FIFTH & HILL STREET

FIFTH & HILL The CINCO LOMAS gang began life in the mid-70’s (est. 1975/76) in Los Angeles downtown jewelry district surrounding Pershing Square located on 5th and Hill Streets; hence the original name for the gang FIFTH & HILL. 5&H was at first not a street gang in the Chicano sense of things in those years because they were more of a Paisa Vatos Locos Cholos moving and doing things, tu sabes. They fell in line more with the (22) Border Brothers ranfla more so than with the Chicano Sureno car, and Fifth and Hill thrived under that flag because it allowed them to enhance their pipeline between the borderland town of Tijuas (Tijuana) and Los (L.A.) allowing them to grow unchallenged and un-taxed. One would ask, where did these Paisa Cholos grow up? What neighborhood they came from? Downtown LA? Really? But back in the days there was a very notorious Castle Park (Bunker Hill) neighborhood overlooking downtown’s central market barrio just up the hill from Angels’ Flight stairs on 3rd and Olive Streets. Although during its early era of the 1900’s, Bunker Hill Castle Park neighborhood was very affluent and well to do, by the 60’s and 70’s it had fallen into low costs hotels and apartment buildings. BY the mid-1970s the whole housing area had gone from White-European to Mexican. And that’s how it was in this downtown jewelry district were on the one hand you had successful middle-to-upper class Amerika being supplied for all their needs by the park paisa cholos. Everything from coca to rucas, from the Pershing Square, to Broadway, to Main Street; hence the reason they had an 8th Street Locos clique to run the nightwalkers on the Main Street strip, Fifth and Hill had the supply on lock. The gang grew into bigger and harder connects, to the point where they got a bullseye on their backs and they got hit with both local, state and federal cases. They got hit so hard that for a while the only place where you would still find them operating was at the Linea 13 and El Tango (downtown) Tijuana. But 5&H was not to be dismissed, they came back and set it off in South LA, they established themselves in the Nickerson Gardens (Bounty Hunters Bloods) projects in Watts during the start of the new millennium and have been representing their set ever since posted up as a Chicano Varrio, this time fully in line with the norm of Chicano Varrio Street politics.