'What happened to Austin?' This one-handed barber has a story to tell

Feb. 22--On the door of Austin's Most Wanted, a no-frills barbershop in an industrial strip off Burleson Road in Southeast Austin, a muscular character with an impeccable fade smirks through prison bars he bends like rubber bands. Inside, Lawrence "Lench" Martinez efficiently wields his clippers to help his clients achieve similar swag.

Working with his left hand, the only hand he has, he shears away unruly shag, sculpting clean hairlines, sharp sideburns and goatees. The 32-year-old native Austinite started cutting hair when he was 13 years old, but he's had his license only since 2016. He finished barber school and landed this steady gig shortly after he caught regional heat as a rapper, stunning the city with his incisive take on gentrification: "What Happened to Austin? (My Beautiful City)."

For years he didn't apply for a professional training program because he was afraid the powers that be would shun a barber without two hands. Instead, he kept a side hustle, rolling up to give his friends $8 cuts on the sly.

Looking back, the man who brands himself "the one-handed bandit taking over the planet" is not bitter about the wasted years.

"I'm not mad because the world hasn't cut me any breaks," he says. "I tried to get disability, they said I'm not disabled. I worked for Budweiser, Coca Cola, Miller Lite, I've worked with a dolly, on the truck. All that stuff, drove a forklift. Thank God I never made those kind of excuses."

There are many excuses Martinez could have made. The hand, undeveloped at birth, was a minor part of the raw deal life laid out for him. He grew up hard, in the corners of the city where poverty strains communities, gang leaders become heroes and drugs are an easy escape. Within his own family, Martinez bore witness to the way lives wither before their time. He was 17 when his father, a reformed gang leader, died. Soon after, an uncle he adored, who was in the home stretch of a lengthy prison sentence, died of a heroin overdose in jail.

"He was finally scot free," Martinez says, shaking his head. "All he had to do was come home. I was planning on starting a landscaping business just with him."

Heartbroken and emotionally raw, Martinez found solace in hip-hop. Inspired by the way Tupac Shakur used stark wordplay to paint vivid pictures of his community, he picked up his pen.

"The music saved my life," he says. Put off by a pay-to-play structure that plagued Southern hip-hop shows in Austin, he didn't do many live performances, but the act of expressing himself on a track, "going into the studio and trying to make music better than everyone else," eased the pain.

He built his skills quietly, flying under the radar for over a decade, then in January 2016, he made waves with "What Happened to Austin? (My Beautiful City)." The blistering protest song succinctly nailed the anxiety and outrage about gentrification in East Austin, from the razed piñata shop to the multimillion-dollar condos cropping up on every corner, pricing out working-class Hispanic families who have lived in the neighborhood for generations.

Longtime Texas hip-hop booster Matt Sonzala called him one of the most important rappers in Austin. Community organizers struggling "to convince people not to fall for a developer's slick tongue" applauded the way the song drove the message home.

Martinez, who grew up in South Austin but has deep east side roots, felt obligated to speak out. "When they tear something down, it tears at my heart," he says.

"They're doing their best to tear the biggest barrio apart," he says. "They're doing the best to ruin it, when they're separating us and sending us to Elgin and Kyle."

'Back when all the casas were owned by La Raza'

Martinez's family has been in Central Texas so long, they can't trace their roots back to Mexico. As far he knows, his forefathers settled in Bastrop County in the 1800s, but for the last several generations, Austin has been home. "Everything that's happened here has happened right in front of our eyes," he says. "The stories I hear are not from Guerrero, or Tamaulipas, Monterrey, they're from (East) Seventh Street, Sixth Street, what it used to be like."

His family was among the first to move into the Santa Rita Courts housing project when it was constructed in the 1930s, and a few generations later they were still struggling to get ahead in the segregated, poverty-stricken neighborhood. "My dad is from the east side, born and raised in the gutter," Martinez says. "And went to war, literally, in his neighborhood."

In the early '80s, Lawrence Martinez Sr. was a promising boxer with potential to go professional. He trained at the A.B. Cantu Rec Center near his home at East Third and Caney streets, but when his family moved and the gym was no longer in walking distance, the dream fell out of reach.

"(They were) dirt-poor. His dad passed away when he was 9. No cars, Section 8 housing. The opportunities that people take for granted nowadays were not presented to you back then," Martinez says.

"I don't know that my father was a victim of circumstances. I don't know that anybody is, but the circumstances didn't help him. It almost felt as if, back then, the system was set up for us to fail. When I say us, I mean Chicanos and the blacks."

In East Austin in the '80s and '90s, working class people struggled to get ahead. Opportunities seemed scarce. "There wasn't anything to look forward to back then," Martinez says. "You could learn computer technology at Austin High. They would teach you bricklaying at Johnson."

The elder Martinez turned to crime. He rose through the ranks to become the leader of East Gran Varrio (EGV), one of several street gangs that turned East Austin into a war zone in the late '80s. During that era, drive-by shootings were commonplace, and squabbles over territory often exploded into gun battles. "I guess you could say (they) terrorized the neighborhood, but they also protected the neighborhood," he says. "They built it back up."

On Easter Sunday in April 1990, a battle erupted between EGV and rival gang the Latin Kings at Festival Beach, on the southeastern shore of Lady Bird Lake (then Town Lake). At the time, veteran Austin police officers told the Statesman it was the worst gang violence they could remember. They worried that a gang war might be breaking out. Five people were injured, and the community was outraged.

Less than two weeks later, the two gangs faced each other again, in the fields of Pan Am Park, near the rec center where the elder Martinez used to train and the amphitheater where, years later, his son would film the video for "What Happened to Austin?"

The meeting was brokered not by authorities but by a 38-year-old woman, a mother of three who had known Martinez Sr. since he was a child. She begged him to negotiate a truce so that the "quiet, innocent people who live in the neighborhood" could sit by their windows again without fear of being struck by a stray bullet.

"We want to settle the violence between us so that people in this neighborhood can open their windows and doors again," the Statesman reported Martinez saying while he shook hands with his rival.

'What happened to Austin, pt. 2'

As its violent past fades into the history books, East Austin has become what many -- especially outside Austin -- call one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the country. But as property values and taxes soar, Martinez fears the families who once worked for peace in their community will be forced to flee. In the two years since he recorded "What Happened to Austin," he has watched Austin's gentrification situation get worse, not better. In his mind, the East Austin he loved is essentially a loss. For "What Happened to Austin, pt. 2," a track he's working on, he plans to turn his attention to Dove Springs, his own childhood neighborhood. With market forces driving up home prices in neighboring Montopolis, he worries the last affordable corners of the city will not be far behind.

"When a BMW dealership comes down to replace Tinseltown, that's a telltale sign ... it's getting very upscale in South Austin," he says. "And that's a place I called home for many years, and I don't know if I'll be able to afford it. Maybe I will, but the people I love won't be able to."

He also sees an open ugliness that "has been made acceptable because of our president" creeping into the traditionally Hispanic areas of the city.

"I cut people's hair and they tell me, 'Hey, I got cussed out, I got called a wetback last night on my street at the house where my grandma owned, passed down to us nine years ago,'" he says.

In his track "Sleeping Giant," he addresses the fallout around the president's anti-immigration rhetoric directly.

"You don't gotta be violent/but you don't gotta be silent/because you're dealing with a tyrant who treats you like a migrant/you've woken up a giant," he raps.

He recorded the song during the 2016 election, but he released a video for it last year. The video cuts vintage footage of protest marches with shots of Hispanic children at a backyard party swinging at a President Donald Trump piñata.

The "sleeping giant" is a largely disengaged Hispanic electorate that could have real sway in Texas politics if they made it to the polls. Martinez counts many of his friends and colleagues among this group.

"They're pissed off and they don't know what to do, and I'm telling them: If you're mad, go vote," he says.

But the personal is political, too, and for his next track, "The Boulevard," Martinez returns to his own biography for a song about his father and the way drug abuse ravages lives.

"Heroin is taking Austin by storm again, but nobody is actually talking about it," he says. "These are my peers. People I went to high school with. Some of them didn't even smoke weed, and now black tar heroin is their drug of choice. So it was alarming, but rather than just be alarmed about it I wrote a song about it."

He's storyboarding a video for the song, a gritty tale about the perils of street life that feels crucial to him right now.

"Heroin is hell. It's living hell on earth," he says. "It's everything you ever wanted and everything you better stay the (expletive) away from."

Growing up the way he did, he understands the appeal of gang culture and drugs, but he's trying to motivate others to find a better way. He wants to lead by example. "Going to prison was kind of cool back in the day. Like, you went there, you survived. I don't think like that anymore. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm that guy that didn't go that route. Look at me now. This could be you. The youngsters, 16 years old, I went through all those same things, but I was bigger than that, and I'm here on the other side making $1,300-1,500 a week. I'm going to make a little bit more (and) open (my own) shop, so why not you?"

It's been a frustrating year for Martinez. A divorce threw him for a personal loop, and the anti-gentrification movement he hoped "What Happened to Austin?" would inspire never fully emerged. But despite the setbacks, he's moving forward. In his own family he's witnessed how reformed gang members struggle to stay straight, and he's making moves to open a barbershop that provides job opportunities to former convicts. He's not giving up on music, either.

"There's a lot of history in Austin," he says. "There's a lot of things that goes untold or unnoticed, or overlooked. That's unfortunate, but if I have a voice and I have people's ear, I'm going to tell those stories."

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