They called her ‘Sweetie’ in the gang. At the age of 11, her brothers would have her sit in front of a doughnut shop and squeeze out tears. She told people she had lost her dog. When someone offered to help her, she led them to a street nearby – where her brothers mugged the helpers. ‘It's not a nice name, it was basically made from manipulating folks’, Linda Gomez says. ‘I have remorse, regret for the people I hurt along the way. But that's also part of who I am. That's why I am in this fight today.’

Gomez, a 37-year-old former gang member living in South Los Angeles, has spent a considerable part of her life behind prison walls. Nowadays, she uses her experience to transform her community for the better and support others to carve out a future for themselves.

At the age of 11, Gomez was already a member of the gang HMT 13 and part of her siblings’ drug peddling family business: ‘My oldest brother started cooking speed at his home in the kitchen, so me and my other brother sold it’, she recounts. As a minor, she could get away with offenses, so she stored drugs and stole food from stores to fill their fridge. Despite their drug sales, the siblings constantly ran out of money due to the addiction of the oldest brother: ‘It was a revolving door. All the money we made he put in his nose, so we had to keep trying to make more money. Also when we got our money we wanted to floss (show off), show love to our homies, throw big parties or whatever.’

Divided Cities

The involvement of minors in the illegal drug trade and other illicit businesses of gangs and cartels is a growing concern worldwide (Breckin, 2019; Dodd, 2019; Dowdney, 2003; Porio and Crisol, 2004). Like many young people of colour from neglected neighbourhoods, Linda Gomez had limited options to choose from. Los Angeles is a divided city, a ‘combination of regulation, discrimination, structural inequality, and violence’ has led to a racially and economically fragmented city (Gibbons, 2018, p. 1). More than half of the black families in LA live in the poorest quarter of neighbourhoods in consecutive generations, compared to only 7 per cent of white families (p. 2).