This is America; But it doesn’t have to be.
After leaving Mexico, my mother grew up in the bad part of Santa Ana that was riddled with gang activity. When she was around sixteen, she was with her family in her front yard and ran to her father’s car to get something. As she was getting in the car, she saw a boy being chased by a gang and ended up inches from her face. He was then shot in the head right in front of her by the gang directly across the street. He died in a matter of seconds and she ducked in the car to avoid harm to herself. She got up to see the gang members that shot him to be able to identify them and recognized the gang. Middleside. An infamous Latin gang in the area. The boy had choked on his own blood and was laying on a pool of it inches from my mom. She looked at it and fainted. She was later picked up by her father and they reported what they saw at the police station, with a lineup and everything.
Traumatizing events such as these changed her. To this day she has major anxiety problems but when she was still living in Santa Ana she was terrified. She couldn’t walk home from school alone anymore and constantly lived in fear. But she was not alone in feeling this way. Impoverished and crime ridden cities like this are full of innocent people just trying to get by. They are subjected to this lifestyle because it’s the only place they can afford. Kids shouldn’t have to grow up figuring out if the neighbors are shooting off fireworks or bullets. Fireworks have less echo. My mom taught me that.
I feel that this can correlate to Animal’s People by Indra Sinha because of how the people of Khafpur are neglected within the novel. The people of Khafpur and the people of Santa Ana have similar ways in which they are dealt with. Crimes are corruptible, the system is flawed, and people are seen less like people and more like animals. I strongly believe there are many things flawed with highly gang ridden areas, such as Santa Ana, but what I’d mainly like to focus on is the impoverished merely trying to survive and provide for their families while people are being shot in front of their homes. This is similar to the unimaginable disaster that happened in Bhopal, India that Animal’s People is based off of. This is mainly exemplified through how the case is handled and their mistrust highlighted during the trial. Animal talks about the hardships they, as a people, have had to face when saying, “hope is a crutch for weaklings. The strong carry on without”. In this way they have learned to fend for themselves knowing there may not be hope. This is the same way many citizens in these gang run cities feel. They can sympathize with fighting through their circumstances despite being hopeless. And this hasn’t gone anywhere. According to the LA Times, “Street gangs are still active, with more than 60% of the city’s homicides classified as gang-related last year”. That’s an extremely large percentage and hopeless citizens have to live in fear day by day because of this terror.
Now, Gang violence may not seem like a disaster, but is a daily fear those in cities such as Santa Ana or Compton have to abide by for fear of losing their lives. So even though this is a man made act of destruction, it is no less disaster than a hurricane or earthquake. What those have in similar is that they change people forever and make them understand what it’s like to live through horrific circumstances with loved ones dying all around them.
Overall the innocent people in terrible situation should never be cast aside and forgotten about. Just because they are not privileged enough to live in a nicer neighborhood does not mean they are not people. It does not mean children should be subjected to gang violence and death in front of their eyes like my mother. Just because they live in such circumstances does not mean the gangs and violence around them define them. They are not animals. Of course, gang violence is a complicated issue and the government has been trying to handle it since the beginning but more emphasis should be put on the innocent people living and raising children in these dangerous situations.
Works Cited:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011128700046004005
Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009.
