BAJITO ONDA AS A STUDY INTO THE GANG MINDSET AND AS A PEACEFUL ALTERNATIVE FAMILY

mark, thanks for your optimism. i'm really so sick of people in the US sensationalizing something that they do not want to take five minutes to really think about and try to understand. i have spent years, hours, days, and gotten to know the lost people. yes i am a researcher and scientist of violent behavior and breaking the prevention of someone entering the cycle and also removing someone out of it.

but the important thing is that the people i work with do not realize that i am a scientist studying them - they think i'm one of them. i have learned to talk like them - act like them and walk like them - that is what gets me into their world, their heads and their hearts. bajito onda is our vehicle to take others safely into their world, etc.

also: because bajito onda is the portal i have developed for us to enter the international underground world of gangs and especailly the marasalvatrucha - the people we interview and sit with and pray with or show love to will receive something from us -

please put in our budget shit loads of tshirts for us to take in with us - they are our sort of peace pipe - peace token - of friendship and desire to bond with them.

you see when we meet you will understand better what i cannot really think about when i'm talking on a cell phone - but....

lemme see if i can explain it to you a little more.

you see, i too am one of them in a way - i used to be the most violent fucking person on the planet - i learned how to kill people in my mind just for fun and sport - although i never acted it out - i really didn't have to - i mastered the mental sport - i lived for violence and revenge and trashing people's lives no matter how i did it. i used to imagine having a detonator and just pushing down the handle at the appropriate moment i wanted to blow people sky high either from fear or from mental shock.

when i heard that a man down the street had died from shock - i think indirectly from some of my torture games with his weak mind - i began to realize how powerful i had gotten. i'm notsaying i killed him - because i didn't - but i sure did know how to get to him and many other people around me. psychotic, yes - pissed off at the world for the way they treated me - hell yes.

well anyway.... i decided to listen to this calling i received one day when i had one hand wrapped around an uzi and the other on the doorknob ready to open that door and go splatter people all over the post office so i could just hop in a cop car, and ride down to the federal bldg - get processed and go back to prison for life. i had had it out here - matter of fact i still hate it out here - but i have learned how to turn the deadly game inside out on society and here is how i do it.

i am still very messed up mentally and emotionally probably - but over the years i've numbed my feelings so now my emotions are for the most part very calculated and formulated. now i know i cannot be around someone who mixes negative with my positive - they have to go.

i have created my own world in which i run my own life with very little outside contact with the 'real world' - that is what i mean by 'inside the gang game' - it is nothing more than a mindset.

the guys from ES and HN and Guatemala - were contaminated by violence as babies - imagine the kids from iraq in fifteen years... same thing.

hispanics in general are very jealous, very macho, hot headed and quick on the trigger, or in the Central American economically deprived nations located in jungles .... the machete. cheap, multi-purpose tool and great for chopping off heads of enemies - very effective.

intrigued by my own violent behavior and figuring if i was ever going to do something with my life I decided to listen to the words of God who I heard speak to me just as I reached for that knob – and simultaneously I also opened up my eyes from crying so hard for giving up on my life and myself and I saw this little toothpick sized ray of light coming into my darkness – I thought it was a sign of light coming into my own personal darkness – I still believe God saved me that day – and told me to go save others from the hell of prison and to be there for them because there was no one there for me when I needed someone so bad to turn to. I went for eleven long years without a hug, without anyone ever telling me they loved me and with out anyone ever telling me that ‘prison was behind me’ – I was stuck in the violent prison mindset – survivor mode referred to as ‘tiger alert’ for many many years. It was terrible being in that mindset but I didn’t know how to get out. One time I wrote down ‘I am in a box and can’t get out’. I wrote it so that I would know that I wasn’t just having mind tricks again – so I could see that I was sane enough to know that I had realized I was trapped inside a box – inside my head and could not get out. Violence had become my only friend – pain was my only real emotion I could feel and that could make me cry tears of emotion. Tears were like a sort of psychological / emotional cleansing that reminded me I was still human and still in charge of some part of my life. I was on the other side of the psychotic fence much more than on this side.

Because I had lived in Mexico way back and I spoke fluent Spanish, I had also somehow become disconnected from the white / English speaking world. I looked at them as if I was a Mexican and as if they would never accept me. Mexicans and other Hispanic races accepted me fully as one of their own. I hated white people for what I thought they thought of me – and actually I was right – they thought I was like a Mexican and they treated me like one. That drove me more and more towards Mexicans and violent persons, like the kids in gangs who society hated and they felt rejected.

It seemed the only people who would talk to me after I told God to give me that damn calling and let me see if I can be good at something other than just printing and making money and spending it again.

Soon I became known as the gang house, the gang hide out, the gang mom, whatever, at least I had some friends and they had someone who would go pick them up and let them sleep at my little ole house in the hood. I had no furniture, slept on the floor but I worked every day in my backyard printing shirts and decals by hand pulling them – hard ass work that wore me out and let me sleep a little at night then I did it all again the next day.

Me and those kids all around 17 to 22 years old kept growing and growing. The kids would help me in the print shop and I would feed them and buy them beer or whatever they wanted. Back in the days we even did drugs together. We shared everything except sex. They were all screwing their cousins and whatever but I just acted like – ‘oh well’ and let them live their lives since they let me live mine… mostly working all the time – just didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to mix with people outside my personal space because I was afraid I would go off on them and ‘it’ would happen and then my little game would be out of my control.

One thing I really hated about prison was those damn keys – the way they jingled reminding me that each time I heard them how it was me that gave them to my keeper who was making about $8 an hour to torture me and make me become a violent animal whose focus was only on surviving the time I spent there (like the maras) and just being able to get what I wanted however I could get it from then on.

Well… so I lived with violent gang kids – whose brothers were getting shot in the chest and killed while others were killing someone and ending up doing life in prison while begging me to help them – I was losing them all around me.

Then in 1993 or so my best friend Woody died (me and him were together for 27 wild and insane years – he weighed 600 lbs so if I ever wanted to have someone hurt – he was like my own personal destructor robot and he did beat them into a bloody pulp’ and that was just what we did.

So when he died the people who I had bought the house from where I lived and worked kind of stole it from me – they swindled me and had a lawyer accuse me of forging my own deed to my own house that I was paying a mortgage company the mo payments. It was a mess and I lost – I was so unable to talk for myself, defend myself without a gun or violence, so I just let them take it from me.

I was very very mad about it but I was also trying to break away from that whole messed up scene over that house so I figured just let them have it and someday I’ll have another damned house. Well I was wrong – its been a long time and still no house. But whatever, so I was so mad I said, I’m getting out of Oak Cliff and I’m moving across town to Pleasant Grove where we from OC used to make fun of them calling them ‘grove-ites’ like it was a worse ghetto than O.C.

So I had a pastor who worked with exconvicts and drug addicts so he offered to have his guys living in his half-way house to help me move out of there before they stole all my printing equipment I had amassed when they took back the house.

I moved over here to what is known as East Dallas / a bit north of PG and I’ve been here ever since. I decided to try to make Bajito Onda a nonprofit charity because other charities thought we were low class and I was even lower for siding with the kids in gangs and other losers in Dallas.

It became a personal matter with me and it consumed my every waking moment which was good because it kept me from having too many violent thoughts and it kept me out of society and for the most part them away from me. I managed to get my 501c3 number and it made me and BO some sort of a ‘respectable group of citizens’ even though we were unruly as hell.

I went down and signed up with the straight laced ‘volunteer center of Dallas’ and they started sending me people on probation for DUI and other cases. I told them to send me the worst ones they had because I didn’t mind – I was one of them too.

At first they kind of scared me knowing that they came to BO because they had stabbed somebody 17 times or they had murdered somebody, raped or kidnapped their child – or whatever. So I invoked for the most part the prison rule – its not polite to talk about your crime because its probably a lie anyway.

So the community service court ordered ‘volunteers’ kind of became my friends, and then I realize that I could actually use them as a captive work force to help me keep BO alive and well. So I used them to weld shelves, move things all over the place, chop down trees, haul stuff and everything I could think of… including printing.

After a while some of them really took an interest in the printing and money making opportunities so I kept my promise to the guy who taught me how to print that if he taught me I would someday teach others…

They frustrated the hell out of me – but when some of them had to do 1,000 hours for shooting people and robbing stores we really got to know everything about each other –

But after about six years of seeing them work like a dog under my now almost half prison guard – half exconvict like mentality do their hours, I got sick and tired of seeing them not give a shit about their future in and out of the courts and ultimately in and out of prison when they would violate. I got to know the probation officers and even became respected by them as well as judges and attorneys for my strict disciplinarian methods that most of the time woke the probationers up and made them change their lives for the better – stop drugging, stop beating their wives, stop stabbing their boyfriends, and the like. The girls were more violent than the guys.

I began to see that if I sat down and spent some time talking to them instead of working sometimes I could begin to understand why they did what they did – what they did – to whom and how they felt inside and what it would take to hear them out and actually give them something nobody gave me – love, understanding, compassion, even if it was only research – they never knew it. Before long I was actually caring about them and their lives, and they were bringing me their families to meet and so on.

Now I have actually ‘raised’ two and a half generations of kids and people.

I got so good at working with them – that I kind of got bored. I wanted a harder group of people to study and get to know why and how they ended up where they did – I wanted to go back into prison but as an outside / insider with privileges and access.

I had been asked a couple times to speak at the closing ceremony of Kairos Prison Ministry and I thought it was cool – being in prison – but being free at the same time. The prison I spoke at is a hard core heavy gang prison – but I was walked in and walked out with no close contact at all. My being there though had an impact on their lives. Some of them started writing and I wrote them back but it was a correspondence type of thing and not really access to their minds and hearts.

I got my prison official volunteer status and the chaplain and a Sgt that taught the class for volunteers eally liked what I told them about my program BO. They said it was perfect for prisons because really there is nothing like it for Spanish speaking inmates.

The chaplain asked me to go to services and I did. I found myself however very identified with the prisoners and detesting the sight of prison grey guard uniforms. The Sgt that also taught the security part of the class intimidated the hell out of me. That was a first – but she was so hard core scary I was sort of intrigued by her genuine no BS toughness. She was the real deal and I didn’t want to deal with her. She asked the class all kinds of trick questions to see what they would do in a crisis hostage situation, etc. and I got them right to the point she told me to let somebody else answer. It was the first time I excelled at something even though it was prison.

About a month after I took the class the Sgt herself called me to ask me some question about printing or a sign for her office. I was knocked over. I thought it might be my ‘ticket to the inside’ and behind the scenes. I was right. I made her a sign and also the chaplain wanted a door sign so I made him one – after that other people saw them and wanted them on all their doors – even the warden wanted signs so I started making them like crazy and applying them all over the prison. That gave me that inside access I wanted so I could study the inside workings.

After a while of hanging out with the Sgt as she made her rounds and we talked and slowly gained each other’s trust she even came over to BO and freaked the guys on probation out – a prison guard in uniform coming over and mixing with them. She let me run my place and I followed her lead in prison. it was her way of teaching me about it and all the games from her side of the coin.

After a couple months we decided we would like to try a sort of program with the inmates. I told her to choose any guys she wanted to and I would experiment with them to see if I could make sense of a prison program that could change lives.

I went out to the prison very often like one to three days a week. She and I walked around the units and she took me inside. I talked to some guys who had DWI and had killed whole car load of little children and found out how they were coping. I nervously waded through units locked inside with up to 80 – 100 men. Soon she would allow me to be locked in there by myself with them. I just had to pray nothing happened and it didn’t.

After a while we decided to choose some guys – about fifteen for me to see if I could bond with them and start to study them. She chose all races.. Indian, white, black, and Hispanic. The first nite was really tense. She locked me in a control room not the chapel. I did my best and I think I was so crazy for them that I scared a few of them being so hard core acting.

After that the only ones who wanted to come back and meet with me were the Hispanics and I was fine with that. The others just didn’t ‘get it’.

After about five months of repeatedly going into prison and being locked in with them about a group of seven or so – I finally had the nerve to ask if they still thought I was a cop or an investigator because they always would say ‘why you wanna come out here and see us anyway like this?’ – what do you get out of it? And they would always say… ‘you won’t keep it up – you’ll forget about us – everybody else has’.

And then the same night I told them… okay can I ask you a question then? They said ‘yes’ – I said so do you think we’ve actually bonded? And they said ‘yes’ – I said so then… ‘if you won’t feel like I’m a cop then I won’t feel like one of you is going to kill me anymore… okay?’ They let me know – I had earned their trust, their respect and that I had also earned something very hard to get – prison protection based on reputation for being real and not a sellout.

The guys I had in that ‘core group’ we decided to call ‘family’ – that nite was the first time we ever prayed and held hands in a circle. It was a beautiful prayer and it was the beginning of BAJITO ONDA PRISONERS FOR PROGRESS – A PEACE MINISTRY.

That was when I began introducing BO into their lives as a form of ‘another choice’ for them to just have in their lives.

Actually what occurred from then on out is what made history. The more they got involved in BO – the more peaceful they became – and the more they began to open up for the first time in their lives – even to Sarge and even Sarge began showing them favor – a first also for her.

What evolved was that I was holding groups with the main gang prison leaders and after about a year – they were leaving the gang leadership alone – turning their backs on it – and beginning to think about life after prison – peace – their families and their children – even accepting other members of BO as their own new family in peace.

So what now is happening is that worldwide – once violent persons are now accepting BO as a gang family for and on all levels it is spreading where the gangs are – and changing lives for peace.

If we can just get some word out about the lives in the violence I know we can reach some of them before its too late.

del