Barrio Therapy
Alberto Gonzales holds a gun in each hand. We’re facing each other across his desk in the bottom floor of the South Omaha Boys and Girls Club, and, with a
stoic gaze, he’s demonstrating how real toy guns are made to look.
“Did a child make this?” he asks. Behind him is a large collage, a mixture of images of the Virgin Mary and photos of kids he’s helped during his time as youth coordinator there.
He sets the plastic guns down and pulls out a jersey. It reads “Los Angeles” where you’d expect to see a player’s name, its number 13 representing a notorious South American gang that’s infiltrated Omaha, and most other major American cities. They sell these jerseys in stores on South 24th Street.
“The store owners know who’s going to buy these shirts,” he says.
With his silvering chinstrap goatee, his short black hair fading slowly from his face and wearing a baby blue-and-white-striped company polo, you wouldn’t suspect Beto, as he’s known casually and by all the kids in his program, to have been a gang member “back in the day.” Some fading hand tats are all that’s left to remind the man of his troubled youth, that and the hundreds of kids he regularly confides his story to.
Growing Up
Born to Alfredo and Vera Gonzales on Nov. 21, 1957, Beto moved to Omaha when he was about 3 years old, when his father got a job at one of the city’s packinghouses. The stockyards now sit empty, but the Midwest town was an industry hub at the time. During the ’60s, Omaha’s stockyards made up the world’s largest livestock processing center.
Vera Gonzalez stayed at the family’s home at 27th and Y, raising seven children while her husband worked long hours at the “big, old, ugly packinghouse,” Wilson’s, across the street. Mel’s bar and the Porkshop Bar flanked the plant, which is what Beto’s young eyes saw everyday.
“Look out my bedroom window and there it is,” said Beto, the second oldest of his siblings. “All I seen was people working hard, and drinkin’ and druggin’ and cussin’ and smokin’.
“You see these adult people in their big, old, white cloth frocks … all bloodied, just out there smoking a cigarette and sharpening knives on their break.
“There was a part of me that couldn’t wait to grow up because to me that was so manly, you know, seeing them brothers come out of there and being real proud of what they were doing. I seen a lot of pride in a lot of those men because they were making good money … but you also see the wear and the tear in them.”
In the early ’60s, there weren’t machines to pull the hides off the cattle.
"Back in those days you’re talking about arms, and just physical, body labor,” he said. “People had to do the skinning and tear those cattle apart.”
Beto knows this because he would work on these same kill floors, at Northern States Beef, when he was 18.
He remembers a lot of embarrassment as a young kid with limited English trying to assimilate, trying to get used to the barrio.
“I’d try to say some English words and of course you’ve got the kids that would say, ‘You don’t say it like this, you say it like this,’ and then they’d laugh because you’d always be in a crowd of kids,” he said. “So there was a shutdown period where I remember I was just really careful about what I would say. In the back of my head I’d think, ‘If it’s not going to come out right, don’t even say it.’ Talk about anxiety setting in.”
Troubled Youth
A Boys and Girls Club alum, Beto started going there when he was 8. His first job came at 11, helping out the silver-haired Ms. Fisher in the kitchen. He still remembers her blue eyes when she’d smile at him. That’s also when his love for working with kids grew.
“There I was, a kid working with kids,” he said. “They always say you have a vision, and if you stick to it, it can come true for you, and that’s what happened — that vision was there.”
But first he had to go through his “own crap, my own painful stuff.”
Beto got involved with drugs and alcohol at an early age. After stints at Highland School and Indian Hills School, Beto attended an alternative school in his teens. He was living in and out of his parent’s house.
By the time he was 11, he was a member of a “little street gang” in the south Omaha projects that fought with its rivals. As he got older, he was introduced to and networked with other gangs.
Though clearly influenced by his surroundings, Beto said he was “kind of my own person,” during that time. “Growing up as a small teenager, seeing the destruction of [gang life], I made the decision that I was never going to get recruited to anything else that could bring harm to me or my family.”
Beto’s mother has always been a positive influence in his life.
"I remember one time coming home stinking drunk and high and just barely fading out,” he said, becoming noticeably emotional. “She was touching my foot and she had her rosary in her hand and she was praying real light. And I could hear her voice. It was just so calm and soothing. When people say the prayers of a mother are always heard by God, I believe that to this day, wholeheartedly.”
But Beto couldn’t escape the violence. He spent five days in jail in 1977 for a crime that could have put him away for 30 years. He’s told his parents put up their house to bail him out, and he spent years on probation. Beto worries that some of the parents of the clubs’ kids wouldn’t understand how someone with a past like his could be a positive force in their children’s lives, so he asks that The Reader not print the details, though they’re public record. He builds trust by sharing his stories with kids.
Sister Joyce
In his early 20s, Beto walked into the Chicano Awareness Center and met Sister Joyce.
“I loved her to death,” he said. “For being a nun, she also kept it real with me.”
The young Beto quickly established a relationship with the outreach worker, and revealed his troubled past to her. “I remember sharing a story with her and she was so angry that I would allow myself to go through some of the stuff that I was going through,” he said. “She goes, ‘If you’re sick and tired of living like this, get up off your ass and do something about it.’
“And I looked at this nun and I couldn’t believe that was coming out of her mouth. I think that was the catch right there.”
Beto was open with Sister Joyce, and she knew that he was in a lot of pain. For the first time in his life, Beto said, he allowed himself to grieve as a man.
“I was in that state of mind that was just emotional,” he said. “I couldn’t stop grieving. I cried and cried …”
Sister Joyce told him to shut the door and asked him to kneel down and pray with her.
"I mean, here I am, in the Chicano Awareness Center, in the middle of 24th Street, praying with this woman,” he said. “That was the start of my recovery.”
Beto made up his mind that he was through with drugs.
“That was 25 years ago this year,” he said. “The day I quit shooting up drugs was the day I quit smoking cigarettes. I mean I used to smoke two or three packs a day. I used to drink like a fish. And all that quit.”
He says meth was the hardest habit he’s ever had to break.
“I went through like a six-month period while I was trying to recover with nightmares, the sweats, the tremors, the throwing up, the not being able to eat. Then, once my body was recovering,” he said, “I began eating a lot and I went though the gaining the weight.”
Sister Joyce began utilizing Beto’s services as a volunteer. She talked about him becoming a counselor, and asked if he had thought about going to college.
“I was real bad in school. My grade point average was too embarrassing to even talk about,” he said. “That was the first time I ever told any human being that I couldn’t read or write, that I had learning disabilities.”
Sister Joyce wasn’t accepting his excuses. She saw promise in him, and told him he was articulate.
“I looked at her and I said, ‘What’s the word articulate mean?’ She started laughing at me,” he said. “She told me to pull a dictionary out.”
With that, Sister Joyce’s informal schooling began.
“She said, ‘We’re gonna get you through school. You just have too much talent. I just can’t see you going down the tubes.’” She told him if he left, he’d be working hard labor the rest of his life.
She challenged him to go to school, and he was “scared to death. I was more scared of picking up a college book than I was a gun, picking up a pen and paper. To stand up in front of a class and talk. I was challenged to do all those things.”
He started taking classes at Metro Tech. He learned to open up, and got help from his teachers and fellow students. In five years, where it takes most people two, he earned his associate’s degree in chemical dependency.
He had kicked all his habits, and began growing with the center.
Gang explosion
With his degree in his back pocket, Beto started running drug and alcohol treatment groups at the Chicano Awareness Center, holding individual sessions, doing a lot of outreach. He did some codependency work with children of addicts at Marrs Middle School.
“Bless those schools for opening their doors to me,” he said. “I still get young adults now that are close to their 30s … that run into me and tell me that was the best thing that ever happened to them,” just like he talks about Sister Joyce.
While she left for a post in South Dakota, and different directors came and went, Beto continued his work at the center through the ’90s, increasingly in the gang field. When the movie Colors (tagline: “70,000 gang members. One million guns. Two cops.”) came out in 1988, Beto said the gang presence in Omaha seemed to explode “overnight,” with gang uniforms and “nets on the heads.”
“I dealt with so much death,” he said. “I was really, really heavily involved,” helping parents deal with their grief, helping them find funeral homes, coffins.
“There was a time a cousin of mine got killed,” he said. “I think that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s when I did go into a kind of burnout.”
Beto asked for and received a sabbatical. He spent 10 weeks with his sister, Gloria, in Hawaii. When he came back, he left the center to take crisis calls from all over the United States at the Boys Town National Hotline. After a few years, he returned to the Chicano Awareness Center and ran its gang prevention intervention program for three more years.
In 1999, Beto’s life came full circle as he returned to the place where the youth-work seed was planted all those years ago.
‘I’m a foot soldier for this club’
Established in 1961, Boys & Girls Clubs of Omaha includes four separate clubs — one north, one south, one west and one in Carter Lake, Iowa. They each offer a safe haven for kids ages 6-18, with pool and ping-pong tables, TVs, exercise equipment, and volunteers committed to enforcing strict behavioral demands, while having fun with the kids and educating them at the same time. Each clubs’ kids think their club is the best, and south club unit director Paco Fuentes is no different. He knows his club is the best because he’s got Beto. Fuentes said when Beto started, he believed his outreach coordinator was probably one of the best in the nation. Now, he says, he’s convinced.
“He has the bona fide life experience, AKA, street credibility. And he is a mature professional,” Fuentes said. “When you have those two ingredients, it makes for a very powerful set of tools you have to deal with these kids.
“He tells it like it is, and reaches them on a level they understand. He tells them stories they can laugh and cry at, and it comes from the heart.”
The two friends and motorcycle aficionados rode their Harley Davidson Road Kings in tandem to Indianapolis, Ind., in early September to receive an award on behalf of the entire Omaha organization for its work in gang prevention through a program called Street SMART.
Beto teaches the Street SMART curriculum as part of his gang prevention and intervention program, but it’s just a small element of what he calls Barrio Therapy, something he’s been developing since his early years at the Chicano Awareness Center.
“A lot of my kids that were coming to counseling, they would talk about some of the programs they were going to,” he said. “They’d go, ‘Man, Beto, we’d just tell them counselors what they wanted to hear.’”
Right off the bat, Beto tells these kids — many sent as a diversion from what would be their first jail sentence, some as a last chance to clean up their act — “Look, I can help you … but if you’re just coming here to BS me and think you’re gonna get over, it’s not going to happen. If I see that happen, I’m going to ask you to leave.
“What’s said behind these doors, I’m not real nice about it sometimes.”
Beto, who often drops “Bro” in casual conversation, talks to the kids about prison life and about friends he’s lost to drugs and violence, lowering himself to their level if he needs to, to get their attention. Once he’s got it, he goes back to “being a professional.”
“Sometimes I have to be just as thuggish as they are in this office,” he said.
Beto’s learned all about Freud and reality therapy and transactional analysis, genograms — “They’re all good, but I use them my way,” he said. “I have fun with it.”
He said body language and eye contact are the most important things to pay attention to when listening to a kid’s story because they’ll shut down immediately “if they see any disgust in your heart.”
He uses imagery. He has a group of kids close their eyes as he takes them with great detail through a scene beginning with a walk with friends, through a shot from a passing car, to their funeral, and ending with them buried under eight feet of dirt.
“… you can’t get out of there. You can’t kiss your girlfriend no more. It ends for you right there,” he said, his voice soft and calm. “The kids hate that.
“That’s Barrio Therapy, bro.”
Responsible adults
As we’re talking, the club is about a half-hour from being filled with the energy of 70 or so kids just liberated from being cooped up in school on a gorgeous fall day. Beto’s speaking about how he was rougher in his counseling style when he first started — how he’s since realized that he doesn’t need to use everything under his hat — when his cell phone explodes with a tinny, piercing dreamlike melody.
“Como estás, corazón?” he answers, without hesitating. It’s his wife, Maria, whom he met while working security at a restaurant.
“She and her girlfriends just happened to walk in and I caught her eye, she caught mine, end of story,” he said.
That Beto has softened over the years is evident. He and his wife have five children between them, and he has a 10-year-old granddaughter from a previous marriage. One look at his office walls — plastered on all sides with photos of friends and family, and the occasional drawing from a clubgoer — shows that he likes to keep close those that mean so much to him. His mother still lives in the neighborhood, at 27th and Drexel, and his father passed four years ago this October.
He hears the burnout rate in the counseling profession comes after six or seven years. And while there are pauses for reflection about good friends passed, and news reports about kids gone unsaved, 21 years later he said he’s loving every bit of it.
“It’s just, these kids, you identify with them. You relate to them,” he said. “And I think everybody … gets into it for that simple reason — been there, done that, gone through it and let’s see what I can do to help someone else.
“I can be a kid all over again with the kids in this club. That’s what keeps me going.”
Friends like Omaha Police Lt. Richie Gonzalez talk about Beto’s “special touch” in his ability to relate to both kids and parents. Gonzalez, an officer in the Omaha police gang unit, sends kids “on the bubble” to Beto, knowing that if they’ve been given that opportunity but still continue to make bad choices, “it’s going to be a hard life for them.”
Frank Granados, 39, met Beto when he was 13, back when Beto was lifeguarding at the Spring Lake swimming pool. He said when he was getting in trouble in his late teens, Beto was a role model for him, and visited him in county jail. A lot of counselors came through there, he said, but Beto’s “the only one I’d say that I even listened to. I know that my life totally changed because of things he’s said to me.”
The owner of A New Creation tattoo shop, off 51st and Radial Highway, Granados said Beto’s “always giving and giving. For him, time don’t matter — don’t mean nothing. You can call him at 2 in the morning and he’ll always be there for you.”
Gonzalez echoed that sentiment: “I’ve never had somebody say that they’ve not been able to get ahold of Beto,” he said. “It’s always, ‘Thank you for sending me down.’”
Beto talks about success being defined by changing just one life, but with 200-300 kids in his club and off the streets, he knows he’s done far more.
Holding a T-shirt featuring prominently a bikini-clad Latina in front of a marijuana leaf growing out of an 8-ball, Beto says, “Young America is not responsible for what’s happening to young America.”
“There’s adult people who own the gun factories, and it’s not 13- and 18-year-old kids,” he says. “It’s adults who own the planes, ships and boats that fly back and forth to these third-world countries and bring back heroin, cocaine and marijuana. It’s not our kids.”
Andrew Norman
