gang violence. He remarked that the artists’ history as former gang members gives them credibility with youth.
Ken Machaca, whose intervention work began in 1980, has helped implement a variety of approaches to gang intervention, including athletic programs that put kids on sports teams and artistic programs that hand them a paint brush, while working in Norwalk, Artesia, and Hawaiian Gardens. He says of this particular approach, “Art has a lot of answers.”
For Flores, he sees the Messengers of Peace as therapeutic. Sometimes, he remarks, people don’t always understand what the five of them have been through and experienced. “We’re all healing,” he says. “We’re traumatized… we’re lucky to have each other – we can relate.”
But one need not have experienced gang violence to appreciate the powerful images that these five artists have created. All that is needed is an open mind, and a willingness to believe that people can change and transcend the boundaries of one territory or another.
Jacob Beizer is a writer living in Long Beach. He can be reached at [email protected]. He blogs at anti-jacob.com.