The Making of a Gangbanger

By: Tim Bush, Ellyn M. Ong, Micah Holmquist and Sarah Karp In Maplewood Park on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Reymundo Sanchez, who had recently started hanging out with members of the Latin Kings street gang, was asked if he wanted to look for members of a rival gang called the Vicelords. He naively agreed, and was soon handed a sawed-off shotgun. Minutes later, he performed his first hit. He was 14.


Sanchez (a pseudonym) recounts the incident in “My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King,” his stark memoir of becoming swallowed by gang life in the 1970s. He writes that he wants his story to show “that most kids are driven to gangs by adults, not by their peers or the dreaded ‘white man’ who is blamed for every problem.”


Sanchez writes about young children who were taught to represent, or show allegiance to, their father’s gang, a police officer who worked for the gang and community members who ignored the violence.


Sanchez moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico in 1964, when he was 6 years old, and ended up in Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side. When he was 13 his parents moved back to Puerto Rico. He moved in with his heroin-dealing brother Hector, who ignored him. The Latin Kings, he writes, became his new family.


He and his Latin King brothers lived in a deadly cycle of retaliation where respect and reputation were earned by violence. He was once beaten by fellow Kings for not killing a 10-year-old boy representing for another gang.


He watched his friends die or go to jail. And he overdosed on cocaine and did a stint in jail himself before enduring a reverse initiation in which other gang members beat him for several minutes. Sanchez, then in his early 20s, concluded leaving Chicago was his only option.


“I shed tears every time I hear news of another victim falling to gang violence,” he writes. “I think it’s time we take responsibility for our own neighborhoods and put a stop to the crying.”
“My Bloody Life : The Making of a Latin King” is published by Chicago Review Press.



A class-action lawsuit filed Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court in Chicago alleges that an Indianapolis-based car financing company routinely charges higher interest rates to blacks than to whites with similar financial backgrounds. According to the complaint, when African American Lyndah Wise went to buy a car from Dave Miller Olds-Isuzu in south suburban Matteson, Union Acceptance Corporation charged her a higher rate. Wise’s attorney, Ken Wexler, said Union Acceptance “motivates” dealers to boost the rate “basically based on the dealer’s perception of how sophisticated the person is. They size you up when you walk in.”



The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are likely to embolden white nationalist groups to turn up their assault on immigrants, said the Rev. David Ostendorf, executive director of the Center on New Community, which monitors hate groups and works on social justice issues. Fewer such groups exist in the Midwest today than in 1999, according to the center’s recent report, “State of Hate: White Nationalism in the Midwest 2001-2002.” But more conventional organizations are now assailing affirmative action, multiculturalism and immigrant rights. What was once “rejected as just silliness, is now well received by many,” Ostendorf said.



Myths keep some black women from breastfeeding, putting their babies at risk, writes Mishawn Purnell-O’Neal in her self-published book “Breastfeeding Facts Over Fiction: Health Implications on the African American Community.” Purnell-O’Neal, a west suburban Forest Park resident and mother, has a master’s degree in public health and works as a consultant for the March of Dimes. She dispels myths about breastfeeding, including that it will stunt a baby’s growth or make the child grow too attached to the mother. In fact, Purnell-O’Neal writes, breastfeeding can help prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is more than twice as likely to kill black babies than white babies in Illinois, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.