October 31, 2012 · 7:47 pm

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: The Stockton Stories

Two new stories up this week on Tell Your True Tale. Both grew from a writing workshop I did with students this month at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA — a town where I was once a crime reporter for several years.

The stories were terrific and I’ll be posting several of them in coming weeks.

Perhaps reflecting some of the town’s grit, the tales themselves are rough, but really great, reads — confirming my faith in community colleges as story goldmines.

These are the first two:

–Christian Lockwood, a former cop, writes of the final day of his drunken homelessness, in The Last Day.

–Darshay Smith, a nursing student, writes of the night her mother was shot and the lingering effects of the incident in The Light That Night.

Check them out. Please share them on social media. I’m always interested in looking at new submissions, so take computer in hand and get writing.


Leave a Comment

Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

· 7:34 pm

LOS ANGELES: Cerritos College Thursday night

Very happy to be speaking to writers, students and storytellers at Cerritos College in Norwalk Thursday night.

I’ll be talking about storytelling and writing.

I’ll be telling some stories that I love and discussing students’ stories from their own lives — a little bit of my Tell Your True Tale workshops.

Hope to see you all there…

Thanks Library Club of Cerritos College!

 

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under California, Los Angeles, Southern California, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 24, 2012 · 7:23 am

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Wasn’t About the Money

A new story up this week on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale, is by convicted bank robber Jeffrey Scott Hunter.

Check out Wasn’t About the Money — Jeff’s story of the time he knew his bank robbing was getting out of hand.

Happy to read any story you might want to submit.

And please share it on any social media you might use….

Many thanks,

Sam

3 Comments

Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 19, 2012 · 1:23 pm

MEXICO: Homeless World Cup

Mexico City photographer Keith Dannemiller has some great shots of the Homeless World Cup soccer tournament.

Great idea — forming soccer teams made up of folks who are homeless, or socially/economically marginalized, and bringing them all together to compete in a soccer tournament, this the 10th annual.

On Facebook, Keith writes of some of the people he met:

“Like Ikram Moukhlis, a young Muslim woman who lives in a women’s shelter in Tangiers, Morocco. I know about 5 phrases in Arabic, she speaks no English or Spanish, but somehow we connected and I was proud of the photos I made of her. This trip to Mexico was the first time in her life to be on a plane. And then, Mauva Hunte-Bowlby, playing for England, who has been, until just recently, ‘sofa-surfing’ in London. Ms. Hunte-Bowlby is 52, and a grandmother twice over.”

Great story, fascinating event….check out Keith’s shots.

 

(if you like these blog posts, please share them on Twitter, FB, email or anywhere else you prefer.)

 

2 Comments

Filed under Culture, Global Economy, Mexico

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

· 8:51 am

LOS ANGELES: Grim Sleeper photos on Facebook

The LAPD has put up a Facebook page of photos of  women whom they are trying to identify that were in possession of the suspected serial murderer, Lonnie Franklin, Jr., known in the media as the Grim Sleeper.

Franklin, 60, is charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of women — many of them prostitutes and drug addicts, whose corpses were often found dumped in alleyways and Dumpsters in South-Central Los Angeles — between 1976 and 2010, and who is believed to have taken a break of 13 years in between, hence the Grim Sleeper moniker.

Franklin was arrested in 2010 and at the time LAPD made public the photos, found in his possession, of some one hundred women they believed might be his victims. Some photos seemed to be normal snapshots, but others showed women undressing.

Many were identified through public outreach, but some were not. So the FB page is one more attempt to find the identify of women whose photos Franklin possessed when he was arrested.

For years, many Grim Sleeper killings were believed part of other sprees. News of an LAPD investigation into the killings as connected to one man was made public in 2008 by Christine Pelisek in the LA Weekly.

The Grim Sleeper case is fascinating for several reasons. But one of them is that it involves a black man. For decades, serial murderers were almost all white. Think Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer. But the chaos of the crack-epidemic years apparently created black serial killers, who often prayed on street women, and whom DNA technology has only recently allowed police to identify, in LA at least. Franklin is suspected to be one of them. Chester Turner and John Floyd Thomas are others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 18, 2012 · 8:29 am

LOS ANGELES: The Virgin of Pico Boulevard

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Photography

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 17, 2012 · 12:02 pm

MEXICO: Our Lady of the Miscelanea

Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca

3 Comments

Filed under Culture, Mexico, Migrants

Tagged as , , ,

October 14, 2012 · 4:19 pm

CALIFORNIA: Stockton and writing

Last week, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Stockton, California, one of my favorite towns.

I was the crime reporter there for the Stockton Record from 1988-92.

This time, I met with students at San Joaquin Delta College, the area community college, in a class taught by poet/instructor Pedro Ramirez. We were talking about writing and how they could tell their own stories — part of my Tell Your True writing workshops.

I’ll be posting some of them soon on my TYTT storytelling page.

The town has taken a lot of hits, entering bankruptcy in the wake of the housing collapse — which seemed reflected in the tales the students wrote, most of which were pretty grim.

Cops have left for departments elsewhere — Oceanside is one, I understand — when they lose their houses due to their salaries being reduced. Crime is again on a track to break records. I did notice a lot of the parolee/addict/hooker kind of folks downtown.

One of Stockton’s problems is that, by design or not, it is within a hundred miles of something like half the prisons in the state: this includes Folsom, San Quentin, Deuel, and the new prisons down by Corcoran/Delano, as well as a women’s prison and a youth-authority prison. That’s a lot.

But there’s a backbone to the town that I always liked, and a down-to-earth quality to folks that I did not feel, for example, when I moved to Seattle for my next job. (Civil folks, those Seattlites, but not at all friendly. And then there’s the rain, or should I say the constant drizzle.)

In Stockton, I note still a lack of graffiti, which is good. When I was there, it was the graffiti that most seemed to drag down the town and give it a defeated/defeatist feel.

These photos suggest the town’s stiff upper lip remains.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under California, Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

· 8:13 am

MEXICO: Manuel Torres Felix, “El M1,” killed

Manuel Torres Felix, the head of security for the Sinaloa Cartel, has been killed by the Mexican military – Oct. 13, 2012.

Torres Felix, (photo left) was the brother of Javier “El JT” Torres Felix (photo right), who was the head of the cartel’s security before his arrest and extradition to the U.S.in 2006.

This time Army soldiers guarded his body to prevent it from being stolen — as happened to the corpse of Zeta leader Heriberto Lazcano a week before.

Manuel Torres Felix — also known as El Ondeado — was known to be especially bloody, and became, perhaps for that reason, the subject of numerous corridos by the new wave of corrido singers, most of whom are from Southern California and who seem to have chosen sides (or were forced to do so) in Mexico’s drug-cartel wars.

Check out, for example, Los Sanguinarios de M1 (the Bloodthirsty Ones of M1) by Los Bukanas de Culiacan (who are actually not from Culiacan, Sinaloa, but instead from Downey, CA), with plenty of references to decapitated heads, etc.

(Here’s some lyrics, and I’m not making them up:

With an AK-47 and a bazooka on our heads
blowing off heads that cross our path
We’re bloodthirsty and crazy – We love to kill
Bullets fired and extortions carried out, just like the best of us
Always in a caravan of armored cars, wearing bullet-proof vests and ready to execute people)

Man, where is the oblique, poetic style of Chalino Sanchez and his tales from the Mexican rancho now that we need them?

I find it interesting that M1, and another sicario, El Macho Prieto, became the focus of so many corridos, rather than Chapo Guzman or Mayo Zambada — the Sinaloa cartel’s leaders.

Don’t know, but his death might do something to undermine the idea that the government is in cahoots with the Sinaloa Cartel.

 

 

2 Comments

Filed under Drugs, Mexico

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 11, 2012 · 9:24 am

CULTURE: Parent-attention gap behind class divide

Fascinating piece in The Atlantic online this morning about what’s behind the class chasm in America.

The magazine holds that a major reason for the class divide in this country is the number of kids born into single-parent families. Or put another way, single-parent families and less parental time spent with kids are both cause and effect of the class divide.

More-educated people are more likely to get married later, and form lasting two-parent families, the magazine states. Educated parents are spending more time with their kids. (A frightening statistic is that 72 percent of African-American children are born into single-parent families; the number is 53 percent for Hispanics and 33 percent for whites, according to the magazine.)

A divorce divide — the growing amount of divorce among less-educated parents — is a factor in the class divide as well, the magazine states.

According to the magazine: “It’s no coincidence that rising inequality in the home has been occurring at precisely the same time as rising inequality in the workplace. These two kinds of social polarization – one cultural, the other economic – are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.”

The lesson: Those who invest in themselves and wait to get married and do not have children out of wedlock or some committed long-term relationship, do better economically. Or the flip side: more education and a better economic situation lead to wiser economic choices, such as waiting for a committed relationship to have children, and having fewer of them.

As someone who waited until 46 to get married and have a child — and then only one — I find this no surprise.

In many areas of highest crime and greatest poverty, young, single-parent families predominate — as they do among gang members I’ve interviewed.

Men, in particular, aren’t ready to get married, emotionally or economically, until their 30s at least, I’ve always felt, though I know this sounds like I’m drawing a universal case from my own life example.

Still….

1 Comment

Filed under Culture

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 10, 2012 · 2:31 pm

PRISONS: A call to end racial warring

A group of inmates in California’s maximum security lockups — Pelican Bay, Corcoran and Tehachapi — are calling for an end to the racial warring that has been part of prison life in the state since … probably since I was born.

Among those calling for this within this coalition are members of the Mexican Mafia, which has warred with blacks in the prison system and ordered Latino gang members in Southern California to wage wars on the streets with blacks as well.

One of the leading members of this collective is Arturo Castellanos — a long-documented Eme member, aka Tablas, serving a life prison sentence for murder since 1980 — who, trial documents and evidence show, ordered up the Florencia 13 war on blacks in the Florence-Firestone unincorporated area that turned that area into a war zone for several years, the worst of which was 2005.

In the federal indictment of Florencia 13 members, the unindicted co-conspirator, identified only as AC, is, according to sources, Arturo Castellanos.

The Black Hand, about ex-mafioso Rene Enriquez, gives a clear idea of how the Eme has used activist groups, lawyers and others to promote their own financial/criminal interests. In interviews with ex-Emeros and their soldiers, I’ve heard these stories as well.

Those interviews have also made clear that the truce edict and the order to end drive-by shootings in the early 1990s were simply ways of organizing Latino street gangs in Southern California into units to tax local drug dealers and kick back some of the money to incarcerated Eme members. Among the edicts the Eme came up with during these years was an order to push Latino street gangs to war with blacks in their areas, rid their areas of black drug dealers, etc.

The result was virtual race wars in neighborhoods such as West Side San Bernardino, Pacoima, Azusa, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Canoga Park, Pomona, Harbor Gateway, Wilmington, Hawaiian Gardens and the aforementioned Florence-Firestone, among others.

Surely it’s a welcome thing to end racial wars in prisons, but history and evidence show that with the Eme you always wonder about underlying motives.

 

4 Comments

Filed under California, Gangs, Prison

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

· 11:12 am

DRUGS: Is the “Buchon” style here to stay?

An interesting story in today’s El Debate, a daily newspaper in the state of Sinaloa, asks whether buchon style is here to stay.

Buchon is a style of dress and speech — attitudes as well — that is from the bottom of the Sinaloan drug world.

It usually involves slang, very drawled speech — which is how folks from the mountains of Sinaloa speak. It also involves guns, demeaning talk about women, glorification of the bloodthirstiest narcos, money, military garb, tricked-out trucks, and, interestingly, the veneration of Buchanan whiskey — bastardized as “Buchanas.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this somewhere before.

Buchon  is a big deal in the state of Sinaloa, where Mexican drug smuggling began — as the story makes clear.

It’s also a big deal here in L.A., where Sinaloan style has dominated Mexican culture for two decades — since the life and death of narco-balladeer legend Chalino Sanchez.

Los Buchones de Culiacan are a band that plays here regularly, and in Sinaloa. (Can’t play in the state of Tamaulipas as their image is so associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, which is at war with the Zetas, whose stronghold in near the Gulf of Mexico.)

People in the southeast cities of LA County sometimes try to speak like hill Sinaloans even though they’re from states with very different cultures, such as Jalisco or Zacatecas.

As Carlos Monsivais was once reputed to have said: if you provide jobs to people, you become a hero. Or you get all the girls…..

 

 

 

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Culture, Drugs, Mexico

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 9, 2012 · 1:27 pm

RELIGION: Protestants no longer the majority

Fascinating findings by the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life that Protestants no longer make up a majority of the United States.

Many folks are religious but unaffiliated with any denomination.

As it turns out, I’m in the midst of a story about many Oaxacan Indians, from a Catholicism in their native towns that resembles something from 16th Century Spain, who have converted to various Protestant denominations here in the United States.

This is something I also found in the parts of Baja California where many Oaxacans also migrated. The Valley of San Quintin, where thousands of Oaxacans have come for farmwork, is studded with storefront churches: Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness and others.

Always seemed to me that converting to Protestant denominations was part of the voyage out of the mountains of Oaxaca, Chiapas and other similarly distant places — a lifting of the blinders, in a sense. Not everyone goes through this, and a lot find other ways to come out of the Old World. But a good many bring clarity to their New World through a Protestant lens.

After all, they come from villages where the priest would visit and everyone would have to take off their hats and cast their eyes to the ground. Where people were prohibited from reading the Bible, but virtually required to participate in mass and annual religious festivals, which often involved heavy drinking.

1 Comment

Filed under Culture, Religion

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

· 9:12 am

MEXICO: Upon the death of a Drug Lord — David Hidalgo, Jackson Browne and Los Cenzontles

This morning’s news that Heriberto Lazcano (pictured here), leader of the bloodthirsty Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, may have been killed by the Mexican military reminded me of a song by Los Cenzontles, the Mexican roots-music band from the Bay Area. (Update below: Lazcano’s corpse stolen.)

The Silence was recorded in February in a session in Echo Park with David Hidalgo, from Los Lobos, who has the vocals on the track, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who sings backup.

A great, elegant tune about Mexico’s drug violence — one of the few songs whose achingly beautiful feel does some kind of justice to the tragedy.

The song is from the band’s great new CD, Regeneration — for which (full disclosure) I wrote the liner notes. The album mixes norteno, a little sixties rock, some blues and funk — all in a really strong, bold sound.

The band started as part of a grant to get kids involved in music in the East Bay. Years later, it’s an accomplished crew, having recorded several albums  and artists such as Hidalgo, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal.

On a lower note, the Zetas started out as Mexican military special operations commandos and were paid to desert by Osiel Cardenas Guillen, then the leader of the Gulf Cartel, which ran the territory on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley.

Cardenas, now doing 25 years in a US prison, hired them — 31 of them — as bodyguards. It took only a few years for them to realize that they could be a cartel as well. They branched off, recruited heavily among poor youth and returning deportees from the U.S. They formed new cells like amoeba, and became a fearsome force across Mexico and down into Guatemala.

See a Mexican military-issued photo of the corpse of Heriberto Lazcano.

UPDATE: Now there are reports that an armed squad of Zetas broke into the place where Lazcano’s corpse was held and made off with it.

The drama of our times — not good for much, except art sometimes.

David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne

 

1 Comment

Filed under Culture, Drugs, Mexico

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 6, 2012 · 7:50 pm

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Emri’s Chest

A great and touching piece is up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.

Check out “Emri’s Chest” by Rachel Kimbrough, a great young writer from Kansas, about the death of her toddler son.

http://www.samquinones.com/category/true-tales/

Please share it on FB, Twitter, etc….

Above all, write one of your own and send it in……Sam

Leave a Comment

Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,