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Serbian denial
As anti-Milosevic protests continue, Serbia stands on the brink of civil war.
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[07/23/99]

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[07/23/99]

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By Joan Walsh
[07/22/99]

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The dance, called "under," is a south of the border take on break-dancing that has taken the capital city's poor neighborhoods by storm. In this neighborhood, known locally as Tlanetziye, "under" is a kind of community thermometer. Five years ago, for example, today's interaction would have been unthinkable. But since 1992, this community has been under social repair and along the way has pioneered a new strategy for neighborhood organizing. Today Tlanetziye, which means "is threatening" in the Nahuatl Indian language, is a rare gem amid Mexico City's urban despair.

Fifteen years ago, the neighborhood emerged as a makeshift shantytown as Mexicans migrated by the thousands to the capital looking for work and a better life. Mexico City's fledgling infrastructure couldn't keep up with the mass migration and gang crime ran rampant in a Wild West type atmosphere. The residents of Tlanetziye were under siege, sometimes at the hands of the children of their own neighbors.

In 1982, a bishop from the city's Catholic Church did what many people saw as the unthinkable. He began to work directly with the gangs by contacting leaders and offering them a place within the Church. The underlying idea behind the bishop's effort was that teens join gangs because they feel marginalized. His plan: To "mainstream" the youths by inviting them to a private mass, organizing excursions and outings and offering them gifts and incentives.

In a country that is 90 percent Catholic, the bishop's program was symbolically important, but on the ground, it simply didn't work. The gangs continued to operate -- perhaps with more impunity, because they now had the excuse that their sins, no matter how ghastly, would be forgiven by the Church. The pontiff's special treatment created a dependency relationship between the gang members and the project without addressing the underlying causes of the problem.

But in 1990, the project changed hands and went through a transformation. Today Cejuv, a nonprofit community development organization, has taken over administration of the youth program and runs it from the ground up. "We wanted to reinvent the program so that it involved the whole community; it was directed by the neighborhood's youth and [it] addressed the root causes of violence and drug abuse," says Oscar Rey, the program's young and energetic coordinator.

Under its new directors the project took a drastically different tack. Rather than impose an agenda on the community, Cejuv took the pulse of the neighborhood and organized events around its existing religious and social structures. On religious holidays such as Easter, for example, the Cejuv organized a discussion which resulted in the symbolic sacrifice of a neighborhood drug addict. To draw attention to the community's social problems, the group constructed a cross and hung an effigy of a street child and a beaten woman from its yoke.

Next page | The gangs may never go away