History Of Surenos
Sureños are an alliance of hundreds of individual Mexican American street gangs that originated in Southern California. They are mostly found in Los Angeles and San Diego, but have spread significantly and can be found throughout much of the united states. Sureños represent themselves with symbols and phrases such as “Sur 13″, “Los Sureños” and “Sureño Trece”. These indentifications are accompanied by the color blue, numeric code of number 13 and the Roman numeral of XIII.
The term “Sureños” was first used in 1970 as a result of a California prison war between the Mexican Mafia (from Southern California) and Nuestra Familia (from Northern California). This conflict resulted in pride and territorial dispute between various independent Chicano gang members who aligned themselves with Nuestra Familia (meaning “Our Family” in Spanish) and those who aligned with the Mexican Mafia. The Norteños (meaning “Northerners” in Spanish) and Sureño rivalry was soon created to distinguish themselves from their region of origin.
Sureños are controlled and influenced by the Mexican Mafia, a Mexican-American prison gang. The Mexican Mafia was formed in the late 1950s by Chicano street gang members incarcerated at the Deuel Vocational Institution, a youth offender facility located in Tracy, California. Several East Los Angeles gang members and members from other areas of California formed the Mexican American prison gang known as La eMe, the Mexican Mafia, and is noted as the first Chicano prison gang in California. Approximately, thirteen to twenty Mexican Americans from East Los Angeles formed the original core of the gang.
Initially, the gang was formed for protection against other inmates and the prison staff. As the organization grew, it rapidly changed into a criminal organization involved in extortion, narcotics trafficking, and murder both inside and outside the prison system walls. Gang leaders from East Los Angeles and other barrios formed a deadly alliance to control the prison narcotics trade. The well-organized gang built its criteria along ethnic lines and a set of rules loosely modeled after the Sicilian Mafia.
Some of the original members and leaders of the group were: Louis “Huero” Flores, who gets credit for being the one who came up with the name, and Rodolfo Cadena. Joe “Pegleg” Morgan (sometimes called Papa Joe) who was of Croatian descent, did not join “La eMe” until years later and rose to become one of its most powerful members.
With a set of rules governing its members, the Eme evolved into criminal activities. Some of the gangñs activities include expanding its control of drug trafficking, drug rip-offs, prostitution, business robberi.