Los Angeles upside down. Inside out. The inner workings of an international city. It’s exports can be seen across the country, in homes and cities far and wide. It breaches the boundaries of our country, jumping oceans, landing on foreign shores. Commerce, you ask? Hollywood, you ask? No. South Los Angeles Gangs: The Bloods and The Crypts.
MADE IN AMERICA is Mr. Stacy Peralta’s most recent endeavor. If you are familiar with his work, DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS, and RIDING GIANTS, you know Mr. Peralta explores the topics of his smash hit documentaries with the passion and fervor he once put to his professional skateboarding career. What you also know is that he paints the larger picture, the whys and hows are answered. MADE IN AMERICA is of the same quality fabric as his previous films, and this one has the power and fury of a thing much bigger than a 60-foot wave. This has the power and fury of Mankind. Mother Nature is no match for that.
Starting with the introductions of three men believed to have begun the first Modern African American gang, the Slausons of the early 60’s, Mr. Peralta takes us through the back story of how this epidemic came to be. Racism was a key ingredient, a lack of recognition, opportunity and respect from the outside world combining with the reality of young men’s need for those things. We see pictures of a group of boys hanging out with friends, leaning against cars, their arms around girls. They smile. They flex for the camera. They are friends. If anyone messes with them, as will happen to teenagers, they’ll take up their fists and protect one another against the world that does not want them.
We see the LAPD harass them time and time again. Pictures of boys and girls lined up against walls, hands up, legs spread. Shotguns at their ears. Pushed down. What are you doing? Where are you going? Why do you exist? We don’t want you here
Another race related arrest in Watts. Word spreads through the streets. Hundreds pour out to watch. It is one situation too many. It is 1965. Los Angeles erupts into the night and fights for five days with LAPD and The National Guard. It is her first civil rebellion.
Mr. Peralta winds through the last forty years of South LA gang activity, finding the people from the past who are still alive, to the children who are out on the streets today, and the mothers who have been left behind by the 15,000 murdered. He shows how this has evolved from a brotherhood to the start of a black pride movement, to the systematic assassinations and arrests of all major African American voices in the 70’s. The 80’s become leaderless and increasingly violent, fists are dropped for guns, crack is thrown into the mix and South LA collapses. Children are raised into bad situations without hope or role models. They have nothing at home, but you’ve heard this story. You know how it goes. It’s a thing you’d rather not think about. Mr. Peralta doesn’t tell you the story. He invites you into it. Meet the men and women, boys and girls of South Central Los Angeles. Hear their stories, feel their pain.
“Can you imagine a society where mothers are burying their children, instead of children burying their mothers?”
Can you?
In this time of high speeches and enlightened national morale, or rather, in this challenged time of recession, war, and joblessness, questions are raised by our Presidential candidates. Please ask yourself if we are our brothers’ keeper. Ask yourself if we take offence to our countrymen being wronged, or our children having higher PTSD levels than the children of Baghdad. Ask yourself if that $3,000,000,000,000 could have been invested into our countrymen, instead of the oil of the Middle East, and more importantly, who you believe does care.
See this film. It is to American Society what AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was to Global Warming. It is as powerful as a film can be. It will not make you proud to be an American. And you should be.
