In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Three A History of the Cuatro Flats Barrio Gang An important part of the investigation into gang and non-gang families in the Pico-Aliso family housing community in East Los Angeles is understanding the history of the dominant gang in the area—Cuatro Flats. It is a long and deep history that began in the 1930s and has continued to the present. This chapter presents the background to the gang and shows how it began, grew, and slowly transformed itself into a street entity with so many of the selfdestructive elements common to gangs in Los Angeles today. Family life in the project community also deteriorated during this span as what began as mostly working poor, two-parent households gradually evolved to include many more poor, single-parent households. The measured devolution of the Cuatro Flats gang and its original intentions to serve as a community protector parallel the descent of Pico Gardens itself into its present state of disrepair and despair. Both gang and community began as strong, reasonably connected entities serving to hold together the people of Pico Gardens, a concentration of low-income citizens who congregated in one place to receive public assistance in weathering the tail end of the Great Depression. At the beginning of World War II, the New Deal provided public housing aimed to help people who helped themselves, and Pico Gardens residents were the working poor. However, both the people and, shortly thereafter, the gang were affected by the poverty and isolation that arose in Pico Gardens and other communities. It was a shaky but still-tolerable foundation. In the ensuing decades, however , a slow but steady disintegration transpired. Pico-Aliso (two contiguous housing developments, Pico Gardens and Aliso Village) is the largest grouping of public housing projects west of the 40 The Projects Mississippi River and is home to as many as eight thousand residents. More than half of these individuals are under the age of eighteen, and some 60 percent of households have no source of earned income. In the aftermath of funding cuts in social services and poverty program contractions in the 1970s, persistent and concentrated poverty and unemployment gained a viselike grip on the community. Self-respect among individuals and the neighborhood began to decline in the 1980s and continued until the end of the century; it was during this time that crack cocaine appeared, and drug trafficking accelerated among the street youth. The Cuatro Flats gang similarly abandoned its erstwhile image as protector and transformed itself into a much more individualistic, fragmented, and destructive force. The history of this significant change is outlined in this chapter to provide an accurate portrayal of the emergence and growth of a street gang and the ways in which young people in the community respond. Early History of Cuatro Flats: 1930–1950 In the 1920s and 1930s, the area from which the Cuatro Flats gang arose was known as Russian Flats, for its first group of ethnic settlers. This area originally covered a large portion of Boyle Heights, bounded on the east by Lorena Street, on the west by the Los Angeles River, on the south by Olympic Boulevard, and on the north by Mission Road. Sometime in the mid1930s , the Cuatro Flats gang emerged here, beginning as a group of youth claiming Fourth Street as its domain. Like the rest of East Los Angeles residents , the group had as its activities mostly just hanging around together and partying. Early in the 1940s, the area became known as Tortilla Flats, and later in the decade the placa (graffiti logo) “Cuatro Flats” came into extensive use. In these early days, the gang resembled many of the other youth clubs forming in the city around this time. Whether among Latinos, African Americans, or other ethnic-based groups, young people were mobilizing within their communities to maintain the integrity of their cultural heritage on the one hand, while fighting the steadily encroaching consequences of racism and discrimination on the other. Indeed, as Mexican American families began to concentrate in the Pico-Aliso area in the late 1940s, largely due to their inability to move up the economic ladder as quickly as their Anglo counterparts in the boom years following World War II, gang membership provided a sense of personal pride in the face of social and economic powerlessness. Cuatro Flats was no exception and began as a Latino-oriented sports and social club. The local church and community center, Bronson House, offered [18...

Share