The 'Un-Becoming': A former gang member finds his resurrection tale at UC Berkeley
BERKELEY, Calif. — Jessi Fernandez joined a street gang at 13. By his 20s, he had been shot at more times than he could count. He got busted for methamphetamine possession and spent time in Los Angeles County jail for carrying a loaded gun. Yet the persistent danger didn't wash away a street kid's dream — that he would get rich as a drug kingpin, then turn legit.
Escapist fantasies became harder to embrace by late 2015, when rivals gunned down two of Fernandez's closest friends in a few months' time. The second had lived with him like a brother for at least a year, before being shot down not far from their front door in Boyle Heights. Fernandez, then 22, held 20-year-old "Shorty" as he bled on the asphalt, huddled between two cars.
Fernandez had seen others in his community change paths, often starting out with classes and jobs at Homeboy Industries, the renowned gang rehabilitation program. He'd hung around Homeboy enough to strike up an acquaintance with Father Greg Boyle, the nonprofit's founder. But this child of immigrants hesitated to throw over the deep loyalties that defined him — to his "homies," to the streets, to the belief that death or imprisonment for his neighborhood represented a kind of honor.
Shorty's death helped move something inside Fernandez. After a half-dozen false starts, he returned to Homeboy and asked Boyle for help.
"I decided to place my needs over those of my gang," Fernandez would later write, in an article ("Scar'd Up but Still Goin' ") published in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Boyle greeted him with a hug and high hopes, he later recalled. "Sometimes," Boyle said, "death can be the alarm clock."
Seven years after that watershed, the Eastside homie named for Wild West outlaw Jesse James would again stride onto the Homeboy campus in Chinatown, on a sunny Thursday in June, this time as an inspiration. Closing in on his 30th birthday, he had come to celebrate his graduation from UC Berkeley. By the weekend, he would board a plane for a summer of study in Spain, his second trip to Europe.
Fernandez has authored
