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September 16, 1999
Gang Influence Runs Deep in Phoenix's Roots
Gangs have been documented in the Valley as far back as the 1930s, but for decades they served more as a neighborhood's protector than its predator.
"It wasn't like you were in a gang; you were from a neighborhood," says Phoenix Police Sergeant Paul Ferrero, a member of the department's street gang enforcement unit and its unofficial historian. "There were certain neighborhoods you knew if you had no business going there, you wouldn't go."
The oldest gangs were Hispanic. Ferrero remembers the Bonjo Boys and the Willow Park gang getting together for "rumbles" in the 1960s.
In 1978, police documented what's now one of the oldest, still operating street gangs, the Wedgewood Chicanos. The gang formed in a housing project called Wedgewood Homes in the Maryvale area, still one of the city's toughest gang areas. Ferrero says the gang started when one family took in a relative from California who had been in a gang and in trouble and was sent to live with relatives in Phoenix. The young man got a small group started. "It came to be and still is one of the biggest gangs in Phoenix," according to Ferrero.
Those earlier gangs had "a real tight hold, a real tight brotherhood" in many neighborhoods, especially those Hispanic communities that were already bound together by family, cultural and racial ties, says Hellen Carter, a Maricopa County juvenile probation official who has worked the streets since 1974. Carter, who now heads the community services division for the county juvenile probation department, studied and wrote about gang behavior while obtaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
"They existed to protect the neighborhood," she says. "Then they became kind of like a cancer in the neighborhoods." …
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/gang-influence-runs-deep-in-phoenixs-roots-6432147