Home Boys: Who Are They and How Did They Get Here?

 

                                                                             

Homies reach Aguascalientes' back streets

     Growing up in the 50’s and 60s’s on L.A.’s westside, neither my friends nor I ever used the term “Home Boy.” It wasn’t in our vocabulary. In fact, I still don’t think I have ever called another human being “Home Boy.” Most of my friends were into sports, music, and the arts, in some form, like arts & crafts, as kids, or photography in later years. We called each other by name, George, Sammy, Mike, Arthur, Mark, Jesse.   

     Come to think of it, in those days, not even the remnants of the pachuco generation referred to each other as “Home Boy.” I say “remnants” because WWII had pretty much decimated the pachucos, drafting them in large numbers. When they returned home from Europe and the Pacific, it didn’t take them long to acculturate into honest, law-abiding, working-class Americans.

     They married, bought homes, and raised families. I remember a few of my dad’s friends even tattooing over the cross they’d tattooed on their hands during the days they ran the streets. The hardcore (or unlucky) pachucos had gone off to prison, were still trying to scam their way through life, or had become “winos,” another term you don’t hear used anymore. Still, I never heard any of my dad's friends use the term “Home Boy.”

     In the western part of Los Angeles, out closer to the Pacific, where Anglos, Chicanos, and Japanese had begun to integrate in school, the mid-1950’s were something of a limbo for pachuquismo. The “Eses,” “Orales,” and “Vatos,” of the pachuco generation sounded kind of silly and outdated. Hardly anybody spoke Spanish, anyway, except at home.

     As the 50’s came to a close, each Westside town still had Chicano gangs, but they were something of an anomaly, like caricatures of their past glory days. Really, it was the era of biker and car clubs. “Man” and “Dude,” were the more accepted terms of hipster identification. Images of James Dean and Rebel without a Cause stole the show, and a cool car was more glamorous than a zoot suit. Our Chicano fathers had moved out of the barrios and integrated the “White” suburbs, post WWII tract homes built over the old beanfields where their parents once labored, depleting barrio life.

     In the 1960s, there was a “pachuco” renaissance, and even though it didn’t look like the 1940’s pachucos, we all called them “pachucos,” for lack of a more accurate term. Obviously, pachuco didn’t mean zoot suitor. It meant something more specific: guys in a gang who used drugs, fought guys from other towns, and were always in trouble with the police. They didn’t call each other “homie” or “home boy.” They used the ubiquitous “Ese, “Vato,” or even "Loco." For some reason, a few cooler kids and athletes in town got caught up in the “life”. Even though many couldn’t even speak Spanish, they’d say “Ese,” “Vato,” and “Orale” with heart, if not always with the correct accent.

     Collectively, they had no given moniker. The term “cholo,” even though it had been around since before the 1930s, usually to designate a poor or working-class Mexican Indian, hadn’t yet been applied to them. Probably, people didn’t start referring to gangsters as “cholos” until the 1970s, just about the time they started calling each other “Home boy, “Homes,” or “Homie.”

     Maybe the terms might have had their roots in prison, when two guys from the same town found themselves “locked up” together. They might have spread in prison among Chicano, black, and even white inmates, who brought the "home boy" back to the neighborhoods once they were released.

     A google search says, somewhat vaguely, "Home Boy” goes back to Mexico, a translation of the word, “Hombre,” which the pachucos called each other in their day. That sounds like a bit of a stretch, though, since a direct translation of “hombre” is “man” or “dude” and has nothing to do with one’s hometown. I don't even recall Chicanos using it in the 1960's military when guys from the same hometowns were always meeting up.

     Others say it’s an African American “urban” term whose origins go back to the 1900s, which makes sense. After Emancipation, when former slaves moved from the same towns in the South and ended up together in the North, they would have seen each other as a “Home Boy” or a “Home Girl.”  

     It seems the term really took off in the late 1970’s – 80’s when hip-hop and rap became popular among urban youth of all ethnicities. Chicano gangsters throughout Los Angeles were already referring to each other as “Homeboy, “Homes, or “Homie,” so it wouldn’t be a stretch for black gangsters to use the term, as well.

     Even middle-class Chicanos, college students and professionals, started calling close friends “Home Boy,” of course, with their tongues placed firmly in their cheeks, with nowhere near the reverence gangsters used the term.

     By the mid-80’s, in urban Los Angeles, where East, Central, and South L.A. shared borders, it would have made sense for rappers to pick up the term “home boy” from Chicanos, who by then had begun to use it regularly, as well a listen to rap music. Rappers were the first to portray life on the urban streets of Los Angeles, so why not appropriate and glorify the language of the streets, right along with the “64 Chevy” and the baggie khakis and Pendleton’s, which Chicanos had been wearing since the early ’60’s.

      When Reagan’s War on Drugs and his Iran-Contra scandal flooded L.A.’s streets with "crack," gangster rap became a cultural phenomenon, reaching across the United States and to the far corners of the world, where even Japanese youth began referring to each other as “Home Boy” and their cars as “low riders.” 

     By 1988, the term “home boy” had become such a powerful personal identifier that even Father Greg Boyle named his gang prevention movement “Homeboy Industries.” In his book Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle calls the kids he worked with, collectively, not gangsters, cholos, or pachucos, but “Homeboys,” and individually – “…a home boy.”

     Then there’s artist David Gonzales “Homie Toys,” small figurines depicting home boys dressed in gangster clothing. He received some push back for glorifying gang life and lost some sponsors, but Gonzales doubled down saying it was "real" and a part of his culture. He knew people who looked that way and called each other by “Homie.” So, you can understand the surprise I felt as I came upon a "homie" souvenir store as I walked the back streets of Aguascalientes checking out the scene.

     Well, I guess all of this is fun speculation. I don’t really think there is an answer as to who first used the term, or when, kind of like the word Chicano, a lot of good ideas as to its origins but no concrete evidence, just more speculation, and the search for the holy grails of Chicano culture continue.