On the evening of Sept. 15, 2007, 18-year-old Giovanni Macedo marched down a crowded sidewalk in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, pointed a .22-caliber pistol at the head of a street vendor named Francisco Clemente and pulled the trigger five times. Clemente was severely injured, but he survived. One of the bullets that Macedo fired, though, killed an infant sleeping in a stroller a few feet away. His name was Luis Angel Garcia. He was 23 days old.
For decades, MacArthur Park has been the beating heart of immigrant Los Angeles, a mainly Central American community that, for all its vitality and hustle, carries a supersize portion of despair. Within a few blocks of the park that shares the neighborhood’s name, you’ll find the usual miseries of 21st-century urban poverty plus the legacy of traumas inflicted by U.S.-sponsored death squads in Central America during the 1980s; constant pressure from a historically corrupt and brutal local police force; and the myriad humiliations suffered by people with the wrong kind of papers. The territories of four neighborhood gangs compete around the park; in the first decade of the millennium, shootings were not uncommon.
The killing of Luis Angel Garcia, though, was different. It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the neighborhood. The chronically amnesiac city raced as always into a shiny future just out of sight, but long after the candles and the flowers had disappeared from that busy patch of sidewalk, everyone remembered what had happened there.
So I was glad when I learned that the veteran L.A. journalist Jesse Katz had written a book about the incident. I was also apprehensive. In most media narratives, there are only two kinds of immigrants: victims and victimizers, angels and thugs. The shooting seemed made for this kind of dichotomy. Clemente was as noble as they come. He and his partner, a Los Angeles police detective told Katz, were “just outstanding people,” “true righteous victims.” And the baby was just a baby — his middle name was even Angel.
Macedo, meanwhile, a son of Central American immigrants, was a high school dropout who had joined the Columbia Lil Cycos, a subset of 18th Street, one of the most infamous gangs in the hemisphere. He was every Trump voter’s nightmare, baldheaded and tattooed, with horns inked above his temples and a demon’s face covering the back of his head.
My anxieties, fortunately, were misplaced. In Macedo, Katz found the story of a lifetime. Macedo’s bad aim put the entire gang in jeopardy. Killing a baby triggered an automatic “green light” from the Mexican Mafia, the prison gang that serves as an informal judiciary among Latino street gangs. It meant “open season” on the Columbia Lil Cycos. The gang’s higher-ups saw only one way out. They drove Macedo across the border to Mexico, where they garroted him with a rope and tossed his body into a gorge. But Macedo didn’t die. By the time Katz reached him, he was back in the United States, serving a 51-year prison sentence in Southern California.
It’s a credit to Katz’s skill, compassion and sheer doggedness — he interviewed everyone from Macedo’s cellmate to his mother’s relatives in El Salvador — that Macedo emerges from this narrative not as the demon that he flirted with, but as an all too ordinary kid, sad and scatterbrained, neither malevolent nor particularly brave. His desperation for affection and belonging drove him to join the Columbia Lil Cycos and eventually annoyed the gang’s elders so much that they put him to the test. As the man who orchestrated Macedo’s botched execution put it, “He was a homie, but he was questionable.” When Clemente repeatedly refused to pay the “rent” the gangsters demanded for the right to hawk cheap headphones on the sidewalk, they put the gun in Macedo’s hand. Failure to do the job, he knew, would mean his own death.
“The Rent Collectors” is filled with such choices that are not choices: impossible crossroads in the lives of people constrained on all sides by forces that will not bend. Katz is acutely attentive not only to the flesh-and-blood personalities that make his story so compelling, but to the structures that both shape and confine them: the city’s hungry and impenetrable bureaucracy, its armies of police, the shadow universe of the prison system and the constant threat of deportation for sins as basic as working to feed one’s family. The state emerges as a character too, a predatory giant, blind and bumbling, creating the very conditions that it tasks itself with correcting.
Katz’s prose, dotted with street Spanish and macho metaphor — “His voice was low and sputtery, like an idling muscle car” — leans toward the hard-boiled. Don’t be fooled. For a tough-guy book about tough guys, this is a work of almost unerring tenderness. If its subtitle promises “redemption,” the book itself delivers something more honest: stories about people broken by powers larger than they are and who nonetheless find the will to fight on.
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