Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

At the time he wrote Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (1993), Rodríguez had completed only a year of college and brought to writing only raw talent, a love of storytelling, and an ear for the harsh music of his adopted language. His coming-of-age narrative is much more than yet another scared-straight strategy to pressure impressionable teens away from hardcore criminal behavior. Although the book was hailed for its chiseled, raw prose and its deadpan narration that reveals the depth of the gang’s activities—vicious rapes, brutal fights, random killings, rampant drug use, and countless burglaries—without intrusive emotional counternarrative, Always Running refused to simply pander to the public’s prurient fascination with violence. The book is more than a searing documentary of life on the mean streets of the barrios of East Los Angeles. Rodríguez deftly moves his narrative toward the generous and entirely convincing offer of a way out of the street life. It is not an easy or quick solution; indeed, the title refers to Rodríguez’s lifelong movement away from his dissolute youth and, by extension, his fears of his own son’s flirtation with gang culture in Chicago. Rodríguez shapes his own experiences into a cautionary tale that seeks to actually change teens’ lives. With the publication of this book, Rodríguez joined Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, and John Updike, among others, to win the prestigious Carl Sandburg Literary Award, presented annually by the Chicago Public Library Foundation for a work that most enhances the power of the written word to impact lives.


See Also

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Martha P. Cotera

Nicky Cruz

Tomás Rivera

Gary Soto

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Luis J. Rodríguez

by Joseph Dewey

American writer and activist

Rodríguez came through the gang culture of the East Los Angeles barrios and wrote a best-selling book about his experiences, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

Areas of achievement: Literature; journalism; activism

Early Life

Luis Javier Rodríguez (lew-EHS hahv-YEHR rahd-REE-gehs) was born by design in El Paso, Texas, on the American side of the Mexican border. His parents had lived in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. His father, a high school principal, and his mother, a school secretary, wanted their children to grow up in the economic promise of America and away from the violent street life of Juarez. The family initially relocated to El Paso but moved to Los Angeles when Luis was two, settling in the barrios of East Los Angeles. Young Luis loved the stories his mother would tell, some drawn from Walt Disney films the boy had never seen, others from the folk tales of her Raramuri people. She would recite long ballads from memory, and Luis would be mesmerized by the music of language. He loved to escape into books; facing punishment in school for speaking Spanish, he used books to teach himself English. As he adjusted to the hard reality of poverty, the routine indignities of bigotry, the oppressive presence of the police, and the omnipresence of warring street gangs, he sought the refuge of the public library where he would read until the building closed. As he read, however, he noticed that, save for minor characters in John Steinbeck’s novels, few Chicanos were depicted.

Life’s Work

Although he never lost his love of books, by the age of eleven Rodríguez had been recruited into a gang. He began stealing and, within a year, was using drugs. He participated in gang battles, witnessing friends knifed and shot. Friends died of drug overdoses or committed suicide. As his street life—or la vida loca (the crazy life)—became more criminal, Rodríguez drifted from school, dropping out at fifteen. In and out of juvenile detention centers for offenses ranging from hitting a police officer to attempted murder, he was kicked out of his home a year later and forced to live on the streets until his parents relented and he moved into the garage. By then he was a heroin addict and a hardcore gang member.

Despite such activities, by the late 1960’s Rodríguez was politically active in the radical Chicano movement, becoming involved in a civil rights organization that promoted Hispanic pride and culture. He also took part in the movement that opposed the American military presence in Vietnam. In addition, as he sat in jail cells, Rodríguez began to write stories and free-verse poems about gang life and the barrio. Years later he claimed that by then violence and drugs had rendered him invisible and that writing reclaimed his identity.

Indeed, creativity became a viable alternative. Rodríguez loved to paint, and he designed a series of street murals for his neighborhood. At the encouragement of a counselor, he entered some of his jailhouse vignettes in a regional writing contest, and his work won honorable mention. However, he was still an addict and still in his gang. When he was arrested at eighteen for participating in a killing as part of a gang initiation, he was given a lighter sentence of six years largely because of the intervention of counselors and neighborhood leaders who saw promise in him. Determined to validate their confidence and now convinced that the street life was a dead end, Rodríguez got off drugs and alcohol and, once released, found regular work at a steel mill. He finished high school and took night courses at East Los Angeles Community College. He began writing for local newspapers and was hired as a crime reporter and photographer for the San Bernardino Sun.

In 1985, he moved to Chicago to write about cultural and political issues for an underground newspaper. Believing that writing had been crucial to his own reclamation, he promoted poetry readings in some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods and helped start the Guild Complex, a multimedia arts center. Rodríguez also spoke at schools and prisons, youth facilities and churches, and he secured financial investors to start Tia Chucha Press. Named for his beloved aunt, the press published activist poetry by minority writers.

Although by 1991 he had published two volumes of poetry, Rodríguez had never returned to his jailhouse notes. When his fifteen-year-old son professed ambitions to join a Chicago street gang, Rodríguez shaped these notes into a memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., published in 1993. Rodríguez’s narrative of the street life marked the first time that a Chicano gang member had come out so publicly to describe the gang experience. The book became a national best seller; critics praised its documentary-like realism and its unflinching account of the violence, drug use, promiscuous and often violent sex, and criminal activity of the gang culture. For Rodríguez, however, the book was solely intended to ensure that his son did not pursue gang life. Despite Rodríguez’s intention to protect high school students and the book’s enthusiastic endorsement by both parents and teacher groups, Always Running became one of the most challenged, and most censored, works in the contemporary canon.

Now a national celebrity, a frequent guest on radio and television, and a much-sought-after speaker for schools, Rodríguez turned to numerous writing projects, and in the next decade he published volumes of poetry, award-winning children’s books, short story collections, and a novel. In addition, his nonfiction writings appeared in prominent newspapers and news magazines. More important, he used his celebrity to spearhead community action projects, including Youths Struggling for Survival, an organization that aims to expose low-income urban youth to the power of creativity.

Rodríguez returned to Los Angeles in 2000. There, he was instrumental in establishing the Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, an arts complex that provided a forum for the paintings, poetry, performance recitations, music, and writings of artists that represented the full range of Los Angeles’s rich multicultural community. Since then, Rodríguez has tirelessly promoted cultural activities that transcend the city’s racial and ethnic divisions, which he argues have made inevitable the city’s violent streets. He maintains that gang culture can be eradicated only by addressing the economic and cultural conditions that created this culture.

Significance

Luis J. Rodríguez understood that hope was a tough sell to the teens in the barrios. Without relying on extravagant promises or quick-fix solutions, without peddling some program or touting his credentials in counseling or psychology, Rodríguez had immense impact because he drew on his own experience, his own reclamation from the streets. His very presence offered hope. His writings and his advocacy of teen intervention programs designed to show at-risk, disillusioned youth creative alternatives to self-destructive criminal activity and drug and alcohol dependence have shaped a heal-yourself therapy in which teens recognize the dangers and embrace productive alternatives. In a vision that grew increasingly spiritual as Rodríguez matured, he challenged the younger generation to expand its vision beyond the radical isolation of the street and the narrow concerns of turf warfare to engage a broader sense of compassion and shared humanity.

Further Reading

1 

Rodríguez, Luis J. Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. 1993. Reprint. Clearwater, Fla.: Touchstone Books, 2005. Reprint of Rodríguez’s gang memoir. Includes a poignant introduction that discusses his dedication to his son and the proliferation of gang violence in a post-September 11, 2011, urban world.

2 

_______. Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Rodríguez’s careful analysis of the spiritual isolation of gang life and his prescription for remedying its causes: intercity violence, poverty, and drug use.

3 

Vigil, Diego James. A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Wide-ranging look at the broad influence of gangs on the contemporary city. Introduces the cultural context that explains the appeal of gangs for disillusioned, disenfranchised urban youth.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dewey, Joseph. "Luis J. Rodríguez." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240052501001.
APA 7th
Dewey, J. (2012). Luis J. Rodríguez. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dewey, Joseph. "Luis J. Rodríguez." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.