Will Angelenos ever understand the mass murder of a child?

This 2007 crime in Los Angeles shook the entire area: A gang member, Giovanni Macedo, approached street vendor Francisco Clemente and shot him five times. Clemente was seriously wounded, and one of the bullets meant for him struck 23-day-old baby Luis Angel, killing the infant. In “The Rent Collectors,” Jesse Katz examines the events of that day and asks whether a killer like Macedo can be let off the hook.

Readers expecting a true crime story in which murder is treated as an isolated act will find a different kind of story here. Instead, Katz has constructed an ethnography of the crime, placing it within the complex web of history, geography, policing, and politics with which the crime was intertwined.

Jesse Katz, author of “The Rent Collectors.”

(Eric Nazarian)

Katz, who covered the story for 24 years for both the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine, used his formidable skills to map the area of ​​Macedo’s crime. It happened near MacArthur Park, a large green area in L.A.’s Westlake district that by the 1980s had become a crowded area of ​​Central American refugees. What Los Angeles offered most of them, however, was not safety and stability, but a fugitive life for anyone living in the U.S. without legal status. “No other place in Los Angeles was so filled with its subversive energy or labor under the burden of so much trauma,” Katz writes.

Denied legal employment, they set up stalls on the sidewalks selling almost everything they could find – single cigarettes, diapers, street food, crafts and pirated forms of entertainment. “For the migrant, it was a ‘cool deal’: work on the margins, stay out of trouble, endure your humiliations, give up the ability to vote or serve on a jury or receive unemployment benefits or ever feel safe in your own skin, and if you were lucky, America might leave you in limbo.”

But Los Angeles punished hawkers despite its self-image as a liberal city. Katz explains that while other cities celebrate urban marketplaces for their cultural richness and business opportunities, Los Angeles has “long viewed hawkers as a nuisance. A code of foreignness and civic disorder.” This was part of a criminalization of poverty that continues today, as Last month, the Supreme Court had ruled that people should be punished for sleeping in public places.The city’s bureaucracy and police force were put to work removing the poor from public spaces.

The Colombian Lil Psychos filled this gap. It was a street gang that made money from the drug trade, it became a sophisticated protection gang that charged fees to anyone making money in this underground economy – whether they were sex workers or merchants. For vendors, who already paid city fines for illegal sales, it was just another expense.

But these costs further distressed a population already under tremendous pressure. Without access to health services or social resources that could help traumatized immigrants in their home countries, young children were further traumatized by their parents’ coping mechanisms — alcoholism, domestic abuse, and the type of absentee parenting that occurs when an adult must work multiple low-paying jobs to support a family.

Some of these factors were present in the teenage Macedo’s life. The immature mind of a teenager was looking for an aspirational masculinity he could emulate, which compelled him to return to the gang despite warnings from other gang members that it was not the life for him.

The vendor he shot, Clemente, was a symbol of a different conflict in the community. He already had a car-repair business, but needed more cash, so he started working as a vendor. He took two recent arrivals, Jessica Guzman and Daniela Garcia, under his wing to help them. Clemente, an undocumented former slum-dweller from Mexico City, refused protection payments when the gang demanded them, so he sent Macedo to kill Clemente as an example. Garcia had brought newborn Angel Luis to work with him because he had no other choice.

Katz has constructed a riveting and well-told urban legend. At its center is the enormous tragedy of the murder of an infant, a heinous crime for which Katz holds the perpetrator fully responsible. The state did the same: Macedo is serving a long prison sentence.

But the truth is that guilt is like a blast wave. It stretches back into history and is widespread in today’s society. None of us are outside its reach. US policies in Central America and responses to them created nightmares, causing citizens to flee in search of refuge and a better future. Here in the US they found torture instead, their existence criminalized by a federal government that refused to take responsibility for the consequences of our foreign policy. Los Angeles, always concerned about its reputation and beauty, further criminalized street merchants by punishing them. Gangs exploited every weakness of this population and created new fears.

“The Rent Collectors” tries to understand an evil act and asks if atonement and redemption are possible for the person who did it. It finds a web of meanings in which we are all hanging, implying that many other crimes can be understood holistically in this way if we take the time. In as much as is possible after such a senseless tragedy, Katz has come to understand that September day to some extent.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Eugene, Oregon. @BerryFLW