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MN: And then you know the east side-west side now, today, I think my generation, we think of west side as Santa Monica. Can you tell, explain to us where exactly in your generation you considered east side and what was considered west side?

JM: Okay. This is all in the context of JA community. For the JA community, the west side was Crenshaw. Now, West L.A. was a different story, Sawtelle and those places. And, of course, there were groupings of JAs all over the place, way out in the... where was it? Oxnard, places like that. And we even got into conflicts with some of the guys out in Oxnard. But we were quite friendly to the East L.A. people. We didn't think too much of them to be honest with you. And we even had an alliance with a Mexican gang over there that wasn't territorial. They called themselves EW, Every Where. So we had some friendships over there, too. Even though we were highly segregated, we never broke down into racial conflict. We all kind of assumed we were in the same boat, you know. We didn't mind, we just, that's the way it was. The whites had their society, and blacks had theirs, we had ours. We were all influenced by each other.

MN: Now, tell me about the west side. Which groups dominated the west side?

JM: That was groups like the... well, the largest group there for a long time were the Seinans, and then as generations turned, they kind of faded out and the Baby Seinans took over and they faded out. They were a group older than I was. And all of a sudden you had groups like the Constituents. They also had this large group called the Dominators, in and of themselves they were like seventy or eighty people. A lot of them were black. So I think, in a way, the west side JAs were much more influenced by their black friends, 'cause they kind of spoke in that slang, you know. And they took on a lot of black mannerisms. Whereas we were more like, we were influenced more like from the Mexican groups. We were much more like they were in the sense that... maybe more territorial, maybe more... I say we were more humbler. [Laughs] That's what somebody said, that was the difference. We weren't as flashy, trying to be as flashy, as flamboyant, 'cause they were used to all this black folk type of thing. That's the way you had to be, loud and brash. They kind of liked it like that, whereas we were like, more like the Mexican groups, where we're really reticent about things and more secretive, and we just kept things. And loyalty and what have you meant everything, you know. You were true to your homies, that type of thing. We were pretty much the same way. And we didn't get into too many conflicts with them, but a few times we might have.

MN: When you say "them," are you talking about Dominators?

JM: No, no, the Mexican groups. But like I say, we kind of considered EW part of us. So you add that to the Freelancers, and then you had EW, they had about ten to fifteen of them. Now you're talking about seventy, eighty. So when you say Black Juans, that's a pretty big, big grouping of people. There was no time in which everybody gets together at one time at one spot. That doesn't happen. But when you go along, when you go to certain areas to see who your friends and allies are, then, you know, in terms of numerically, we would say we have about sixty, seventy people sort of allied to us in a loose alliance. Now, we got into a sort of cataclysmic war with the west side. Everybody took sides, you're either east side, west side. You were either Constituent or Black Juan. We were, we headed up the east side.

MN: So you're saying the Constituents headed up the west side.

JM: Yeah, pretty much. The biggest group that we had, we got into a continual conflict with, was the Dominators. It was open warfare for us, not that we wanted it to be. I keep saying this over and over ad nauseum, but it just turned out that way. I mean, it went against everything we wanted to do, 'cause we wanted to party. "Where's the happenings?" "Oh, go up to Stockton and have a good time." Yet, now, we're spending time figuring out where we can go because we might get jumped, and what are we gonna do about them if they attack us here, and blah, blah, blah. And a lot of times, we can't control this stuff. When you have allies, sixty, seventy, they're gonna do things on their own. They don't need our permission to do anything. And I'm sure that happens at the other side. But on the other hand, everybody thinks that we had perfect control, like the Constituents had perfect control of the west side, I don't think so. And we had control over people on our side, no, that didn't happen. People did things on their own. It's sort of like, a lot of times we were left to clean up the, clean up the thing. It came to a head when... it wasn't us, we kept the peace fairly well, and we didn't use armaments very much. But among the younger Baby Black Juans, then it really broke out into armed warfare. And I think they got into an argument with the west side folks, and the fight continued down here in the Pershing Square area, gunshots, shots rang out, and one of the west side kids got, was killed. So all hell broke loose after that, and that's where they, they even, that's where they formed Jacs, because that was to stop this warfare going on. And I was getting these calls saying... and I got a call from one of the, a relative of the person that got killed. And he accused me of instigating it all. I said, "I have no way of controlling everybody and anything, and I don't want to see anybody get killed."

MN: This made the Japanese section of the Rafu Shimpo, am I correct?

JM: Oh, yeah. My mother caught wind of some... she said, "What are you doing?" [Laughs] I said, "I don't know. What do you mean, what am I doing?" She said, "It's all written down here," you know. Oh, boy, I was in hot water.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.