There was no need to ask what he meant by “heavy shit.” The barrio is already plagued by sporadic fire-bombings, explosions, shootings and minor violence of all kinds. But the cops see nothing “political” in these incidents. Just before I left town I talked on the phone with a lieutenant at the East L.A. sheriff's office. He was anxious to assure me that the area was totally pacified. “You have to remember,” he said, “that this has always been a high-crime area. We have a lot of trouble with teen-age gangs, and it's getting worse. Now they're all running around with .22 rifles and handguns, looking for fights with each other. I guess you could say they're sort of like the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago, except that our gangs are younger.”

“But they're not into politics like the black gangs in Chicago?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” he replied. “The only political thing the Blackstone Rangers ever did was con somebody out of a federal grant for a lot of money.”

I asked him about some of the stories I'd heard about bombings, etc. But he quickly dismissed them as rumors. Then, during the next half hour of random talking about things that had happened in the past few weeks, he mentioned one dynamiting and a building burned down at East Los Angeles College, and also the firebombing of a local vendido politician's real estate office. “But they hit the wrong guy,” the Lt. said with a chuckle. “They bombed another realtor who happened to have the same name as the guy they were after.”

“Que malo,” I mumbled, lapsing into my own dialect. “But aside from all that, you people don't see real trouble brewing? What about these rallies that keep turning into riots?”

“It's always the same bunch of troublemakers,” he explained. “They take a crowd that's gathered for other reasons, and then they subvert it.”

“But that last rally was called to protest police brutality ,” I said. “And then it turned into a riot. I saw the films -- 50 or 60 police cars lined up bumper to bumper on Whittier Boulevard, deputies firing shotguns into the crowd. . .”

“That was necessary,” he replied. “That mob was out of control. They attacked us.”

“I know,” I said.

“And let me tell you something else,” he went on. “That rally wasn't really about 'police brutality.' The guy who organized it, Rosalio Munoz, told me he was just using that slogan to get people out to the park.”

“Well, you know how they are,” I said. Then I asked him if he could give me the names of any Chicano leaders I should talk to if I decided to write an article about the scene in East L.A.

“Well, there's Congressman Roybal,” he said. “And that real estate man I told you about. . .”

“The one who got fire-bombed?”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “The other guy -- the one they intended to fire-bomb.”