00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 My full name is Jose Leonidas Lara Lara.
00:14 I was born in El Salvador in 1967.
00:17 I came to the United States in 1981, I believe.
00:23 I left El Salvador because of the war
00:24 that we had, the Civil War, back in the 1980s
00:26 that claimed the lives of so many people.
00:30 When the war started, the Civil War started in El Salvador,
00:34 a lot of the people that were getting killed were students,
00:36 because this is where it all started.
00:38 They had a group called MERS, Movimiento Estudiantil
00:41 Revolucionario de Secundaria.
00:43 So the guerrillas were targeting the youth.
00:48 I was getting in trouble in El Salvador,
00:51 and my uncle was killed during the war.
00:56 And that's one of the reasons why my mom sent for me.
01:00 She was already here maybe a year or two here
01:02 in the United States, and they worked to get
01:05 enough money to send for me.
01:06 Back in the early 1980s, I started going to school,
01:13 and I was an innocent, naive teenager.
01:19 Then I got into junior high school,
01:21 then I started getting into some trouble.
01:23 People used to bully me at school, and then again,
01:27 I was naive.
01:28 I didn't like fighting.
01:29 But you were kind of pushed into defending yourself.
01:33 And then you get tired of people pushing you around.
01:35 So of course I had to learn to defend myself.
01:39 And then I met people that we became friends.
01:42 And this is where my homeboys, my barrio comes in.
01:46 Out of 125 guys, only 10 of us were Salvadoran,
01:50 everybody else was Mexican.
01:51 And we became like brothers.
01:53 And it's been about 28, 25 years that I met these guys,
01:59 and we're still close.
02:00 You know what I mean?
02:01 We're like a family.
02:02 It's kind of a sensitive subject because there's a lot of stuff
02:08 that I won't talk about.
02:10 I can't.
02:13 But we grew up in San Fernando Valley, Valle de San Fernando,
02:17 back in the '80s.
02:18 And we went on for years.
02:20 And we don't gang bang anymore, but we used to.
02:23 But we're older now, wiser, and we're
02:27 thankful that we're alive.
02:28 Some people did not make it.
02:30 People got killed.
02:33 My first wife asked me one time, it's either your gang or me.
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