By Lindajoy Fenley

© 2008 chicoSol

 

Former Los Angeles gang member Luis Rodriguez has sentenced himself to a lifetime of community service.

The 54-year-old man with a Pachuco Cross tattooed on the soft skin between his left thumb and index finger is content with his decades-old and indefinite sentence. However, he is saddened when he thinks of many of his childhood companions. At least 25 of them were dead by the time he was 18 and more have died since. And while he acknowledges he's not the only person to have matured out of gang life, he laments that some of the others who escaped violent ends are now behind bars.

Once an angry young cholo wreaking havoc on the streets of Los Angeles, Rodriguez is nationally known today for his effort to help people turn their lives around.

A determined man whose profile features a strong chin pushed out because his jaw was broken in a street fight long ago, Rodriguez calls himself a soldier of change. He is a peaceful soldier, offering young people around the world a message of happiness and inner healing. He speaks with them in schools, prisons and at a non-profit book store-coffee house he, his wife and friends opened in a corner of California's San Fernando Valley otherwise bereft of bookstores and libraries.

Young people also find him on the pages of "Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA," the book he wrote in a futile effort to save his son from making the same mistakes he had.

Rodriguez speaks with a gentle voice of experience, winning the confidence of his young audiences. Long ago, this peaceful soldier was not so peaceful. "I did," he said in an e-mail, "do what the gang wanted me to do, including stabbings, shootings, robberies, and, once, fire-bombing a home. I was a 'good soldier' more than a leader."

Rodriguez' message is not just for troubled children seeking power and a sense of belonging in the gangs sprouting up in rural, suburban and urban America. It is for everyone, because society suffers immeasurably as it loses thousands of creative people who become destructive forces instead of contributing members, he explained. In addition to the great social price and lost productivity, there has been an astronomical increase in the cost of building and maintaining prisons.

The pull of gangs, once thought to be an inner-city phenomena, is as strong or stronger in suburban and rural areas because there is even less for young people to do, he said. The situation becomes exacerbated when they can't earn any money, and Rodriguez warned that gang violence is likely to increase as the economy worsens in the absence of community efforts to support youth.

"It is documented that gangs tend to rise in economic downturns," Rodriguez said. "Families break apart and gangs fill the emptiness."

The last time he was sucked into the violence and almost ended up in prison, he was an 18-year-old college student trying to turn his life around. Unfortunately, he also was a heroin addict who began shouting at a police officer he observed arresting a woman outside a nightclub. In flailing against the officers who were also arresting him, he inadvertently kicked one in the chest and was charged with assaulting a police officer. That could have put him away, but community members – a judge, teachers and social workers aware of his recent community work – helped him avert a prison sentence. 

Rodriguez' Web site sums up the end of this story. "Feeling responsible to the people who rallied to his defense, Luis turned away from the 'Crazy Life' and dedicated himself to conscious revolutionary thinking and activity, expanding his organizing efforts to other parts of East LA as well as Watts/South Central LA, LA's Harbor area and Pasadena. He also got off drugs at age 19, 'cold turkey.'…"

Although billions of dollars are spent on punishing people behind bars, Rodriguez told teenagers, teachers, parents and grandparents at a Sonoma County library this spring that much of the money is ill spent. "All we do is punish, punish, punish," he said.

Speaking to a full house on the eve of a two-day visit to three Sonoma County schools and the local juvenile detention facility, he repeated the message he delivers to audiences all over the country: Yes, wrongdoers should face consequences, but the justice system should help them heal and give back to society.

"Don't abandon our children," he repeatedly told the adults at the Rohnert Park-Cotati Public Library. He urged them to listen to youth, provide them with educational, entertainment and job opportunities, and look for more creative solutions dealing with the root of the problem. He maintains that prisons are not the answer to gang violence. The community, he said, must   "close ranks to cover the essential needs – for example decent schooling and training, food and jobs… we need to be alive culturally, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally."

Rodriguez first became a soldier of change during the late 1960s and early 70s when Chicano organizations empowered minority youth. He read books like "Manchild in the Promised Land," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and "Down These Mean Streets." With prodding from a concerned community organizer, he graduated from high school and started college. He distanced himself from gangs and became active in the student-activist organization MeCHA.

He wrote he had to work long and hard to disentangle himself from "the silky, web-like threads of 'la vida loca' " that had ensnared him as a child. The "crazy life" had grabbed hold of him at age 7 when he began stealing, and had tightened its tentacles when he was jumped into a gang at 11. Only the power of the imagination, he said, and lots of hard work allowed him to finally escape at the end of his teenage years.

Rodriguez discusses his efforts to save himself and his own family and repay those who helped him.

 "On my own, I had to sentence myself to a lifetime of community service," he told his Sonoma County audience. He spends almost a third of his time working with communities in this country, and has also worked in other countries – from Nigeria to El Salvador – where gang violence has emerged.

 

At school in Northern California

On a recent April morning, Rodriguez strode into the Rancho Cotate High School library toting a sampling of his 13 published books. His eyes sparkled from behind his large, wire-rimmed glasses as he opened a collection of his poetry called "My Nature is Hunger."

"I want to start by reading a poem," he told the 47 high school students:

 

"The calling came to me while I languished

in my room, while I whittled away my youth

in jail cells and damp barrio fields. …

It called me to war, to be writer;

to be scientist and march with the soldiers

of change."

 

Rodriguez' background – so different than that of most of the adults in the students' lives – combined with his easy-going manner, facilitates dialogue when he visits campuses. Most of those at the Rancho Cotate workshop had already read his book and came prepared to talk. They asked candid questions. Do you have tattoos? What stopped you from suicide? How did you leave your gang?

Rodriguez answered each question, dotting his answers with the repeated rhetorical question, "You know what I'm saying?" It seemed they did.

He said he kept his tattoos to remind him of his past. His wife, Maria Trinidad Rodriguez, who was never been lured into gang life, loves him the way he is, and, fortunately, his discrete tattoos haven't stopped him from earning a living. Nevertheless, because many gang tattoos do put people off, Rodriguez said he has pointed others to tattoo removal services. Facial tattoos are particularly problematic, he told the high school students.

Having read Rodriguez' desperate story of pills, liquor, aerosol spray and a razor held against his wrist, a girl asked about his suicide attempt. He replied that a song had come into his head in that one "crazy moment," helping him realize that he wanted to live. "As long as you have a song inside of you, you know what I'm saying? … Don't ever lose that song, that part of you that wants to live," he said.

Rodriguez told the students of his struggle to leave the web of violence. Gang members, he explained, turn their lives over to others; they are caught in the web; they aren't free. "The hardest part of changing your life when you're in the gang is regaining control of your own life," he said, noting that it is particularly difficult for the hard-core members like him.

When a person tries to leave, even former friends become enemies, he said.

The students accepted Rodriguez. When he asked them to write, not one hesitated.

He offered prompts designed to get them to think about where they are going, what they think of themselves and how they relate to others. He urged them to keep those questions in mind the rest of their lives.

Some of the students read their writing aloud, and when the workshop ended, nearly all of them lined up for Rodriguez to sign their books. Most said the experience was fun.

Rodriguez says he receives 300 to 500 letters from kids every year. "Almost all of them to a person say my book changed their life," he said. Some of their testimonials are printed in "Always Running."

 

'Keep Helping the Kids'

At a poetry reading in the San Quentin prison yard a few years ago, Rodriguez said a man he hadn't seen in 30 years walked up to greet him. He never knows whether people he knew from the streets might wish him harm. But Rodriguez was pleased when the San Quentin lifer said, "Whatever you do, keep helping the kids."

He told chicoSol his personal story could be a compelling coming-of-age movie script. But he hasn't yet trusted any of the producers who have approached him. He'll allow "Always Running" to become a movie only if the right person comes along who understands how to present the story and who will let him retain control. Having recovered his own life once, he's not about to give it away to Hollywood.

More immediately, there's another book on the horizon. Rodriguez said next year Simon & Schuster's Touchstone Books is scheduled to publish his book about the pull gang life exerts even on those who drop their chains and escape the web.

Although he distanced himself from the web of gang life as a young man, Rodriguez confessed that he wasn't totally free until just 15 years ago when he gave up drugs and alcohol.

 

To contact Luis Rodriguez or learn more about his work, visit his Website at http://www.luisjrodriguez.com.

 

Lindajoy Fenley is a writer who has worked in both Latin America and the United States. She is a contributing editor to chicoSol. She can be contacted at ljfenley@mac.com.