Christina Hoag is the
author of Skin of
Tattoos, a literary thriller set in
L.A.’s gang underworld and Girl on the Brink, a romantic thriller for young adults. She is a former reporter for
the Associated Press and Miami Herald and worked as a correspondent in Latin
America writing for major media outlets. She also co-authored Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang
Members to End the Violence, a
groundbreaking book on gang intervention. Learn more about Christina and her
books at her website.
What
Inspired Me to Write About Gangs
Having
written both a nonfiction book and a fiction book about gangs, people often ask
me why gangs? I first encountered gangs as a young newspaper reporter in New Jersey,
when I was assigned to write a story about a notorious motorcycle gang
delivering Christmas toys to a local hospital. I went to interview them in a
small suburban house, very normal-looking apart from the bunch of Harley
choppers out front and its rather gloriously hirsute occupants, who insisted
they belonged to a “club” not a gang. I was fascinated by them and their chosen
lifestyle. They had established their own society with its own rules, dress,
language and culture within mainstream society. What drove people to do that? I
wondered.
A side
note: A couple years later, I saw one of the “club members” at a New Jersey
prison where I’d gone to interview an inmate for another story. So much for the
“club,” I thought.
Years
later, on a magazine assignment, I interviewed gang members deported from Los
Angeles to El Salvador, where they had landed like fish out of water because
they’d left Salvador as babies and small children during the civil war. It was
a country that they identified with, but really didn’t know. Some of them barely
spoke Spanish. They had joined and formed gangs in Los Angeles because their
families had moved to predominantly Mexican-American neighborhoods that had
long-entrenched gangs.
The
Central Americans formed their own groups for protection, but because they
weren’t U.S. citizens, they later were vulnerable to deportation when the
government started cracking down on immigrants with criminal records. The stories of
the young men I interviewed were really rooted in an unusual outcome of both a
civil war and the immigrant experience. They ended up staying in my mind to
form the genesis of my recently released thriller, Skin of Tattoos.
Talking to the young men in El
Salvador also reignited that previous interest in gangs from when I had
interviewed the motorcycle guys, and I started reading about and researching
gangs in earnest over the following years. I covered numerous gang issues as a
reporter for the Associated Press in Los Angeles, talking to gang members,
people who worked with them, people who worked against them, ie. cops.
There are many factors leading to
gang formation, but in essence, gangs are driven by the universal human need
for belonging to and approval of a group, and because some sectors of our
society feel excluded from mainstream society, they form their own societies
instead. Gang culture is alien to most of our lives and an extreme consequence
of socioeconomic marginalization, but everyone can relate in some way to
feeling excluded, of needing to belong, of wanting approval.
Los Angeles homeboy Magdaleno is paroled
from prison after serving time on a gun possession frameup by a rival, Rico,
who takes over as gang shotcaller in Mags’s absence. Mags promises himself and
his Salvadoran immigrant family a fresh start, but he can’t find either the
decent job or the respect he craves from his parents and his firefighter
brother, who look at him as a disappointment. Moreover, Rico, under pressure to
earn money to free the Cyco Lokos’ jailed top leader and eager to exert his
authority over his rival-turned-underling, isn’t about to let Mags get out of
his reach. Ultimately, Mags’s desire for revenge and respect pushes him to make
a decision that ensnares him in a world seeded with deceit and betrayal, where
the only escape from rules that carry a heavy price for transgression is
sacrifice of everything – and everyone - he loves.
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1 comment:
Thanks so much for hosting me on your blog today!
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