![]() ![]() While graphically describing what he witnessed as a gang member-senseless killings, inter-ethnic hatreds and sexual abuse of gang-affiliated women-Sanchez also pursues harder truths, arguing that it is a minority of promiscuous drug-users accompanied by community-wide silence that keeps the gangs in business. Soon, he joined the fearsome Latin Kings, and his given street name "Lil Loco" attested to his youth and ferocity. ![]() ![]() When his family returned to Puerto Rico, he stayed behind. Sanchez recounts his family's arrival in Chicago's Northwest Side in the late 1970s, when he was a small boy he describes the beatings his grifter stepfather regularly doled out and he portrays the allure of the mysterious and ritual-bound lives of tough, teenaged gangsters. But he offers a forceful and unusual perspective on Chicago-in Sanchez's telling, it's a place of territorial graffiti and racist cops, in which a slow-motion riot of drugs, sex and gunplay constantly unfolds. ![]() Now repentant, Sanchez (a pseudonym) writes in a voluble voice, replete with operatic asides declaiming the immorality of his actions. Chicago in the 1980s provides the setting for this extremely disturbing and raw account of a Puerto Rican teenager who lost himself to violent gang activity. ![]()
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