Editor’s note: In April 1996, The Register published a two-part series about Minnie Street, then a blighted, crime-ridden neighborhood in Santa Ana where police had just joined residents and property owners in an effort to turn the area around. This story takes a look at what happened to one of the gang girls interviewed for that story.
You have to look closely to spot the three dots of blue ink arranged in a triangle beneath the corner of Juanita Amezquita’s left eye.
It’s a tattoo that she got at age 13, a symbol for the phrase “Mi Vida Loca,” or “My Crazy Life.” These days, it’s almost always covered with makeup.
And as she sits taking notes at a Starbucks on a recent midsummer night, there’s no hint of just how dangerously crazy her life once was. She’s finished a long day of work and is in the shop with other football moms, boosters for Los Amigos High, planning activities for a team fundraiser.
The talk is of how to raise the $7,000 needed to pay for new uniforms for 90 boys, most of them from poor families. Team members have sold cookie dough and Carl’s Jr. coupon books. A casino fundraiser is in the works.
By the time the group breaks up to head home it’s past 8 p.m.
Juanita’s son, Abel, 15, plays quarterback and safety for Los Amigos’ freshman squad. She got pregnant with him at 16, back when she was “Juana” from Minnie Street, a tough girl raised mostly around men – uncles, cousins, an older brother – and their gangbanging homies. Her father died when she was young. Her mother was in and out of jail.
Juanita wasn’t a “hootchie” who slept around with all the guys. But otherwise, she says. “I was down to fight; down to do anything.”
She recalls this later, in the office of a Laguna Hills company where she works processing paperwork to help distressed homeowners. She’s 15 years and several miles removed from her old gang life on Minnie Street.
Juanita used to think the police were just harassing her and her friends back in the day. Now, at 32, she sees things differently.
In her office, by her computer monitor, she keeps a framed photo of her five children mugging for the camera – Abel, her 13-year-old twins Jasmine and Jaslyn, her other daughter, Jasel, 11, and her youngest son, Sergio, 9.
Abel has heard the stories of his mother’s past life. The younger kids know only a little. She usually keeps the darker details to herself.
She looks sad as she remembers it, and she lowers her voice to describe it as simply as it can be described.
“It was so hard back then.”
A ‘LUCKY ONE’
Juanita’s childhood reflected all the social ills that troubled the Minnie Street neighborhood in southeast Santa Ana where she grew up: gangs, drugs, poverty, family dysfunction, and everyday violence on the street and inside the quarter-mile long stretch of run-down, crowded apartment buildings.
By 1996, life would start to change for her — and for the neighborhood. A year earlier, the Santa Ana Police Department had opened up a substation in a Minnie Street apartment, assigning two officers – Dan Armendarez and Tony Romero – to focus on community policing. Their duty mostly meant going after the two gangs that dominated Minnie Street.
The Lopers were the oldest and most notorious. The gang claimed generations of Minnie Street residents, like Juanita’s family. The gang insignia, LPS, is still tattooed on Juanita’s left wrist in that same blue Mi Vida Loca ink.
She’d like to remove the gang tattoos, but she has other priorities: “I’d rather pay for my son’s football.”
Abel is the reason Juanita left Minnie Street. He is a polite kid who does well in school, is respected by his peers, and follows his mother’s strict rules. She only recently let him spend his first night away from home. Most of his free time is spent playing football.
He never sees his father. Juanita says she broke off that relationship six months into her pregnancy because he beat her.
Given how his mother grew up, Abel understands why Juanita keeps him on a short leash: “I get it. I don’t really get bummed out if she says ‘no.'”
When Abel was a few months old, the ground-floor apartment where Juanita lived with her uncles was targeted in a drive-by. No one was hurt, but one of the bullets smashed through a window above the bed where Abel slept.
Soon after, Officer Romero came by to talk with Juanita. He and Armendarez often lectured her about wasting her life, but this time Romero’s warning was urgent.
“Juanita, now you’ve got to start thinking if you will raise your baby in the gang life or out of it.”
After Romero’s words came another warning. This time, it was from an officer on a gang detail, as he and others searched Juanita’s house, a frequent occurrence at the time.
The officer told her bluntly that if Juanita, then 17, didn’t leave Minnie Street she’d have her baby taken away. That night, she gathered a few things, scooped up Abel and left.
She missed a transformation that has taken place in her old neighborhood, but she believes it was the only way she could give Abel a chance at a different life.
“I guess you could say I was one of the lucky ones.”
Juanita initially moved a few blocks away from Minnie Street with her mom and one of her uncles. She married a boy from across the street. They had three girls together but later divorced. Her mother continued to have her troubles, and Juanita ended up taking in her younger brothers and her younger sister. They were teenagers; she was in her late 20s. She worked full time to support the entire family.
“When she moved from Minnie, she started changing the way she was,” says her cousin, Dina Vertiz, who was raised in Anaheim but now lives in Santa Ana. Dina notes that Juanita has pushed her boy toward something different. “She always had Abel in sports since I can remember.”
Juanita has been back to Minnie Street only a few times since she left. She says she felt uncomfortable, and worried that some long-ago friend would walk up to her and say “Hey, what’s going on? Where have you been?”
But Minnie Street is not the same. The neighborhood isn’t even called Minnie Street anymore, though the quarter-mile street remains. The people who live there now like to call it Cornerstone Village.
WORK IN PROGRESS
The changes happened in steps. Police presence has been intense, at times, and that’s dropped crime. Where police statistics show 392 instances of reported crime in the Minnie Street area in 2000, last year there were 102.
There’s trust, too, as residents and police don’t see each other as natural enemies. And property owners have pushed away troublesome tenants and invested in renovations.
An infusion of $6.5 million in public funds revitalized the neighborhood with new building facades, street realignment that made it safer for pedestrians, and landscaping that added trees and flower beds to what once was a concrete jungle. The advocacy of nonprofit groups such as Lighthouse Ministries out of Mariners Church and Latino Health Access has provided other resources for residents.
Most of the gang kids from when Juanita lived there are gone.
“A lot of them have moved out and moved on,” says Victoria Zaragoza, a long-time Minnie Street resident and activist. “So many of them got locked up.”
The police substation is still there, but it’s rarely manned. Zaragoza says the Cornerstone Village Neighborhood Assn. keeps an eye on things and is quick to tell the police or landlords when problems crop up.
It’s still not perfect. Cameras were installed this year to monitor activity on Minnie Street and at a nearby shopping center, after a spate of gang fights.
Santa Ana Councilman Vincent Sarmiento, whose Ward includes Minnie Street, remembers Minnie Street from a better time, when he had family living in the area. And he’s working to revive that. Last year, he persuaded a landowner to turn vacant property at the corner of Standard and McFadden avenues into temporary green space. Now the property includes a community garden and a small soccer field.
“It’s not a huge space, but it’s a space of their own,” Sarmiento says, adding that other park space is being developed nearby.
The last major gang raid in the neighborhood took place in October 2008. That’s when police and federal agents arrested 18 people suspected of dealing drugs for Juanita’s old crew, the Lopers, out of the Bishop Manor apartment complex on the north end of Minnie Street. Drugs and weapons were seized.
But the gangs’ stranglehold has been undermined. The neighborhood where gang members could commit crime with impunity, and find haven from like-minded neighbors, “has changed,” says Santa Ana Police Commander Ken Gominksy.
Officer Armendarez, who now works part-time with the police chaplain and with the department’s peer outreach and senior volunteer programs, wishes there was funding to continue the community policing he and Romero did and expand it to other areas. He is proud that one kid from the Minnie Street neighborhood became a police officer in Santa Ana.
Armendarez also remembers Juanita. He was amazed to hear that her son will be playing football at his old high school. Her family, he says, were “hardcore” gang members. But he always viewed Juanita as somewhat softer.
“She didn’t have the real, true hard heart. You could tell she had a chance,” Armendarez says.
“She just needed a break. Even though she acted tough, I think she liked what we had to say.”
SCARY PAST, HOPEFUL FUTURE
Juanita wants more out of life for her children and for herself than she has now. But she is happy to be in a much better place – physically and emotionally – than she was on Minnie Street.
She’s been married twice but is raising Abel and Sergio as a single mom. Her girls live most of the time with their father in Riverside County, but she gets them every other weekend, on holidays and during school vacations.
Juanita’s mother, who has stayed clean the past few years, lives with her. So does Juanita’s sister, Christina, 18, along with her husband and their 6-month-old baby. The family of seven shares a modest two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in Garden Grove. Juanita’s boys, Abel and Sergio, sleep in bunk beds in Juanita’s bedroom. And Juanita’s mother watches the baby while her sister and brother-in-law work.
Abel got his love for sports at the Boys & Girls Club in Garden Grove. He’s not very big, but he’s muscular.
Juanita wants Abel to go to college. She dropped out of school after eighth grade. For her, high school meant fights every day with people affiliated with other gangs.
Over the years she’s studied to become a certified dental assistant and obtain a dental X-ray license. She became a Notary Public. Last year, she started taking classes to get her high school equivalency diploma, but couldn’t keep it up between working and parenting. She’d like to go back someday.
A friend who watches Sergio when he’s not in school, Darlene Martinez, met Juanita six years ago, long after Minnie Street. She says the Juanita she’s known has always been “a hardworking lady” who is always “taking care of her kids.”
Martinez, who grew up in a stable home, finds it “scary” when Juanita talks about her former life.
“When she talks about the past, it’s like she’s talking about a totally different person,” Martinez says.
“She says ‘I don’t want my kids to live that same lifestyle that I did.'”
Contact the writer: twalker@ocregister.com or 714-796-7793