Sarah Garland has reported on crime, immigration, and education for The New York Times, Newsweek International, and The New York Sun. She spent the last five years working on Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America’s Suburbs
Q. What was the impetus to write “Gangs of Garden City”?
A. I was actually doing research on Mexican gangs in Harlem and had a professor who was Salvadoran. It was in 2003 and 2004, just as MS-13 and 18th St. were getting more national attention. There had been some incidents out in Long Island including the murder of a 14-year-old. And so, he suggested I go out there and take a look, so I did. I made a visit to the high school and met with the principal and met with some advocates who were working on reaching out to gang members, so it kind of started from there. Initially, I was surprised that there was that kind of violence, that kind of poverty going on in the suburbs in Long Island. I’m not from New York and so I had this image of Long Island suburbs as the Hamptons and the Garden Cities, so Hempstead was definitely a surprise.
Q. Do you know why Salvadorans chose to migrate to Hempstead, N.Y. as opposed to New York City? It seems unusual that they went to the suburbs first, and I think you mentioned in the book that there isn’t a real Salvadoran community in New York City.
A. I think the first couple of immigrants from El Salvador had come sometime in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s during the civil war. There’s relatively affordable housing in Long Island. In the 1990’s, which is when the civil war in El Salvador and Guatemala, there was an economic boom and a lot of construction going on in Long Island so there was a need for people to fill those jobs. So only a handful of people came originally but, through immigration networks, it grew exponentially after that.
Q. What do you think of MS-13’s reputation as the most ruthless, deadly, violent gang? Do you think some of that is media hype? Specials on the History Channel and National Geographic have seemed pretty sensationalized. Are they that much worse than other inner-city gangs?
A. According to the FBI, MS-13 been reported in 42 states, and that’s a huge growth since the 1990’s. I think a lot of that has been the attention and the way that they’ve been described in the media. When you read a news story, there’s often a quick reference to the way law enforcement has referred to them as the most ruthless gang and very sophisticated and there’s not a lot of unpacking of whether that’s true and what that means. What I’ve found, and I’ve talked often to local police officers who’ve noticed the same thing on the ground, is that really when you talk about the level of sophistication and communication, it’s not to the degree that is described in national reports.
One of the interesting anecdotes that I like to refer to is about a group of immigrant kids in Port Washington, which is a town in Long Island. They had formed a little group called the Main Street Posse. I’m not sure when, probably in the ‘90s when MS-13 gained all this notoriety and was being talked about in the national news, they changed their name to Mara Salvatrucha because the name sounded that much more intimidating. And you actually find that a lot of the MS-13 cliques on Long Island have their territories staked out on Main Street. The problem and the reason why they spread is partly because of the hype. Probably more so than, you know, emissaries being sent out from El Salvador or Chicago or L.A. I think it happens more organically and naturally than that.
Q. When a gang gets media exposure as being tough and violent, kids from other areas will call themselves by the same gang name – can you discuss this trend?
A. Yes, and I didn’t go into this much in the book but I was down in El Salvador and I did interviews in a prison that was all MS-13 members. It was interesting talking to these kids, none of them had any connection at all to the US or to L.A. They were all from El Salvador and had never left their neighborhoods for the most part. Occasionally there would be regional meetings or someone would come back from the United States, but there wasn’t this communication network or this recruitment network. And the same thing was true in the suburbs. People who had joined the gang in Long Island, back home they hadn’t had any involvement and had probably never seen a gang member. I think that’s the untold story of these gangs, how they form very organically and because of outside conditions not because there’s this malicious effort to spread the gang across the country.
Q. How did you feel as a woman writing this book? Was it an obstacle at all, was there any discrimination against you from these masculine gangs? Did you bring any different perspectives?
A. It’s interesting. I get asked this a lot, you know, “Did you feel like you were in danger?” My goal in writing the book – and this is why I don’t actually go into a lot of detail about the gang members in EL Salvador – was that I really wanted to get to know the kids who joined the gangs (in Long Island) and why. What I did is really focus in on three main characters and spend a lot of time getting to know them. Rather than doing what I think is the more typical way of writing about gangs, which is to go hang out on the street with them and do participant observation.
I really got to know Jessica, I got to know Daniel, and I got to know Julio really well. It’s interesting talking to teenage boys who are in gangs, there’s a lot of macho-ness in play there. For example with Daniel, he was this tough guy kid who I met when he was a freshman in high school and when he walked into the classroom everyone would turn around and he’d slap hands with everyone. But once he sat down to talk with me just the two of us, he was sort of shy, awkward 15-year-old by. So I think that there was a definite change, even with talking to the MS-13 prisoners in El Salvador. It was a juvenile prison but a lot of them were 18 years old. They actually wouldn’t tell me there age, because they weren’t allowed to say the number “18” because it was their rival. Walking by, groups of them might whistle or yell things to me, but when I sat down and talked to them one on one, for the most part, they were just sort of awkward…
Q. Normal boys?
A. Well, not normal! But they were adolescents who were going through a rough time. A lot of them had gotten in over their heads and they’d had traumatic stories. A lot of them had really awful stories about growing up, in Long Island they had hard stories about crossing the border, so they’d had lives that most suburban kids don’t have. And I think that explains why some of them are drawn to the gangs. In a lot of ways, when you sit down and talk to them as a grown-up talking to them, they would shed some of that macho attitude…and maybe it helped that I was a woman talking to them, I don’t know.
Q. How do you think the global recession will affect Central American gangs in the New York area and beyond? Have you seen any effects already?
A. I think it’s been really hard economically in Long Island. New York has been one the places hardest hit. There’s a lot of development and construction on Long Island that’s slowed down significantly so it’s harder for people to find work. Day laborers, for example. There was one police chief who said he had a few day laborers come to the police station asking to be deported so that they wouldn’t have to pay to go back home. I don’t know that that’s a widespread trend, but I do think that the level of immigration from Central America and Mexico has dropped off just a little, according to Pew Hispanic Center reports. Central America has been really hard hit, so if anything, the economic conditions that contribute to families who are struggling, with kids growing up in dire circumstances has gotten worse due to the recession.
Q. Why should someone care about the gang violence in Garden City? Playing devil’s advocate, the level of violence is definitely much lower than in New York or L.A. so why does it matter if there’s a little gang violence in the suburbs? What’s the trend here? What does it mean for suburbs in general?
A. Well, actually with the title “Gangs in Garden City,” I used the term “Garden City” metaphorically. It was a term for the suburbs. But Garden City’s also a real place and it’s actually very affluent, a mostly white suburb. It’s right next door to Hempstead, which is the suburb where the gangs are most active and where you have a very high percentage of Hispanics and African-Americans and families living in poverty. The reason I used Garden City in the title, and write about it in comparison in the book, is because I do think that the well-to-do, white suburbanites who are living next door to this may not recognize it as a part of their world.
Whether or not you recognize it now or in the next 50 years, the population of the United States is going to become majority minority. A lot of those kids who are going to be the next generation of adults are being raised in communities where the schools are bad or they’re lacking resources and where there’s violence on the streets and where they feel like their communities have been ostracized by the rest of society because they’re Hispanic and they’re seen as illegal immigrants. You may live in the suburbs and say, you know, it’s not my problem and I don’t have to think about it. But it really is the future of the United States, and something that people should be worried about, if you have a whole new generation of Americans growing up in these kinds of situations.
Q. So it’s sort of a wake-up call to a lot of people that this violence going on?
A. Well, problems of the inner-city have now grown and become suburban problems as well. And so moving to the suburbs, 50 years ago a lot of families thought suburbs had better schools and they could get away from problems like poverty and the arrival of new immigrants and crime. And now, I think the gang problem in the suburbs and what we’re seeing in places like Hempstead is that you can’t – you know, we’ve tried to run away from those problems and they’ve followed us and it’s a problem that we’re going to need to address. You can’t run away from it. There’s hope now that there will be some way of dealing with the immigration system under the Obama Administration and a renewed focus on public schools and trying to erase the achievement gap but there’s still a long way to go.
Q. How much do you think our own U.S. problems are to blame for the Central American gang problem in general in the U.S.? I’m talking about the involvement of the U.S. in the civil war in El Salvador, the deportation of criminals.
A. I think that the U.S. has contributed to the problem in two different ways and one is with foreign policy like you said. All of the money that went toward funding the civil war, that went on longer because of that funding, and also looking the other way when, for example, the government in El Salvador was recruiting kids younger than 16 to join the army…and the rebel forces were doing the same thing. And then, when a lot of refugees came to the United States because of those wars they weren’t granted refugee status and so a lot of them arrived as illegal immigrants and as marginalized citizens. It was hard for them to get good jobs, go to college, and so on. And those problems then compounded with the domestic reaction, in terms of the law enforcement crackdown against the gangs.
On the national level you had these huge waves of deportation where they’d send immigrants back to Central America, which obviously hasn’t helped the problem and a lot of people would argue it’s made it worse. Even on the local level, in places like Hempstead or even in L.A., you’ve had these arrests of gang leaders and the result has not been the end of gang problems or the end of gang violence. In Hempstead, they arrested a lot of the leaders of MS-13, and in the past year or so, MS-13 has sort of dissipated but a new gang has taken its place. The reaction of the U.S. has been to focus on prison, to focus on punishment, to focus on deportation, and it really hasn’t gotten to the root of the problem that created gangs in the first place.
*Photo of Sarah Garland by Jennie Aleshire.
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