The Women of the Mara: Adriana
Even if the gangs are officially instructed not to allow women into the organization, some homegirls remain in El Salvador. Adriana, whom I met in San Salvador, was a rare case.
Adriana, whom I met in San Salvador, was a rare case of a female homie that I met in El Salvador.
Although she was only twenty-seven, her eyes were tired, her light-brown Afro pulled away from her face to show skin mottled by years of self-professed drug use. After her mother died of cancer when she was twelve, Adriana turned to embrace the only other family she would ever know, she told me: the Barrio 18.
“I started living on the streets. My brothers were older. I was always involved in that [gang] world, because of where we lived. My brothers always smoked weed and drank, and I saw all this, and when I got to a certain age, I wanted to do it too, to be around them. I was the only girl, and I always liked being with the boys.” Adriana spoke in a low mumble, and I had to ask her to keep repeating things to be sure that I understood what she was saying.
“The homeboys knew me from such a young age that they respected me. They started to see that I wasn’t like the hainas [girlfriends] who hung out with them—those women gave them love. I wasn’t like that. I sold weed, I did jobs, and bit by bit I started getting more involved in the gang.”24
(Illustration by Michelle Urra, originally for VICE News.)
Eventually Adriana was jumped into the gang, despite the nationwide ban. “Four guys did it,” she said. “They didn’t rape me the way that they did the majority of other young girls, which is what they used to do between 2001 and 2008. When I entered in 2011, it was really rare, really rare, for them to jump women into the gang.” She said that she chose the beating over the rape, and that it was the longest few minutes of her life.
“I was always in the game. On the lookout, selling weed, cocaine, crack. We stole cars—I learned how to steal cars and mug people. I always really liked the adrenaline—I liked being in the street, in the game. I loved it.”
She was known as “La Tranki,” she told me, “The Calm One.” Her demeanor came in handy for the “missions” she ascended to, gang code for assassinations, usually of rival gang members. “It’s so much adrenaline,” she said. “I used to do it when I was high, because it’s when I had more courage. You have to find the courage one way or the other. It feels bad the first time, yeah, but then after the second, third or fourth time, it felt like something routine. You tell yourself once you’ve done it once, you can do it again.”
Adriana was calmada (inactive) when I met her in November 2021. She and the male gang member who introduced me to her said that they had lost count of the number of people they had killed. But I sensed, speaking to her, that Adriana was proud of her acceptance into the male world of Barrio 18. But it felt to me that even though she had ascended to a significant level in the gang, her power and approval still depended overwhelmingly on the men around her, that she was moving very much within a male organism.
Her pride in her place in the gang made me wonder how she saw her life compared with how it looked from outside. For me, understanding her circumstances made the illogical seem logical. Following her mother’s death, Adriana’s brothers had abandoned her, leaving her alone on the streets. That’s when she started working for the gang. Barrio 18 was survival to her, what she perceived to be her safest option among a plethora of pretty limited choices. Might I have done the same in her position?
I grew up in a world with parents there to love me, siblings there to look up to me, and teachers there to school me. But what I could understand—as a woman and a first-generation immigrant whose parents moved to a new city every five years, as someone who never wanted to draw too much attention to myself or stand out—was the need to belong. I understood why Adriana felt utterly alone and sought a sense of belonging where she could find it. Orphaned and abandoned, she needed a group, a family, in which to root herself. I think that this is why gangs prove such a lure to so many men and women across the Americas, who feel let down or betrayed by their own families or shut out by the communities around them. That, and the thrill of the power and adrenaline gang life offers to the most maligned and disempowered group in the region: poor, disenfranchised, largely brown men and women.
Adriana’s pride put her above the women who “gave love” in the gangs, the hainas who slept with or went out with male gang members.
“Because most women are hainas, and hainas snitch,” said Adriana.
It’s unclear whether Adriana’s example of a female homie is one that is going to increase or disappear in the future of El Salvador’s gangs. Since the murder of Brenda Paz (see my previous post), women are hardly ever initiated members of Central American street gangs, and they are rarely found in leadership roles.
Women are, however, always present in the families of gang members, often living with them. Most gang-affiliated women and girls work as low-level collaborators in their male family members’ criminal enterprises. However, to discount the influence of these women simply because they lack official positions in the gang hierarchy seems to view the situation through the male gaze rather than through a more complex and realistic lens.
These women, much like the tens of thousands of male foot soldiers, aid and abet the gang. Members or not, they actively participate in many of the gang’s criminal activities. Should we only consider women involved if they are leaders or if they can claim official membership, but not if they are wives or mothers or girlfriends? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that only looking at the gang through the prism of the overwhelmingly male initiated members and not as a whole within the networks in which they are housed is to fail to really understand the significance of women in these gangs.
Without taking a broader view, we are marginalizing women and discounting their relationships and bonds to the male members, and how those bonds influence the gang and its existence. We are blind to the ways women influence decisions and dynamics within gangs, albeit from beneath if not from above. As investigator Juan José Martínez told me, if the male ranfla (top leadership of the gang) is the engine that keeps the car running, at least half of the rest of the car—the body, the exhaust system, the tires—is made up of women.