“You just gotta smash them! Gotta let them know what’s up. You gotta show them you have no weakness, that you’re strong!” snarls Willie, 17, centre forward of California’s controversial football team, Aztecas. But the teenager is not talking tactics. Willie is speaking about battering his teammates, who include members of a rival street gang known as Sureños. “One time this guy pulled out a knife and told me to step-up. All they did was rip my shirt, so I grabbed the knife and turned it on him. I was trying to kill him. The next day, I was on my way home from practice and I got swarmed by the cops and they arrested me.”
Like most of the players on the Aztecas team, Wilfredo ‘Willie’ Maciel is serving probation for gang related crimes, including that near fatal stabbing. He is a member of the Norteños, a powerful gang who have turned the streets of Watsonville, California, into a war zone. In a desperate attempt to calm the running street battle between the Norteños and Sureños, in April 2008, probation officer Gina Castañeda had the idea to form a football team to encourage the two sides get along. What she created was one of the most unique- and dangerous football teams in the world. These boys can teach Ashley Cole a thing or two about bringing firearms to training, and tell Rio Ferdinand about drug tests. And today, FourFourTwo joins the Aztecas for the most important game in their history; a fiery play-off match in which this team of under-aged gangbangers could become the unlikely champions of an adult league, and the ultimate underdogs.
These boys can teach Ashley Cole a thing or two about bringing firearms to training, and tell Rio Ferdinand about drug tests
DEATH ON THE STREETS
“It is very sad that most of the kids on the team are involved in gangs,” admits Gina, who wears her police badge at all times during training. “They join gangs for the love, acceptance, respect, rights and rituals,” she explains, “but as soon as they join they’ll be lured into violence.” By making rival gang members play on the same team, Gina says she calls a ceasefire on Watsonville’s bloody turf war- if only until the final whistle. “Kids are killing their own, but we are trying to promote peace,” she enthuses, “to bring safety to the streets of Watsonville.”
Aztecas player Cristian, 17.
Watsonville is a miserable concrete slum rising out of eight miles of swamp and slough, just 17 miles south of Santa Cruz, an ugly hernia on the picture-perfect coast of California. A rural farming community, you could fit the entire population of Watsonville inside the city of Manchester Stadium. But among the 47,000 citizens live a complicated network of local gangs, all linked to the deadly Norteños and Sureños. Like the Los Angeles’ Bloods and Crips, the fight between these gangs has raged on for decades, a messy battle painted in graffiti and blood, fought against a soundtrack of aggressive rap music, fuelled by drugs and cold-blooded murder. All these gangs have in common is a love of soccer- and a hatred of each other….
The rest of the article is out now, in FourFourTwo.
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By Jeff Maysh