Youth group was way out of street life for South End native

Yawu Miller

Calvin Feliciano had just finished an eight-month stint in a juvenile detention facility — his longest in his six-years of criminal activity.

Hanging out on West Newton St. with a group of friends, he ran into a cousin of his from the neighborhood who didn’t approve of his lack of structured time.

“He introduced me to someone who worked at Teen Empowerment,” Feliciano recalls. “He told me, ‘you should hang out with this guy.’”

Feliciano had spent more than two of his eighteen years in juvenile lockups in Roxbury, Dorchester and Brighton. The youth worker offered an alternative to the warring between teen residents of Feliciano’s Villa Victoria housing development and those in the Castle Square and Cathedral developments.

Although Feliciano would continue to hang on West Newton St. and would be arrested again, his association with Teen Empowerment was his first step out of a life on the streets that began for him at age 12.

“I was in middle school at the Edwards in Charlestown,” Feliciano recalls. “There were kids from Cathedral and from Castle Square. We’d get into fights.”

Feliciano joined forces with other children from his neighborhood, forming what the children then called the West Newton Posse.

“When you don’t have anything, when you don’t relate to what you’re being taught in school, when your mom is stressed because she’s working 50 hours a week and struggling not to be evicted, you start hanging onto what little you have,” he explained. “You begin to look at your block as your property.”

Perhaps more than any other neighborhood in the city, the South End is a neighborhood of class extremes. It’s a neighborhood where whites live in $2 million duplex condos in close proximity to blacks and Latinos living in public housing developments, many surviving on public assistance.

The black and Latino middle class left the neighborhood in the ’80s, after rising rents and real estate prices cemented the South End’s reputation as a yuppie enclave.

The Area D-4 police blotter’s standard fare of muggings, house break-ins and property crimes reflects the neighborhood’s stark income disparities. Earlier this year, West Newton St. resident Carlos French made headlines when he aimed video cameras at the streets outside his condominium after thieves twice pilfered headlights from his Acura.

Feliciano’s first brush with the law came after he and several friends launched snowballs at a white shopper on Tremont St. The man fought back, swinging a plastic grocery bag at the 12-year-olds, who then drew knives. While the man outran their blades, he didn’t escape a brick Feliciano launched at him.

Feliciano got two years probation for the attack and ended up cycling through the juvenile justice system, with stints in the various youth detention centers around the city.

“They call it the Department of Youth Services,” Feliciano says of his years in the facilities. “But if there were really services, you’d see a reduction in crime. They had social workers, but they were always young white women right out of college. They didn’t understand why you did what you did.”

Feliciano had joined the ranks of young offenders, meeting teens from similar backgrounds as he cycled through the system which he says was not aimed at rehabilitation.

“I never heard anyone say ‘I’ve learned something here,’” he said. “Everybody was just talking about ‘I can’t wait to get out and smoke some weed. I can’t wait to get out so I can get with a woman.’”

Feliciano’s last arrest came when he was 18. Standing with a group of friends in the Villa, he watched an older man attempting to discipline his son, who ran away. When Feliciano and his cohorts laughed, the man became enraged and came back with a kitchen knife.

“Someone must have seen him with the knife and called 911,” he said. “We saw the police coming and, even though we hadn’t done anything, we ran. We thought they would arrest us and nobody would believe us.”

Because he was on probation, Feliciano knew an arrest would land him back in jail, even if the charge were thrown out. He made good on his escape, but a few days later was arrested in his home.

It was at about that time when he began working with Teen Empowerment as a teen organizer.

“After the last time I was in a youth facility, I said, ‘I’m done,’” he explained.

Feliciano became an organizer with the South End-based youth group and began to work with teens from all over the city, including the housing developments he had feuded with just months before, helping others seize hold of opportunities to better their lives.

“We used social justice issues to organize,” he said. “We worked on the bigger picture. Like why are people claiming they want to help youth but cutting funding for youth programs? Why do we live in run-down neighborhoods? Why do we attend broken schools?”

Several books fellow organizer Banjineh Brown gave Feliciano also sparked introspection. Books on the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords dealt with the FBI’s efforts to undermine both groups. Another book, on the diamond trade’s effects on Africa, opened his eyes to the shallowness of American consumer culture.

“I saw that people are making money off our hardships,” Feliciano said. “I saw how the prison system and the lack of educational opportunities affected our neighborhood. I saw how we lived in a world where it was all about guns and violence and disrespecting women.

“I saw all these issues facing my community and said, ‘I’m on the wrong side.’”

After his stint with Teen Empowerment, Feliciano worked other jobs while earning his GED. Now he works as a legislative aide to City Councilor Chuck Turner.

Like most teens who grow up in the South End, Feliciano can no longer afford to live there. He now lives with his fiancé and son in an apartment in Hyde Park.

He said reaction to his turnaround has been mixed in his old neighborhood.

“Some of my friends called me a sell-out,” he commented. “They thought I had turned my back on my neighborhood. Other people respected what I’m doing. Working in Chuck Turner’s office opened me up to a lot of resources. A lot of my boys are in GED programs that I found while working in Chuck’s office.”