My high school had some serious gang trouble, though it rarely ever affected the school, at least not during school days. Most of the trouble usually happened over the weekends, after a football game, or at one of a few 24-hour fast food places in my town. These weren’t inter-school rivalries or anything, but legit gangs determined – as far as I was aware – entirely by race. I was one of the few white kids at the school; the majority were Hispanic or black. And that seemed to be the divider. On top of that, there were even more, smaller gangs claiming to represent the terrifying Mara Salvatrucha otherwise known as MS13 (wearing all black with long, black finger nails and tattoos extending up to their necks from under shirt collars) and other similar-type violent groups. One can imagine how stressful this must have been for the teachers, who were outnumbered – remember this is a public high school in Austin, in a state and country which values education slightly more than infrastructure… which is to say not at all.
Eventually, during my junior year, it came down form the school board that all campuses must practice “lockdown” drills, complete with simulated “threats,” which at the time included fire, lone gunmen, gang riots, tornados, swam of locusts, etc. It was, pretty obviously, the gang riot simulation that caused the most disruption. The whole simulated emergency production was put on by the theater department in the cafeteria, and I remember thinking even then that this seems like a terrible idea. And then, of course, the fictional, campy, cliché gang fight between the fictional “haters” and “squids” expanded, radiating outward from the actors through the packed cafeteria. The fight was suddenly much more real than the faculty had bargained for.
It’s the teachers’ reactions that I remember most vividly. I watched their faces change from utter boredom to confusion to terror as this invisible wave the theater group was emitting washed over the room. The faces of the theater instructors specifically, which at the beginning of the performance looked so proud of the culmination of their weeks of hard work, suddenly flipped along the spectrum from smiling muse to crying muse. They were panicking – screaming in that limp-wristed-arm-waving way you might expect a theater teacher to flail.
The faculty and school district lit the powder keg by exposing these punks to a cheesy performance consisting of puny theater kids fake-beating on each other with baseball bats. And I thought to myself again, how the hell could you not have seen this coming? By the time I thought that, the whole place had erupted. I mean think about it: the juniors and senior of a gang-infested high school, who had three of four or five years to learn everyone else’s gang affiliation and develop group and personal vendettas, crammed into one room. The police – the entire department – arrived about ten minutes later and ended up teargasing the whole school, everyone, and dragging everyone out individually.
I was homeschooled the next year.
High School Gangs by Travis Tyler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Reimaginings by Travis Tyler 