Luis Colosio gives visitors a tour of the bakery behind Homeboy Industries
Luis Colosio first decided to join a gang the day his mother pressed his hand to a hot electric stove when he was six years old. Disowned by his family, he found a new one in the East L.A. Dukes as an adolescent.
“I was smoking PCP, selling crack at 14,” Colosio said. “If a substance made me feel good, it’s because no one else could.”
Today, Colosio is out of prison, done with the gang life and wearing a hair net. He spends his days answering phones and showing visitors around the bakery at Homeboy Industries, the downtown Los Angeles organization that proved to be his salvation.
Starting as a job placement program over 20 years ago, Homeboy has since grown to become the largest gang-intervention organization in the country. Each year, Homeboy helps over 8,000 former gang members like Colosio gain access to legal services, employment assistance and counseling.
Gang members come to Homeboy when they know they help.
“They have a comfort level here,” said the organization’s founder, Father Greg Boyle. “We have cred, longevity and a reputation.”
Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, looks to a photo of a former 'Homeboy' lost to gang violence several years ago
Boyle started Homeboy after burying a young victim of gang violence in 1988 in his Boyle Heights parish. Since then, he’s seen 166 more parishioners die in area gang wars.
“We have our heart broken by the very thing that breaks the heart of God,” he said. “So we take the difficult, the belligerent, the damaged, and the wounded, and we roll up our sleeves.”
In addition to offering an array of social services, Homeboy employs 350 former gang members in five businesses. These include the bakery, which supplies many area restaurants and the attached Homegirl Cafe, where female parolees serve up tacos and fresh juices to local patrons.
Their staff t-shirts are printed with the credo that keeps them coming back to Homeboy day after day: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”
Boyle describes the organization as a therapeutic community for those wanting to start their lives anew.
“Here they learn, ‘what does it mean to be a man?” Boyle said, “and ‘what does courage look like?”
The bakers at Homeboy arrive at work by 3 a.m. The day begins with an inspirational talk by a staff member, followed by a prayer led by a so-called “Homie.”
In the orderly tumult of the main room, newcomers sit in neat rows of plastic chairs and wait their turn for processing. In a building filled with more former gangsters than any probation office, the occasional fights and meltdowns do happen.
“The other day there was a guy who started throwing dough, saying ‘f*** everybody, I want to get fired,’” Boyle said. “We know there’s something else going on there, and it’s our job to find it.”
Homeboy digs for the “something else” through counseling, which the organization offers alongside job training, tattoo removal and life skills classes. Boyle said that at first, the Homies were somewhat reluctant to talk to psychologists.
Then they saw the 1999 movie “Analyze This.”
“There was no stigma after they saw a mafia don getting therapy,” Boyle said.
The organization requires the efforts of over 50 senior staff members and over $9 million annually to run, a number that Boyle has faced increasing difficulty reaching as the economy has worsened. Although their donors’ endowments are drying up, Boyle and his staff keep alive the hope that they will find the money somehow.
“This place is expensive, but it’s costly to imagine us ending our services,” Boyle said. “We release the steam from the gang violence pressure-cooker.”
UPDATE: This article can also be found on TheOpenCase.com