Discovering a Healthy Identity

The following is adapted from Tafolla Toro by Lorenzo Gomez.

At Tafolla Middle School, I learned quickly that identity was defined by membership in a gang. The moment I walked into the school I became part of an informal gang: the multilingual gang.

Multilingual students were students from outside the neighborhood who were bussed to Tafolla because it was one of the few schools in the area where it was possible to learn a second language. The implication was that the multilingual kids were smarter than the regulars, who came from the local neighborhood. Anyone who knew I was a multilingual student put me in that group.

At Tafolla, different gangs were separated by their differences as surely as if there were walls between us. To the regulars, the multilinguals were an alien and unwelcome breed. They weren’t saying, “There’s Lorenzo, one of those nice, multilingual kids. I should go and be his friend.” Instead, they were thinking, “He’s one of those guys who’s supposed to be smarter than me.”

The differences showed up in many ways. The multilingual kids were bussed to school. The local kids mostly walked to school. Most of the regulars, if they lived in the Alazán-Apache courts, came from low-income families and were on food stamps, yet many of them wore Red Wing boots, Guess jeans, and Polo shirts. To this day, I don’t know how someone on food stamps buys a $200 pair of boots.

I always thought it was strange to define people by their differences. Even as a teenager, I instinctively kicked against the idea of building an identity around gang membership. The kids who were members of gangs understood who they were through shared rituals, often violent, and through their enmity with other gangs. That wasn’t my idea of a healthy identity, but I felt that I had no choice but to respect the rules of the environment I’d walked into.

Gangs of Tafolla

Unfortunately, there were a lot of people at Tafolla, and in San Antonio as a whole, who chose to define themselves through gang membership at that time. From 1984 to 1997, San Antonio experienced the highest rate of gang violence in its history. The gangs had their territories on the street and that had seeped into the schools. Older brothers brought siblings into the gangs at a young age, and gang members immediately found their safety when they entered a school like Tafolla. If someone asked you the question, “Who do you claim?” they were asking what gang you belonged to.

In an unsafe situation, being part of a gang became a way to create a sense of safety, even if it was illusory. There were three main gangs that somehow found a way to coexist at Tafolla. The NDs (which might have stood for Notre Dame, but who knows) was the biggest gang in number and in size. Those guys were big, they had muscles, and facial hair. They were everything you shouldn’t be in middle school (probably because most of them had repeated a grade or two).

Another crew was led by a guy I met on my first day in the gym locker room, Raymond. Raymond’s crew were the most Mexican of the gangs and for the most part, they kept to themselves, but they noticed everything that went on. Raymond had a number two kid who was a short, chubby serious-looking, Hispanic kid. I never heard him say a word in three years, but he was always with Raymond as his quiet enforcer, ready for action.

The NDs and Raymond’s crew members were all regulars. The SOT or Studs of Tafolla, were multilinguals. They were also the biggest troublemakers. The SOT were posers to me because they only formed a gang to feel tough. The only reason we had to take them seriously was because there were a lot of them. They wanted to prove they were legit even though they weren’t. I hated them.

There was no real reason for the gangs to be enemies, and for the most part they kept to themselves, except for the SOT, who were always looking for trouble or causing trouble. Despite the obvious advantages of joining a gang, I never did throughout my years at Tafolla. Sometimes I wasn’t too sure who I was, but I knew who I didn’t want to be.

The Search for a Healthy Identity

We all need a sense of identity. That’s how we understand who we are. I was lucky. I was a member of the Gomez family. I had a loving family to go home to and older brothers who would always stick up for me if I was threatened. That’s what protected me from the need to join a gang.

A lot of the kids at Tafolla didn’t have what I had. They would have loved to be part of the Gomez family. Without that stability, they turned to gangs as a way to create identities and give themselves a sense of importance. For a lot of the kids I went to school with, being part of a gang was the closest they got to family. It wasn’t healthy but it was the only way they knew how to define themselves.

If I asked, “who are you?” what would you say? What identities come to mind? Perhaps you’re a father, a mother, a son, or a daughter. Perhaps you identify yourself by the career you’ve chosen or your nationality. Does your identity depend on you separating yourself from others, the way the kids at Tafolla divided themselves into gangs? Or do you identify with the people and values you hold dear?

I invite you to investigate where your sense of identity originates and to assess what it takes from you as well as what it gives you. We all need to belong and to see ourselves as part of a larger group. As I learned the hard way, however, that doesn’t mean we need to divide ourselves into gangs and fight to prove our worth.

For more advice on discovering a healthy identity, you can find Tafolla Toro on Amazon.

Lorenzo Gomez III overcame his mental health obstacles to become a proud participant in the transformation of the city he loves — San Antonio. He’s the chairman of Geekdom, Texas’s largest coworking space, the cofounder of the 80/20 Foundation and Tech Bloc, and has served on the board of several non-profits, including SA2020 and City Education Partners. Lorenzo is honored to have spoken at several universities, including Texas State and UTSA, and cherishes the opportunity to connect with students as a speaker at local schools. He’s the author of The Cilantro Diaries, which quickly became a bestseller (and required reading at Texas A&M) when it was published in 2017.