Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and violent death.

Eddie Anzora was a Salvadorian boy growing up in South LA in the late 1980s. His neighborhood was divided up between various gangs, and he learned to observe those around him carefully to keep out of trouble. Eddy came to the United States from El Salvador at three years old with his mother and little brother. He remembered nothing of El Salvador and believed he was Mexican “because that’s what you were if you weren’t Black” (155).

One day, Eddie was playing football with friends when he saw a shoot-out between several “goth rocker” teenagers and local kids who belonged to a gang called the Harpys. These teenagers with long hair and metal t-shirts were part of a new gang called Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadorian slang term “meant to convey scrappiness and savagery” (157).

There were no white people in Eddie’s neighborhood, and Central Americans occupied “the bottom of an already vicious racial hierarchy” (159). Salvadorian teenagers had to choose between the dangers of remaining unaffiliated with any gang or the possible violence of trying to be accepted as an outsider.

18th Street was a Chicano gang that had a reputation for being welcoming to outsiders, and it quickly grew into one of LA’s “more fearsome” gangs.