Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez arrived in Denver on Tuesday and spent Wednesday sitting in a wing-back chair fielding questions from Dr. Vincent Harding and his daughter, Rachel. Have you met Dr. Harding? Alejandrez asks me.
At that point, I hadn’t even met Alejandrez, who has a national reputation for his three decades of work with youth involved in gangs, in the life of the street that supplants the life of the soul. “The madness that destroys our youth,” Alejandrez calls it.
He’ll be speaking Friday night at 6:30 at Su Teatro on Seventh Avenue at Santa Fe. Admission is free.
“You have to meet Dr. Harding,” Alejandrez says. “He’s a great man.”
Harding was friend and speechwriter to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He’s now professor emeritus of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology. Twelve years ago, he started the Veterans of Hope project. It revolves around in-depth interviews with key leaders, thinkers and activists in civil-rights movements past and present.
“When Dr. Harding called me and said he wanted me to be one of his veterans, I almost had tears in my eyes,” Alejandrez says. “Do you know who some of these veterans are? I go, ‘Man, why does he want to interview me?’ “
This kind of reaction, it turns out, is fairly typical of Alejandrez. It suggests neither false modesty nor a lack of belief in his own work but rather that, after all these years, he still sees himself as a student. Of human nature, gang dynamics, economics, history. To a community that might say to him, “We don’t know how to stop the madness,” he will answer: “I didn’t know how either, and I still don’t. But I’m looking for the answers, and I keep looking.”
The question that leads me to seek out Alejandrez is one he really can’t answer to my satisfaction. This may be because I don’t work daily with troubled youth. I don’t visit prison yards and attempt to get rival gangs to join an indigenous dance (and so I miss the triumphant moment when they do, hands linked, feet shuffling to beating drums). I do not coordinate peace summits between brown and black gangs. Instead, I drop into neighborhoods where I am sometimes overcome by how entrenched the poverty is and how isolated its youth are, by the defiance masking a sense of inferiority that is only reinforced outside the neighborhood.
It may be because I don’t have his life experience. Alejandrez is the child of migrant workers. He spent years in the fields with his parents. “You know when school lets out for the summer and kids say, ‘What camp are you going to?’ That was my camp.” He writes of watching his father humble himself, eyes lowered, shoulders bowed, before “the boss man.” His father drowned that swallowed pride in alcohol.
Alejandrez dropped out of school by ninth grade. By his early 20s, he was a Vietnam vet and a heroin addict deep in the madness of the streets.
The violence he inflicted, suffered and saw led him to the teachings of Cesar Chavez, King, Gandhi. Chavez, he likes to say, saved his life. This is in part because as a youth he was inspired by the civil-rights leader’s words and called a strike among his fellow teenage workers in a melon field. They got a raise, he says, from $1.65 to $1.95 an hour. More than that, Alejandrez caught a glimmer of the power of a unified people to better their lives.
Years later, he remembered that moment in the melon field. It guided him. “We stopped the machinery,” he says.
Alejandrez graduated from college and started Barrios Unidos (United Neighborhoods) out of his California living room in 1977. What began with community outreach grew to include an alternative high school and small economic-development projects. It encompasses the belief that the roots of alienation are spiritual and cultural. The lack of connection to anything beyond the immediate has given rise to a neglected generation of youth, he argues. So, when he speaks to parents, to community leaders, he says: “Are we so far gone that we are willing to supply the Department of Corrections with our children, with our future?” And to young people who say, “This is my barrio forever, ese,” he will say, “Go out and find a 60-year-old ese on the west side, and take a good look at him. Is that what you want?”
For 30 years, Alejandrez has been working, and the violence rages still. The question that led me to him is how he maintains hope. It is a simplistic question and one to which I already know the answer. There is no alternative. “We cannot give up,” he says. It is the necessary answer.
The writer Luis Rodriguez once wrote: “Nane Alejandrez is proof you can never write anyone off — no matter how lost they may seem or one believes they are.”
This is the more satisfying answer. It sits right in front of me, a 60-year- old peacemaker in a wing-back chair.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699; tgriego@denverpost.com.
