Two Kalihi boys, two different lives
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Staff Writer
Malakai Maumalanga and Benjamin Cayetano grew up on the opposite ends of a broken-down two-block stretch of Kalihi called Silva Street 40 years apart. To hear their stories about the neighborhood, they might as well have been raised on different continents.
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Cayetano burst out of a poor, proud and largely Japanese neighborhood, driving a delivery truck and working his way through law school. He left Silva Street for the suburbs in Pearl City, where he launched the political career that elevated him to governor.
Malakai Maumalanga, 25, grew up in the 1980s and 1990s on Silva Street, the same short roadway in Kalihi where Ben Cayetano lived four decades earlier. Cayetano became governor; Maumalanga led a gang and landed in jail.
He remembers building makeshift canoes out of corrugated iron to paddle to Mokauea Island, and wearing Japanese tabi on his feet to catch crabs on Sand Island. He recalls Silva Street neighbors keeping an eye on him and shooing him home when it began to get dark.
Two decades after Cayetano left the neighborhood, Maumalanga grew up on the same street. Known by the nicknames of "Molo" or "Molokai," Maumalanga is a former "enforcer" for a street gang called Cross Sun.
He recalls being attacked by Samoan boys in elementary school because he was Tongan. He remembers the "King's Men," a gang of older boys he began to hang out with when he was in the third grade. They played football in an alley, and the boys in the gang advised Maumalanga to be brave, to stand his ground and fight.
Life got a little easier when the kids at school realized he had the backing of the gang, he said. But as Maumalanga's gang involvement deepened over the years, the violence escalated. He eventually landed in jail for a shooting, an experience he said shook him awake and changed him.
In the lingo of sociologists, what happened on Silva Street is a story of a "neighborhood in transition." How Silva Street evolved from what Cayetano remembers in the 1940s and 1950s to what Maumalanga experienced in the 1980s and 1990s is the story of sometimes ugly change in urban Honolulu.
Both Cayetano and Maumalanga speak affectionately of little Silva Street, now a grubby mix of auto shops, dilapidated apartments and warehouses. Maumalanga, 25, hopes to become a social worker and steer the neighborhood kids to something better.
Cayetano shakes his head at Maumalanga's stories of drive-by shootings and teen suicides, and opines the neighborhood just somehow started to get meaner in the early 1970s.
In part, Kalihi was subject to the same growing pains that affected all of Hawai'i. Honolulu's population has nearly tripled since Cayetano was a boy, and the crime rate surged during the same years.
But some of what happened is more specific to Kalihi. There was an "industrialization" of Kalihi neighborhoods as tourism became the dominant industry. More businesses needed space to operate close to the population centers, said Karl Kim, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawai'i.
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Old Kalihi's suburban feel became gritty and urban. Kim points to the power lines that tower over portions of Kalihi as an example of the trend: "That sends a clear message that this is an industrial area, and the quality of community life isn't particularly important."
Gov. Ben Cayetano's childhood home doesn't look that different from Malakai Maumalanga's home. Yet, the time gap that separates their childhoods may have had a huge impact on how their lives unfolded.
The Silva Street steel yard that operated in Cayetano's day is still there, but most of the single-family homes Cayetano remembers have disappeared. Most were replaced by what are now run-down warehouses and auto repair shops.
Junked cars with flat tires are scattered around the neighborhood. The shaded sidewalk in front of the house where Cayetano grew up was littered with broken lawn chairs, empty beer bottles and cans when Cayetano visited recently.
Surveying the scene, Cayetano muttered: "We were poor, but we were clean. You know what I mean?"
Cayetano, who proudly cited his Kalihi days in his election campaigns, considers growing up in Kalihi to be a "badge of honor." He was happy there, and said his days there helped to shape his personal values.
Cayetano's parents divorced when he was small, and his father worked long hours in Waikiki at the Outrigger Canoe Club. Caye-
tano and his brother were usually on their own after school, and a next-door neighbor who was also divorced would check up on the house and intervene when he heard Cayetano and his brother quarreling on the other side of the wall.
"I could have gotten into so much trouble, but fortunately the neighborhood was such that the adults in the neighborhood would tell me when to go home, don't do this and do that, and they were older, so I respected them," he said. "That was a different world."
Cayetano remembers neighbors watching over him, but the odds are there would be fewer adults keeping an eye on the neighborhood today when the kids get home from school. In Kalihi and in urban communities elsewhere, youngsters in the neighborhoods usually have fewer relationships with caring adults, said Tony Pfaltzgraff, executive director of the Kalihi YMCA.
Kalihi has long been a first stop for new immigrants, and today the newcomers often must work harder and longer to make ends meet. There are more single-parent families and more families with both parents working. All of that means peer pressure is even more important, Pfaltzgraff said. "It's kind of that children-raising-children dynamic," he said.
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Drugs were absent in Cayetano's day; now, Pfaltzgraff said, dangerous drugs such as smoked crystal methamphetamine, or "ice," have added tremendously to Kalihi's problems.
Malakai "Molo" Maumalanga, 25, grew up in a Kalihi where he felt a need to carry a weapon even when going to the neighborhood market.
There was violence in Cayetano's day, but it was different. Back then, Kalihi boys banded together to defend the neighborhood from outsiders. Fights usually involved local boys against outsiders, often military personnel. "During my time, we never wanted to kill anybody," said Cayetano, 61.
Weapons were rare, and "about the dirtiest thing you could do in those days was kick a guy when he was down," Cayetano mused. "But that happened a lot."
When the "bull" of Central Intermediate School came to Kalakaua Intermediate to strut outside the fence, the neighborhood kids jumped him before he even made it once around the school, Cayetano said.
Once some youths from Kalihi Valley stopped by the local pool hall where young Cayetano and his friends were gathered and asked for help, and the two groups of teenagers piled into cars and drove to Palolo Housing to settle a score.
Men from a party in the project poured into the street to join the fight, with one man attacking the Kalihi boys with a hammer. The Kalihi crowd received a terrible beating and fled in a panic. "We got our asses kicked," Cayetano recalled.
Maumalanga knew a deeply divided neighborhood, one that had been so completely carved up by gangs that he felt he needed a weapon to embark on a trip to the neighborhood market.
By the time he attended Kalakaua Intermediate School, Maumalanga was deeply into gang life. "Every street get their own gang, every block. If you grew up different neighborhood but you move that neighborhood, you representing your gang, so you start recruiting from the neighborhood," he said.
"Couple streets down from my house, we used to have our rivals. Like, every night we'd get drunk and go at it. Every night, 30, 40 guys fighting in the street. Got to the point where they ending up drive-bying my house, shooting my house, gas-bombing my house."
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A walk to the closest park could be deadly, which meant there were virtually no recreational opportunities for kids, Maumalanga said. "It was hard. Never have little kids around. They'd be trapped indoors, couldn't come out day or night, because the streets was all infested with gang members. Parents was scared. People started moving out, their cars ended up getting bus' up from rocks, bullets."
While Hawai'i's governor is aware of how the Kalihi street scene of his memory differs from its current-day reality, he finds many of Maumalanga's childhood experiences incredulous.
For Maumalanga, the major change came when he was arrested after firing a handgun at a group of other youths in 1995 in a confrontation at a Kalihi gas station, hitting one in the leg. Maumalanga claimed he fired in self-defense, but he was charged with attempted murder.
While awaiting trial, he shared a cell with a rival gang member, and both were afraid to sleep. But as they talked, he was stunned to discover how alike they were.
Maumalanga was eventually acquitted of all but a firearms charge, and was released. In a meeting on neutral territory in a Kahala Mall restaurant, he met and made peace with the gang member he shot, and now visits Hawai'i schools to warn students to avoid gang life.
Social workers who counsel youth in the area agree that for the moment at least, the gang activity in Kalihi has dropped off dramatically although it remains a poor and sometimes unsafe place. Debbie Spencer, a social worker with the nonprofit Adult Friends for Youth, said Maumalanga's peacemaking and anti-gang work had a lot to do with the relative peace on Silva Street.
Maumalanga is clearly pleased to see youngsters such as his niece and nephew playing in the street until dusk. The kids set up makeshift skateboard ramps at Silva and Kalihi streets, and their older brothers have turned their attention from hanging out in gangs to hanging out in nightclubs, he said.
Maumalanga downplays his own part in this, suggesting gang membership has essentially gone out of style for most youths in the neighborhood.
"The world moving, but Silva moving, changing too, ah?" he said.
