Both Feet Out

Benny Estrada

In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.

Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.

Benjamin “Benny” Estrada believes he is doing God’s work. A former gang member in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village on the Southwest Side, Estrada uses his own experience to help at-risk youth. He spoke with us in 2011 at the YMCA’s Street Intervention Program in Pilsen, where he worked as a program coordinator with Jorge Roque, whose narrative also appears in this book. The program, which operates in neighborhoods throughout Chicago, attempts to keep young people away from street violence through services such as recreational activities and in-school visits.

Estrada—who, prior to joining the YMCA, worked for the anti-violence group CeaseFire—is a small man with swift gestures. He has a casual air, but when he becomes passionate about a topic he is prone to smacking tables and using his hands to emphasize his points.

Little Village is divided by two major gangs, right: the Latin Kings and the Two-Sixes. And where I grew up, which is like the east side of Little Village, there was a real lack of resources, a real lack of after-school programming, a lack of green spaces, parks in general. If we wanted to go to the park and stay in the Latino community, you can either go to Pilsen, which is out of your way, or you can go to Piotrowski Park, which is based in Little Village. But there being two major gangs, if you’re not from the community where Piotrowski Park is at, there’s guys that know that.

So what happened was I tried going to Piotrowski Park. I played Little League baseball over there. At this time, I wasn’t involved in gangs. I was just a kid that loved sports. I was a pitcher. I think it was at the age of 11 that I got put on the Pittsburgh Pirates team. And the Pittsburgh Pirates team uniforms are the colors of the gang in my part of Little Village. It wasn’t even the gang colors, but it was something that was very similar to the gang colors.

So I went to the other part of Little Village to play a game. I pitched a real good game and I’m walking home. I get to the boundaries of both gangs, where this is this side and this is this side. And the gang from the other neighborhood approached me. And I’m like, “Aw, man.” I had a friend, and he was a chubby kid and he just took off running. So that already invoked suspicion on them. They’re like, “Well, why’s this guy running? He must be a gangbanger.” And I didn’t run, you know, ‘cause I didn’t feel like I had to run.

And the ringleader asked me, “What you be about? What gang are you in?”

I’m like, “Man, I don’t gangbang.”

They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, but what’s up with them colors, man?” I was 11 years old and this 16-year-old goes and slaps me and he takes my hat. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, you’re in a gang, punk, with those colors on.” He took my baseball jersey too from me. I’m like, “Aw, man.”

And that was like my first taste of what it was to be affected by gangs. And it invoked hatred in me for the other side of the neighborhood. I came home and threw my glove away, like threw it in the garbage, and my mom’s like, “What’s wrong with you? Why you throwing your glove away?” I just stopped playing baseball altogether. I’m like “Man, ‘ef ’ baseball.” I mean that’s how much that day affected me. It just—it planted a negative seed in me, is what it did, and that seed upon time, you know, it grew and it grew and it grew.

From that point on, I didn’t go to the west side of Little Village. I didn’t go back over there. At all. For nothing. And that’s where the park was at.

I really wasn’t gang involved up until I hit my freshman year at Farragut High School, but my stepfather was one of the major players in the community. He was already involved at a young age in gangs; I think about 14 or 15 years old he was already involved. Everything that he did, I pretty much did; I wanted to emulate him.

And when I hit high school, it was like a culture shock. You got the Gangster Disciples, you got the Vice Lords, you got the Travelers, all African- American gangs. And the guys that were already involved in the Latino gang from my neighborhood in Little Village, they pretty much just cuffed me and took me under their wing. There was this one guy in particular, he seen me in the lunchroom like my second day. He’s like, “You’re gonna be cool; you’re with us. Don’t worry about it.” He was like this big muscular dude; it was probably like his fifth year in high school, and he probably had like sophomore credits, and he just took me under his wing. From that point on, it was like, “All right, well, I guess I’m gonna be involved.” I didn’t really have a choice.

He was one of those guys that, you know, if there was a fight, he’s right in the middle of it. If there’s an argument, he’s coming, he’s showing up. That’s just who he was—the guy that always managed to have his hands on anything that happened in the school in terms of guys getting into gang fights. Nobody would mess with him. And ‘cause nobody would mess with him, nobody would mess with me.

I was with him once when a well-known rapper came to the school to perform a concert. So I sit down and the concert starts and some back-andforth banter starts going on in the stands. The blacks and Latinos be gangbanging to each other. Signs here, signs there. All it took was one swing and it was over. Everybody started fighting.

And that was my first experience, man. I hit a couple people. Our assistant principal got hit with a chair; it busted his head right open. I got a black eye; I got a fat lip. It really started to invoke that hate, and that seed was already planted from the Latino gangs, but now it was planted from the African-American gangs. That really took me off course. It put a bad taste in my mouth.

It was tough, man, because I played basketball and all the African-American students, they would see me in the gym. And I had a real good friend that was a black student—a real good friend. I mean, we used to hang out after school by the gym and we would play ball. Saturday mornings, me and him would be the first ones there. And in my junior year, there was a big fight and everybody’s running around the school. They were taking students and locking them up. I’m walking in the hallway and he’s coming up the stairs. He’s got a big old bandage on his head, and he’s just bleeding profusely. He’s like, “Why the ‘ef ’ your boys got to do that, bro?”

I just looked at him, and that’s when I knew: I just lost a friend. And it wasn’t even something I did. It was something the guys did, but I didn’t try to repair that relationship. I left it alone. That’s just the way it was.

I didn’t have a father growing up. I was about five months old when he passed away. And my uncle through marriage was a positive person in my life. He’s like one of the biggest influences in terms of why I do this work, because he was a social worker, too.

He loved working with the kids and he took a real liking to me, even though I was heavily involved in the gang in the neighborhood. Basketball was always something that attracted my attention—and my uncle, he fueled that passion, man. He would come to the block in his little Honda. He’d double-park in the middle of the street and jump out in front of my house, which at the time was like the epicenter for all the guys. But he had no fear.

He would be like, “Hey, I’m looking for my nephew.” People would pull out guns on him.

They’d be like, “Man, what you looking for him for?”

He wouldn’t be afraid of the guns. He’d push them out of the way and go knock on my door: “Man, we got a game! Get your shorts. Let’s go, man.”

I’d be like, “Man, I don’t wanna go play right now.”

“Bro, we got a damn game, man. You got a commitment to me. You’re gonna stick to it. Now get your ass up.”

And I always had this tremendous talent to put the ball in the basket. It was a God-given gift, you know. I mean, people that know me can tell you I’m just one of those guys that just picked up the ball and it seemed like it was second nature to me. So my uncle seen all that, he seen all the potential. He never really pushed me to get out of the gang, but he just told me, “You’re gonna see that eventually all this stuff is not gonna get you anywhere, but basketball is gonna get you somewhere.”

And, I mean, it did. There was a Latino tournament that was strictly for the Midwest and it was like a 20-city tournament, so every month there was another tournament to go to. So I started getting exposed to all this other stuff that I just didn’t know was out there. Here I am living in Little Village and closing my mind off to all these options, ‘cause I thought just the gang life was all there was for me. And getting out there and seeing Latinos doing all kinds of other stuff just blew me away.

My son, to this day, has about 50 to 60 trophies that he just has put in his room, ‘cause now he’s starting to like basketball and he thinks his dad is like this big-time star. And I tell him, “I never made it to the NBA, and I didn’t go to college to play basketball, but I did make a name for myself.”

I even got offered to go play in Mexico on a professional team. There was a scout that had came to watch somebody play, and I ended up dropping like 50 points on the guy, and the scout just forgot about the dude and came to ask me. But I thought, “I don’t wanna go live anywhere else, especially not for no three months. I’m making money doing my side stuff in the neighborhood.” It just didn’t seem like it was an option to me. I closed myself off to it.

I was in high school for four years. I had credits, enough credits to be maybe a sophomore at most. It wasn’t a big deal to me. The gang culture and the gang life just took a real hold of me for a lot of years of my life. A lot of years, man, I lost a tremendous amount of friends, and, as I lost my friends, my hate for other gangs just grew and grew and grew.

I was on probation for possessing the cannabis. I spent about two months in the county jail. I was sentenced to two years’ probation, but I was off of probation after a year and five months. Being on probation, you know, it started to change my attitude a little bit about not wanting to get into so much trouble. But what helped me decide that this road I was on was a destructive one and it was gonna end my life, is when I had my daughter.

At the time, me and the woman who is my wife now had broken up, and she had left the city, and I was just on this destructive path. I was just like, “I lost my girl and I loved her.” So it made me drink even more, party even more, go out there and even be more of a … Then her mother called me.

She’s like, “Come to the house. I need to show you something.”

I’m like, “Show me something?” ‘Cause I always had a good relationship with her mother, and her mother always kept in contact with me.

And she says, “Just be ready to see something that’s gonna change your life.” And I figured, like, she had money or something. And she opens the bedroom door, and there’s the—there’s the little baby, my daughter Leslie.

And I’m like, “Who’s that?”

She’s like, “That’s your daughter.”

“That’s my daughter?”

It blew me away. By looking at that baby, I could already tell that she was my daughter. She had the same birthmark as me, everything. But I had so much anger in me that I was like, “No, man. I want a DNA test.”

She’s like, “If you don’t stop, I’m gonna slap you, ‘cause that’s your daughter.” And it hit me like a ton of bricks, man: “I’m willing to die for what I believe in, but am I really going to do that now that I have this little girl in my life?”

I went and I signed up for GED. And it took a while to get my GED, I can’t lie. Because I had so much stuff going on in terms of just being in the neighborhood and dealing with stuff. I got my GED, and I got hired by a display company and, like, within a year that job just took off for me. I went from just being the driver for the company to getting the manager’s job. That was my really first job-job, you know, and it took off from right there.

I started working on the railroad. I got the call from CeaseFire, and I still don’t know how they got that number. They wanted somebody that could get in there, get in touch with individuals in Little Village, and let them know that they’re trying to promote a culture of nonviolence. And I started doing a lot of detachments for them, which was kids that wanted to get out of gangs. I knew everybody in the neighborhood, and I would say, “Look man, the kid’s not going to pose a threat to you. Let him get out, man.” Kind of negotiate some things. And I started pulling kids out. Not a lot of kids out, but four or five kids out of a gang a year to us is a huge number. Ultimately, God has his hand over who stays and who goes, but the threat of being killed by gang violence shoots down once you’re not in it.

And it just sparked something in me. It just did. It always felt like there was a burden in my heart, ‘cause I would be in the community and I would try to volunteer and do things, but I also knew that in this line of work you cannot, you cannot, have one foot in and one foot out. Kids see through that. The kids that you work with are gonna see that.

I’ve been on board with the YMCA’s Street Intervention Program for I’m gonna say about four to five years. My days here, they can just be overwhelming. During my mornings, I could be at court or I could be at the high school or I could be checking up on one of my kids and making sure he went to school or talking to one of the school counselors. At night, I do recreational activities and run peace circles with the kids. I put in at least 65 hours this week. For people like me, it’s important that we make time for our own kids, ‘cause we don’t want to lose our kids while we’re trying to save somebody else’s. I try my best to call my kids at least three times a day and talk to all of them, see what’s going on, tell them, “Daddy will be home late so just make sure you take a shower, get ready for bed, and I’ll kiss you when I get home.”

My weekends I try my best to just dedicate it to my kids. Even during the week, if I can sneak away, I’ll tell my boss, “I gotta go home for a little while and help my son with his homework or I gotta see my daughter, who is in the choir.” She sings like a bird. I don’t know where she got it from ‘cause I don’t have that voice and neither does my wife. But I like being there to support her. So those are our days, man. We just do all this and that. All of it.