SKIN OF TATTOOS by Christina Hoag
Since I’ve been a journalist (a newspaper reporter, which
almost sounds quaint these days!), I get a lot of ideas from news events and
people I’ve covered. That’s how “Skin of Tattoos” was born. I was sent to El
Salvador back in 2000 to do a magazine story on gang members deported from Los
Angeles to San Salvador, which most of them really didn’t know because their
families had emigrated when they were infants or small children. It was a
classic “fish out of water” story. They neither belonged in El Salvador or in
the United States. Some barely spoke Spanish. It’s really a strange take on the
immigrant experience.
By the way, this was before the scourge of gangs became a
pandemic in the northern countries of Central America. When I was there, the
gangs had formed, spurred by these deported Angelenos, but they were nowhere
near as strong as they are today.
The story of these young men I interviewed resonated with
me. I could relate to them because I had moved around the world as a child, so
I also feel I don’t really belong anywhere; I straddle numerous cultures. Although
my novel is not about deported gang members; it’s the tale of rival homeboys in
L.A., the book was inspired by those interviews in El Salvador, although I
didn’t sit down and write an outline until maybe six years later and started
writing it in 2008. It’s been a long haul!
But I confess I have a general interest in gangs as a
subculture within our larger society. I
first encountered gangs again as a journalist in New Jersey, where I was working
as a reporter for The Times in Trenton. The editor assigned me to write a story
about a notorious motorcycle gang delivering Christmas toys to a local
hospital. I went to interview them in a small suburban house. It was all very
normal-looking apart from the bunch of Harley choppers out front and its rather
gloriously hirsute occupants, who insisted they belonged to a “club” not a
gang. However, a couple years later, I saw one of them at a New Jersey prison
where I’d gone to interview an inmate for another story. So much for the
“club,” I thought.
I also covered gangs and related issues when I was a
reporter for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and later co-wrote a
nonfiction book on gang intervention called “Peace in the Hood: Working with
Gang Members to End the Violence” (Turner Publishing, 2014) with a South Los
Angeles gang interventionist. It’s now being used as a textbook in various
courses at UCLA, USC and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, a fact
which I’m very proud of.
BIO:
Christina Hoag is the author of Skin of Tattoos, a literary thriller set in L.A.’s gang underworld
(Martin Brown Publishers, August 2016) and Girl
on the Brink, a romantic thriller for young adults (Fire and Ice YA/Melange Books, August 2016). She is a former
reporter for the Associated Press and Miami Herald and worked as a
correspondent in Latin America writing for major media outlets including Time, Business Week, Financial Times, the
Houston Chronicle and The New York Times. She is the co-author of
Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang
Members to End the Violence, a groundbreaking book on gang intervention
(Turner Publishing, 2014). She lives in Los Angeles. For more information, see
www.christinahoag.com.
BLURB:
Los Angeles homeboy Magdaleno is paroled from prison
after serving time on a gun possession frame-up by a rival, Rico, who takes over
as gang shot-caller in Mags’s absence. Mags promises himself and his Salvadoran
immigrant family a fresh start, but he can’t find either the decent job or the
respect he craves from his parents and his firefighter brother, who look at him
as a disappointment. Moreover, Rico, under pressure to earn money to free the
Cyco Lokos’ jailed top leader and eager to exert his authority over his
rival-turned-underling, isn’t about to let Mags get out of his reach.
Ultimately, Mags’s desire for revenge and respect pushes him to make a decision
that ensnares him in a world seeded with deceit and betrayal, where the only
escape from rules that carry a heavy price for transgression is sacrifice of
everything – and everyone - he loves.
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