A key scene in Drive By, an indie feature about gangbangers in Little Village, takes place under the el tracks just east of the Blue Line stop at California and Cermak. The hard-bitten Loco spies one of his fellow gang members consorting with someone from a rival crew. His gang, the Brotherhood, is under siege–targeted by other gangs, pressured by the police, and betrayed from within. Loco figures he’s looking at the turncoat and decides to shut him up for good. He walks up, pulls out a Smith & Wesson, and delivers a few words of advice before pulling the trigger: “Never betray your friends.”
“I believe in Juan,” says Zuniga. “To me, he’s a brother. When we came back disappointed, I felt like LA had won. Thousands come back the same way, except they spent more money trying to prove they could do something. I didn’t want that to happen to Juan because he had a lot of years invested.” Frausto went back to the drawing board and spent three weeks drafting a new script, “The Brotherhood,” based mostly on stories Zuniga had told him about his rough childhood. After several revisions, the pair pooled their savings, applied for loans, ran up their credit cards, and solicited contributions from friends and relatives to produce the film.
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Thomas Kelly High School, where he spent his freshman year, was especially tough. “I had too many enemies there because everybody thought I was a gangbanger,” he says. “The white guys didn’t like me because I looked white but wasn’t. The Mexicans didn’t like me because they didn’t know which gang I was in.” When one of his friends got jumped by a white gang called HEADS (“Help Eliminate And Destroy Spics”), Zuniga leaped into the fray to help him out. Another time a 19-year-old Latino gang member hit him and snatched the gold chain off his neck; after Zuniga pressed charges, the hood threatened to shoot him.
The murders of several friends dissuaded Zuniga from joining the gang. “I knew how I was. I knew I could be real crazy and I was going to start hurting people for real. I was worried about that.”
In elementary school Frausto was a strong student and a talented artist. He got his first taste of the movies at the old Marshall Square Theatre, near Marshall and Cermak, where he became a fan of Mexican director Felipe Cazals. In 1977 he convinced his father to take him to Star Wars, and two years later he saw a WTTW special about the making of the film that showed director George Lucas in action. Frausto was taken with the idea of making movies, and at age 12 he began messing around with a neighbor’s eight-millimeter camera.
Principal photography for “The Brotherhood” took place in January and February 1999. Frausto and Zuniga had no difficulty finding locations, shooting at Washtenaw Park and George’s Hotdogs on Kedzie. But staging scenes of gang violence in Little Village posed some problems. A pair of cops interrupted the death scene under the el to find out what was happening, and a noisy crowd disrupted a scene in front of AAA Foods on 25th Street in which a gang member shoots his girlfriend, her lover, and then himself.
