Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., by Luis J. Rodrigues

excerpts from Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., by Luis J. Rodrigues, 1993 Curbstone Press

Title page/Frontispiece, a quotation from Jacques Rivière

“There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.”

p157

“An invitation to abandon illusions about a situation, is an invitation to abandon a situation in need of illusions.”

p237

I arrived at a point which alarmed even me, where I had no desire for the internal night, the buoyancy of letting go, the bliss of the void. I required more, a discipline as bulwark within which to hold all I valued, a shield against the onslaught.

p238

There comes a moment when one faces the fresh features of an inner face; a time of conscious rebirth, when the accounting’s done, the weave in its final flourish, a time when a man stands before the world — vulnerable, nothing-owed — and considers his place in it. I had reached such a moment.

p239

I recalled the old people who came here, the men in brown suede hats and canes, and black-shawled women with rosaries clutched inside vein-streaked hands. I recalled the mothers who had to be restrained as they lay across the casket, beseeching to be buried with their son or daughter. I recalled the working men with their calloused palms and sun-beaten faces whose hardened eyes were forged from the heat of foundries or from under the sun’s gaze— and I remembered the stream which emanated from those dense eyes, how it pulled something raw and smoldering from every one of us.

p240

The scourge of PCP — “angel dust” — had begun to grip almost every facet of barrio life. Whole neighborhoods became like ghost towns as increasing numbers of young people were hooked into this overpowering narcotic, easily manufactured in back-room laboratories and distributed widely and cheaply. Although PCP preceded the crack epidemic, it was enough to make blabbering idiots of once-vigorous boys and girls.

p 242

Along with all this, the neighborhoods also changed. What I had unknowingly conjured up in my teatro productions came to fruition as land developers, along with county and city officials, tore up whole streets to build new townhouses and malls and expensive condos.

p243

When I returned to Los Angeles, I moved to Boyle Heights and later to neighborhoods such as White Fence, Florence, South Pasa, La Colonia Watts and Gerahty Loma. I found work in foundries, refineries, steel mills and construction sites, which I would do for another seven years before pursuing the disciplines of journalism and literature.

p248

Government officials at local, state and federal levels proved they would not allow any serious challenge to the economic and political underpinnings of poverty in this country. They dispatched the National Guard and Army troops, who turned their guns against Americans — barely more than a year after the bloody (for the Iraqui people) Persian Gulf War.

p249

In the months after the uprising, police broke up as many gang “unity” rallies as they could, attesting truce leaders, and inflaming the ire of housing project  residents in which many of the rallies were being held. The LAPD told the media they feared the gangs were going to turn on them, possibly ambush them. Yet no police officer has been killed or severely hurt since the King verdicts — even during the uprising, although instances have emerged of police shooting several people, some of them in the back, during and since the riots.

p249

This is not the first time the federal government has intervened. It has derailed and, whenever possible, destroyed the unity which emerged out of the watts Rebellion, out of the Chicano Moratorium, out of the Wounded Knee protests. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, the Weathermen, Puerto Rican liberation groups, the Chicano Liberation Front— and more recently MOVE. the Republic of New Africa, FALN, the Black Liberation Army—every major organized expression for justice and liberation was targeted, its leaders killed or jailed, its forces scattered.

To challenge how power is held in America meant facing a reign of terror, some of which I witnessed over the years, most of which failed to reach “mainstream America—although this is changing. L.A. helped bring it home.

p250

Without definitive solutions, it’s easy to throw blame. For instance, politicians have recently targeted the so-called lack of family values. 

But “family” is a farce among the propertyless and disenfranchised.Too many families are wrenched apart, as even children are forced to supplement meager incomes. Family can only really exist among those who can afford one. In an increasing number of homeless, poor, and working poor families, the things that people must do to survive undermines most family structures. At a home for troubled youth on Chicago’s South Side, for example, I met a 13-year-old boy who was removed from his parents after police found him selling chewing gum at bars and restaurants without a peddler’s license. I recall at the age of nine my mother walking me to the door, and, in effect, saying: Now go forth and work.

People can’t just consume in this society; they have to sell something, including their ability to work. If decent work is unavailable, people will do the next best thing—such as sell sex or dope.