"I despised God, after a while," Marguerita recalls. "Every time someone tried to help me, every time it would get to me. I'd like walk out. After a while, I had two voices in my head, going through my head, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes you're so weak that you can't do anything about it. You cannot do anything about it. It's like drug addiction."
Was it fun, hanging out with the gang, handling all those drugs, taking risks?
Kids brush up on reading and math and (below) music at the First Presbyterian Church DUCK program.
Paolo Vescia
Music at the First Presbyterian Church DUCK program.
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"Yeah, it was fun, but if you got caught or if you got in trouble -- your heart is just pumping, pumping, pumping. You're like, 'Oh my God.'"
At one point, Marguerita says, she wanted to move in with her boyfriend, who lives in the projects (when he's not in jail) and is a member of a multigenerational gang.
"The projects are family. They're more or less together. But it's violent, you know? . . . Helicopters always going around. I loved that. I loved that. It was mysterious and it was fun. Acting, you know? And when you're in that environment, you feel safe, proud and tall. Nothing can put me down, I'm sooooo cool.
". . . I look back and I'm sad, because I loved doing those things. I loved the attention. It felt like being in Hollywood, only your own world. Everything was fine, cool dancing."
But can't she dance with her new church friends?
"We don't have any rules," Marguerita says of her gang friends, making it obvious her allegiance is still split. "They do. We don't have a limit. They do have a limit, at church. We're free to speak our mind, whatever is on our mind, we're free. At church, you can't do that."
And yet, Marguerita says, she's made up her mind that it will be all church, no gang. Well, almost no gang. She still has a relationship with her boyfriend, and says she's trying to get him out.
"His nana and his mother, they go to church. But he can't seem to get back with it. He thinks God has totally turned his back on him and that the devil is right there, has him by the neck. . . . He says he doesn't have any use for the Bible because he read the Bible four times and it's just like another book to him."
He's Catholic, she says. "They believe in God and they believe that that is what's going to protect them, and if it's their time to go, it's time to go."
So what can help? What, in Marguerita's opinion, can be done to stop gang violence?
Not programs, she says. Not even church.
"They have too much pride. Too much pride. . . . They don't want to go to programs to get help. They don't want you to say, 'Help,' they want you to say, 'Oh, well, any time, I'm here, you can just come talk with me and this church is open to you. Don't be afraid.'
"Don't let them know that you're trying to give them help, because then you make them feel like they're sick, they don't know nothing. And maybe they don't, but to them they do."
Marguerita and her mother recall that Mesa First Assembly made some unsuccessful attempts.
Mom: "They had a church program that was reaching out to gang members, but it was making the youth from our church afraid to go to the youth group."
But Marguerita says it made the gang members uncomfortable, too.
"I'd bring my gang members, you know, to church," she says. "They [the congregants] just intimidated them, totally. They're like, 'I'm never coming back here.'"
In the end, Marguerita says, nothing will help until the gang members want out.
"I think you have to want to change, okay? You can't make somebody change. You can advise them to do things and they'll try. They may try, but they don't really want to leave it. They don't want to really leave the freedom that they have to do whatever they want. . . . They don't realize what's going to happen to them. They're not going to have freedom. They think they're going to run the world. They think they're going to have a choice to either go to heaven or hell, or just stay here on Earth and roam it, by themselves."
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Contact Amy Silverman at 602-229-8443 or her online address: asilverman@newtimes.com
