Always Running
Authors: Luis J. Rodriguez
La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
Luis J. Rodríguez
This work is dedicated to:
Antonio Gutierrez
Carlos Mancillas
Eddie Lozano
Linda Treviño
John “Spook” Fabela
Marlene “Negra” Domínguez
Don “Sonny” López
Miguel Robles
Elías Avila
Richard “Porky” Sierra
Lenard “Gallo” Ocaña
Fernando “Caballo” Arredondo
Martin Alvarado
Fidel “Puppet” Hernandez
Marcelino “Daddio” Cabrera
David “Puppet” Alcon
Freddie Mendoza
David “Loco” Domínguez
Ricky Herrera
René Molinar
Al “Pache” Alvarez
Leonard “Lalo” Villaseñor
Ruben “Sharkie” Martínez
Daniel “Indio” Cabrera
and
Rodolfo “Sonny” Gómez
My life is a poem to their memory.
—Luis J. Rodríguez
The Long Run
: New Introduction to
Always Running
A Biography of Luis J. Rodríguez
New Introduction to
Always Running
“My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.”
—Joseph Conrad
W
HAT’S HAPPENED IN THE
more than ten years since
Always Running
first hit the bookstands? My son Ramiro, for whom I wrote the book, is serving a 28-year prison sentence for three counts of attempted murder. More of my homies from 30 years ago have died, including Rene Muñoz-Ledo, who wrote a family-produced book, “Forgiven,” about overcoming his gang and drug experiences before succumbing to cancer in 2004. The Chicago youth I started to work with right after the book’s publication through Youth Struggling for Survival (YSS) continue to organize and thrive, although a few have been killed or imprisoned.
Good and bad things have occurred. But the good—young people changing their lives, the growth of organized urban peace efforts, the expansion of spiritual-based practices and the intensifying debate on how to address violence in this country—have far outweighed the bad.
I have gone to hundreds of public and private schools to speak. In Boston’s Hyde Park, the mostly African American students there created a ballet and a rap song based on the book. In East Lansing’s Eastern High where black and Mexican youth had been warring,
Always Running
became the one thing they could unite on (a student there painted a mural in the school library with scenes from the book). In East L.A.’s Garfield High, Chicano students established an after-school study circle to become intellectually engaged and politically active based on what they learned from the book.
I’ve visited numerous prisons, juvenile detention centers, sober-living homes and rehabilitation centers. I’ve read my poems in the Maximum Security Yard at San Quentin Prison as prisoners talked, worked out with weights, played chess and jogged (oh, and quite a few stopped to listen). In one California prison, I saw a homeboy I had not seen in 30 years—all that time he’d been in prison. He told me, “Whatever you do, help the kids.” I’ve met court judges who made reading my book part of offenders’ sentences.
I’ve addressed thousands of teachers, law enforcement personnel, social workers, community organizers, journalists, government officials, graduate students, writers and others in countless conferences, workshops, peace summits and forums.
I’ve appeared on major media programs such as
The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America,
CNN’s
Talk Live, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,
and other shows on BBC-London, C-SPAN, National Public Radio, Discovery’s Health Network, Pacifica Radio, PBS-TV, Spanish-language TV and radio networks and more.
My work has taken me to Toronto, Montreal, Paris, London, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Cologne, Munich, Heidelberg, southern Germany, Amsterdam, Groningen, Salzburg, Mexico City, Chihuahua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.
For more than a decade, I’ve taken part in purification ceremonies in Native American and Native Mexican “sweat” lodges (called
inipis
or
temescallis
) with gang and other troubled youth as well as recovering adults; with longtime spiritual friends Luis Ruan, Frank Blázquez, and my wife, Trini; and with elder medicine men like Anthony Lee of the Navajo Reservation.
This work is about the “long run,” not just for today, for any possible accolades or to meet funding deadlines—but for the adequate and full protection, health and balance, as Native elders say, of our young people seven generations from now.
In spite of this,
Always Running
has become a lightning rod for certain right-wing groups who are trying to stop its use in schools because of the book’s politics and graphic nature. According to the American Library Association, it is one of the 100 most censored books in the United States.
In Rockford, Illinois, I debated a prominent school board member lobbying to ban the book to an overflow audience of mostly book supporters. In San Jose, California, I wrote an opinion piece to counter the efforts there to remove the book from approved reading lists. In Chicago, I addressed leaders of a group of 200 students who had walked out of their school to protest the removal of the book from the school library.
One strange incident occurred in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was speaking at various schools and community events in the area. At one point, I tried to enter a school with
Always Running
in hand. School officials stopped me at the entrance saying I could come in, but my book could not—it had been banned in that school.
As I see it, the battle lines are between the idealized, superficial and insular-minded way of looking at the world (which many schools and mainstream culture impose on our children and the rest of us), and the actual conditions of our lives with all its multiplicity, struggle, shading and nuance. Most children recognize the hypocrisy of emphasizing a linear, clean and desexed past while they confront daily the muddy, uncertain and hybrid truths.
Sexuality, for example, is a natural part of human development. Books don’t cause teenagers to become sexual—hormones do. Instead of providing understanding and badly needed guidance to teenagers when the hormones kick in, too often they are told “sex is wrong,” that it shouldn’t be addressed until they mature (instead of preparing them so they do mature), and that there’s only one way of looking at sex and other disturbing topics like race, class and power (mostly by denying their existence). The truth is much more complex.
There is too much censorship of reality in the classroom. Whatever involves social discomfort, emotional depth or hard thinking is cut out. Language, behavior, ideas, ways of expression and authentic imaginations—as well as books—have been censored. Everything is directed toward “normalcy,” the folding into the fast-paced, material- and status-oriented capitalist value system. As a result, much of the expanse and variety of the human condition is belittled or invalidated. Our humanity is sacrificed, little by little.
Despite this,
Always Running
continues to be requested and used. I’ve been told countless times that this is one of the few books nonreaders love to read. And that it is often the most stolen book in libraries and classrooms. I don’t condone this, although it usually happens in places where there are no bookstores or decent library facilities.
Yes,
Always Running
is hard-core. Yes, it’s graphic. It’s meant to be this way. You can’t tell this true story about real gang life without the graphic details. Many kids who love the book have also lived through similar experiences. Too many adults are naive or close-minded about what their children are going through.
The thing is,
Always Running
was a book that had to be written. It’s the first major account of the Chicano barrio gang experience from an actual participant (unlike the many sociological studies by social scientists). After more than 80 years of L.A. barrio warfare, thousands killed, several generations of gang families, parents who lost two or three sons, this story had to be told.
I can’t claim
Always Running
is representative of the vastly multifaceted Chicano gang life. I can only take responsibility for the truths I felt compelled to reveal, with the necessary changes in facts and names to protect the innocent
and
the guilty.
Like any good story, there are deep lessons, most of which I learned “the hard way.” My life on the streets involved stealing, shootings, stabbings, arrests, homelessness, drug use and overdoses. I’ve been beaten and shot at—although never hit—and I’ve beaten, stabbed and shot at others. I felt too far gone to be redeemed, to be any good to anyone or anything. I didn’t have plans for a future, for a career, or the dreams to take me there.
You’ll find all this and more in
Always Running.
At the same time, you’ll also discover the transcendent account of a poet/artist who, with the help of a small, socially engaged core of community leaders and teachers, overcame his own deeply held pathologies to take on the great challenges of an oppressive and exploitative reality—and finding his own particular destiny with words, dedicated himself to making positive contributions in transforming that reality.
I went from victim to perpetrator to witness to revolutionary. More than 30 years later, I continue to do the vital work of helping create a healthy earth and a healthy society worthy of our gifts, our needs and our dreams (which is the ultimate struggle, the one fight really worth fighting).
I have a duty to take those lessons and experiences to as many people as will listen, to expand the conversation about why people join gangs, are violent, lose their imaginations and their hopes, and what we can do as creative and caring communities to truly see and address these ongoing and deepening concerns.
Censorship, repression and suppression simply don’t work.
All-out creativity; poetic expression; access to life-giving resources; truly meaningful and respectful relationships; purposeful and life-affirming schooling and work (jobs and more jobs); decent health care; drug and psychiatric treatment as needed; and truly rehabilitative and initiatory practices are a few of the things that do work.
But the political will and narrowing economic resources, as well as the cultural values of our present time, have not fostered the growth or taken up the responsibility of healing a nation. Prisons and war seem to be the only way out for most poor and abandoned communities.
We have the technological means, we have the people, we have the ideas—we don’t have the proper social organization.
No one can stand gangs. Everyone wants to get rid of them. But the solid and necessary work that will actually delve into the social, political, psychological, economic and spiritual basis for gangs, drug addictions, as well as domestic and street violence is not being done. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, thousands are hacking at the branches of the problem; few are working at the root.
While it’s true many organizations, churches, unions, neighborhood councils, native sweat lodge circles, community centers, arts programs, poetry circles, hip-hop organizations and mentoring groups continue to transform lives among the most hard-core gang youth, there are still tens of thousands more young people, most not even in gangs, who are being abandoned, pushed aside, condemned to prison, drug addictions or early deaths.