Can Angelenos recognize baby-killing gangs?

Crime shook Los Angeles in 2007: A gang member, Giovanni Macedo, approached street dealer Francisco Clemente and fired five times. Clemente was seriously wounded, and one of the bullets aimed at him hit 23-day-old Luis Angel, killing the baby. In “The Rent Collectors,” Jesse Katz examines the events of that day to question whether killers like Macedo can be redeemed.

Readers expecting a true crime story that treats murder as a sui generis individual act will find a different narrative here. Instead, Katz has created an ethnography of the crime, locating within the works of history, geography, policing and politics within which the crime took place.

Jesse Katz, author of “The Rent Collectors.”

(Eric Nazar)

Katz, who spent 24 years covering stories for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine, brings extraordinary skills to Macedo’s crime scene mapping. It happened near MacArthur Park, a large green space in LA’s Westlake district, which in the 1980s had become a bustling neighborhood for Central American refugees. What Los Angeles offers most, however, is not safety and stability, but a life of fugitives for anyone in the US without legal status. “Nowhere else in Los Angeles does it feel the subversive energy or labor of being so deeply traumatized,” Katz wrote.

Cut off from legal employment, they set up sidewalk stalls to sell almost anything – single cigarettes, diapers, street food, handicrafts and forms of pirated entertainment. “For migrants, it’s a ‘cold deal’: work hard on the fringes, stay out of trouble, swallow your insults, take away your ability to vote or serve on a jury or collect unemployment or feel safe in your own skin, and you’re lucky, America might be leaving you in limbo.

But Los Angeles, despite its self-image as a liberal city, punishes merchants. While other cities celebrate urban markets for their cultural richness and commercial opportunities, Katz explains, Los Angeles “has long considered peddling as a nuisance. Code for foreigners and civil disorder. It is part of the criminalization of poverty that continues to this day, as in last month’s Supreme Court ruling on punishing people who sleep in public. City bureaucracies and police forces were put in place to remove the poor from public spaces.

Columbia Lil Cycos stepped into the gap. A street gang that makes money from the drug trade, has branched out into a sophisticated protection racket that charges a fee to anyone who earns money in this underground economy – whether they are workers or traders. For vendors, who have already paid city fines for illegal vending, it’s just another cost.

But the cost is putting a population already under tremendous pressure. Without access to health services or social resources that can help traumatized immigrants in their countries of origin, more trauma is passed on to young children through parental coping mechanisms – alcoholism, domestic abuse and the type of parenting that is absent in adulthood. must hold some low-wage job to support the family.

Some of these factors played into Macedo’s teenage life. The immature brain of a teenager looking for a masculinity to emulate, keeps him coming back despite warnings from other gang members that this is not the life for him.

The vendor who was shot, Clemente, is emblematic of a different struggle in the community. He already had a car repair business but needed more money, so he started as a salesman. He took two new arrivals, Jessica Guzman and Daniela Garcia, under his wing to help him. Clemente, an undocumented former slum boy from Mexico City, refuses when the gang demands protection payments, so they send Macedo to kill Clemente as an example. Garcia had brought her newborn Angel Luis to work with her because she had no other choice.

Katz has created a riveting and masterful urban narrative. At its center is the great tragedy of infanticide, a horrific crime that Katz takes responsibility for. The state did, too: Macedo served a long prison sentence.

But in reality, culpability for crime is like a blast wave. It extends back into history and much through today’s society. Nothing is outside of that zone. US policies in Central America, and the reaction to them, have created a nightmare for civilians fleeing in search of sanctuary and a better future. Here in the US, they instead find purgatory, their existence criminalized by a federal government that refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of its foreign policy. Los Angeles, once concerned with its own reputation and aesthetics, criminalized it again by punishing street vendors. Gangs capture all the vulnerabilities in this population and create new fears.

“The Rent Collectors” decides to understand the evil deeds and asks if redemption and redemption is possible for those who do it. It discovers the web of meaning in which we are all suspended, meaning that many other crimes can be understood in a holistic way if we take the time. As much as possible after the senseless tragedy, Katz made sense of that September day.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Eugene, Ore. @BerryFLW