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“Melisa”
I never got to knaow Melisa very well. I first saw her on August 7th, 1997. I was eating tajadas (crispy fried plaintains) at a small neighborhood restaurant with Rebeca’s daughter Vanesa and Vanesa’s friend Elysa. An androgynous black girl with a shaved head wearing a t-shirt that read “O.J. 100% NOT GUILTY” in African National Congress colors came in. Elysa, whose boyfriend had been deported from the U.S. for gang activity, flinched. “She’s a Dieciocho,” she told me. “Everybody’s afraid of la negra.” The girl sat down by herself and ate her tajadas contentedly.
Later, I asked Rebeca about Melisa. Rebeca knew all the gang kids. “They respect me,” she had told me on various occasions. “I’ve known them all since they were this tall” (motioning close to the ground). Rebeca said that Melisa had suffered physical and sexual abuse and had been abandoned by both of her parents. Her participation in the gang, according to Rebeca, was understandable–as opposed to the other kids, who Rebeca said were just making trouble. There are many such exceptions to the rule that gang members are “evil.” I was often surprised by the failure of the many examples of personal victimization to change the general understanding of gangs as inscrutably savage.
In January 1999, I was again in La Lima. Hurricane Mitch had struck Honduras a few months earlier, and La Lima was one of the places hardest hit. Piles of sand had been left on the side of the road by the municipality to absorb the excess liquid, but in typical Lima government fashion, nobody had moved the sand onto the roads themselves in the months since they had been delivered. One afternoon around dusk, I was busy working on a photo essay involving a toy monkey, a pre-Columbian relic, and one of these piles of sand, when I was startled by two teenage boys I recognized as neighborhood gang members. I became nervous, having been warned time and again about being robbed or attacked by these children. I grabbed my camera more tightly and said hello.
“What are you doing?” one of them asked. I told them I was taking a picture.
“Do you need help?” the other asked.
I answered “well, yes,” and let them position Sancho, as Sabrina and I had earlier dubbed the anthropomorphic figurine she had found after the hurricane, in the sand. They seemed to find this wildly amusing. As I continued back to the house I chatted with them. We discussed the standard neutral topics–the mud, the weather, where I was staying. “Oh yes,” they told me, “we know Doña Rebeca.” A group of their friends was playing a few streets down, Melisa among them.
“You’re taking pictures?” she yelled. “Take a picture of me! Look! I am Dieciocho! Take a picture of me in my shirt!” She turned around to model her basketball tunic with the number 18 on the back and beamed as I took her picture. After that, whenever I saw her around town, we would both smile and say hello.
(continues in next post)