I just started reading a book called Black and Brown in Los Angeles recently, and it touches on this subject. A little bit from the book below.
Fernandez, who is a member of the La Puente Blackwood gang and is now serving life in prison for murder, described his gang’s situation in the years before the Mafia meetings: “My gang was getting along with [blacks] real good.” But after the meetings, he said they “would like go hunting.” “We’d go shoot up the projects in West Covina where they lived. We’d just go out there and shoot as many as we could till the cops came.”
For some multigenerational gangs, Mexican Mafia orders to “clean the neighborhood” were unnecessary. The Avenues gangs in northeast Los Angeles had five members in the Eme, including one of the masterminds of taxation, Alex “Pee-Wee” Aguirre, who’d been made a member in state prison amid the Crip Wars of the 1980s. Generations of young men from the Avenues had been in and out of prison. “We didn’t need anybody to tell us what to do,” said Jesse Diaz, a Highland Park gang member. Diaz testified in court that his Avenue 43 clique watched as houses were razed and apartments erected during the late 1980s. Blacks moved in. Suddenly the neighborhood didn’t feel theirs, Diaz said. “We didn’t want them in the neighborhood making it look like South Central,” he testified.
Avenues gang members spoke often about this state of affairs. They mounted campaigns of harassment that included insults, racist graffiti, and violence, Diaz said. “It was always, ‘Those fukking ******s are moving in,’” he said. “We got to go put work in—whatever it takes: beating them up, shooting them, killing them. I yelled racial slurs all the time, whenever I’d come across them.” Eventually, U.S. prosecutors convicted four members of the Avenue 43 street gang for conspiracy to deprive African Americans in Highland Park of their civil rights. This included the murders of two men—Kenneth Wilson and Christopher Bowser. Wilson was gunned down while parking his car on Fifty-Second Street late one night in August 1999. Bowser was shot to death in December 2000. The federal indictment alleged that the gang’s campaign included robberies, beatings and pistol whippings, racial slurs, and confrontations. Gang members drew an outline of a human body in front of one man’s home and released a German shepherd on him.
The Eme meetings were “like gasoline on the fire for us,” explained a member of the Azusa 13 gang who is now incarcerated but asked not to be identified, fearing for his family. He said he had attended the Legg Lake meeting run by Buelna and Shryock but reported that Azusa 13 was “already thinking that way before” the meeting, although he added, “The meetings just made us do it more. Other San Gabriel gangs picked up the racist activity after the meetings: Pomona 12th Street, Baldwin Park, El Monte Flores, Puente. El Monte Flores wouldn’t let nobody move in who was black.”