Smithsonian Features Young Guate Gangster Turned Artist
A young boy who grew up a short car ride outside of La Antigua, in Magdalena Milpas Altas, escapes a life of gang warfare through art. An inspiring story from Smithsonian.com:
Out of the Guatemalan Gang Culture, an Artist
By Patti McCracken
Smithsonian magazine, February 2010
Carlos Perez could have been an artist or a gangster. Photographer Donna DeCesare helped him choose.
Carlos Perez wishes now that he had burned his clothes instead of giving them away. He thinks mostly about his shirt—white, and emblazoned with the image of a dying gang member.
“It’s hard to think now that someone else is wearing the shirt, thinking it’s cool,” Perez says as he contemplates a photograph taken of him in 2001 in his family’s yard in the Guatemalan village of Magdalena Milpas Altas. He was 18 then—a budding artist, but also a member of the 18th Street Gang, a violent, illicit Los Angeles-based group that has gained ground in Guatemala and El Salvador.
“At the time, he really had a foot in both worlds,” says Donna DeCesare, who took the photograph. “He was starting to do a lot of art, but he was active in the gang. It was very clear he hadn’t made up his mind which one he’d go with.”
DeCesare, 55, a New York City native, has become internationally known for her work documenting the spread of U.S. gang culture to Central America. She won awards for From Civil War to Gang War, a photographic project on Salvadoran refugees getting involved in Los Angeles gangs. A multimedia sequel titled Hijos del Destino, or Destiny’s Children, was scheduled to go up on the Internet last month. “When kids have any kind of pull toward gangs, often they’ll say, ‘I’ll be dead soon,’” she says. “But Carlos told me early on that he didn’t believe in destiny and thought life was more a matter of influence…”
In 2001 he met DeCesare, who spent a year photographing gangsters in and around Magdalena Milpas Altas. “There is an unwritten rule in gangs that you don’t let yourself be photographed,” Perez says. “But by the time Donna began photographing me, I’d gotten to know and trust her. She had seen some of the same [violence] I had.” Perez even helped her photograph members of rival gangs, avoiding the question of whether he was a gang member himself. “He’d say, ‘No, I’m the photographer’s assistant,’ ” DeCesare says. “That was a real breakthrough.”
Read the entire article by clicking here.
Popularity: 2% [?]