Has family planning curbed youth gangs?
Some economists claim that with the access of the lower classes to contraceptives, the proliferation of unwanted children who previously, when they grew up, swelled criminal gangs, stopped proliferating.
Here we had the Vaquilla and similar in the eighties and nineties: today they are the Latin Kings.
And I agree that contraceptives increased the control of the poorest citizens over birth, but that does not explain everything. There continued to be high homicide rates afterwards.
Have we imported criminal gangs?
Because street culture has also become global and is now booming on both sides of the Atlantic... Like the Latin Kings.
What will he tell me about reggaeton!
Or wearing saggy pants, very saggy, because they copy the ones worn in prison, where they forbid the use of belts...
Do bands impose their fashions?
...Hip-hop, break dance, were born in prison yards and were copied in slums, as was graffiti.
Why are the trends popular?
Because these guys aren't just brats, they're also creative and innovative.
In the neighborhood, or spaviles or licks?
I know this very well, because I was one of them...
His accent is cockney.
I'm from East London and the challenge of being born there was to be proud to be from my neighborhood, poor, working-class neighborhood... Scared!
From the neighborhood to the teachers' cloister?
And along the way, some good teachers tried to clean up my low-stove accent, but you can see and hear that they didn't succeed.
Will the Latin Kings one day also be integrated citizens?
They arrived in Spain from Ecuador when Washington tightened its border with their mothers, who immigrated to Spain as domestic workers, and here they grew up in gang culture with their identity frustrated.
Do you think this justifies criminality?
Gangs like the Latin Kings do not necessarily have to be criminal: they are social structures to integrate or to disintegrate.
Do you really see them doing oenagé?
In New York, in the 2000s they became an association of integration and political and social influence that curbed drug trafficking.
With?
Gangsters are not fools: they know that the life of a trafficker is short and hard, and poorly paid and brutal. And they end up losing it so that the big narcos can prosper...
Was any outlet better than this one?
They began to question why they had to kill each other and die in the streets. And in 2005, a Latin king leader, Tone Fernández, emerged among them, who wanted to become a politician.
With?
The Kings were already more than 3,000 in all the neighborhoods of New York and had an enormous cultural influence – they premiered the documentary Black and gold – and social...
Beyond organized crime?
They looked for work and unionized, and Tone, to be a candidate for mayor of New York.
Surely there have been worse ones.
But crime is both a misfortune for the lower classes and an opportunity for the populists, who win votes by posturing their "tough hand" against crime.
What happened to the integrated kings?
Mayor Giuliani preferred them to be criminals and he took it upon himself to arrest Tone. Several special operations were mounted on him with which the police said they had found drugs. He was sentenced to 12 years and put in solitary confinement. I wrote to him...
Because?
He knew the king leaders personally and knew their true history. And I asked him to help me integrate Latinos here in Barcelona, with the help of the Generalitat. And the president of Ecuador, Correa, also joined the initiative. They knew that the opportunity was to give them a chance.
Is it cheaper to subsidize gangs than to fight them with more police?
It is fairer, more pragmatic and less expensive to give them opportunities to get educated and work than to pay more and more police.
How do you know?
Because with these investments in integration, it began to be noticed that the street crime rate dropped where they were carried out. Instead, where Giuliani imposed mere repression, the kings ended up returning to marginalization and street fighting.
Where was the opportunity taken?
The Latin Kings worked well here, in Barcelona - in Madrid they preferred the hard hand -, and in Genoa and Ecuador: they are already a transnational brand and a structure that carries values, trends and fashions that can integrate or disintegrate societies depending on whether you know how to manage or not.
