Author Exhorts Youths to Wield Power of Words

On a recent afternoon, author Luis J. Rodriguez preached about the power of language to 20 youths unaccustomed to thinking of power in those terms.

The youths, Los Angeles Conservation Corps participants studying for their GED high school equivalency certificates, had been reading Rodriguez’s new novel “Always Running: La Vida Loca,” about his gang experiences during the ‘60s in Watts, East Los Angeles and an area that is now San Gabriel.

They were so impressed by what they read that their teacher, Robbie Frandsen, invited Rodriguez to speak to the class and he accepted.

“A lot of kids are like me,” Rodriguez, 39, the son of Mexican immigrants who has also published two books of poetry, told the students.

“They fell through the cracks of language. They not only took the Spanish away from you, but they didn’t teach us English very well, both African-American and Mexican kids. So you become almost incommunicable. We cannot relate at the highest levels of society . . . If language is power and it’s being used against us all the time, we need to grab a hold of it. We need to make language ours.”

Jose Gallo, a 24-year-old who left gang life in East Los Angeles’ Aliso Village housing projects four years ago, said he usually reads only sports magazines but immediately liked Rodriguez’s book.

“It’s talking about what I know from East Los Angeles and South-Central,” Gallo said. “It’s talking about someone like me that came up. He did his stuff, but he’s decided that he wanted a change. Hopefully, the same will work for me.”

Gallo commended the book as a universal story that cuts across racial, cultural and geographical barriers.

“You could be Latino, you could be mixed, you could be black, everyone can relate to this story,” he said. “East Los Angeles and South-Central are different places but a lot of the environment is the same.”

Frandsen, the USC student who teaches the class, said it was difficult to find reading material that would hold the students’ interest until she found Rodriguez’s book.

During the twice-weekly classes at the Conservation Corps offices just south of Downtown, Frandsen said, the students have taken turns reading aloud from the book and wrote essays about it. She said that “La Vida Loca” has been the first book several students have read, and pointed to the subject matter as the motivation for their interest.

“This book is real important,” said Frandsen, 40. “A lot kids don’t relate to what’s being taught, they’re really checked out. Whatever the reason is intellectually, they get to the point where formulating a question in their minds becomes a really uncomfortable experience. Nobody really respects their thinking because there is nothing for them to hook on to. It makes a big difference (when they learn) their ideas are not right or wrong, that they are not just valid ideas, but they are exceptional ideas.”

In her essay about the book, 18-year-old Luz Gutierrez wrote that it was “thrilling, adventurous, sad, exciting, but never boring . . . It tells about gangbanging, killing, drug using, sex, rape; it shows the ups and downs of life without holding anything back. I cannot wait to meet the person that went through so much hell and still is sane enough to create such a beautiful book.”

Another student, Arthur Bonner, 23, wrote that he hoped the book would have a lasting impact on other youths, pushing them to leave gangs.

“I figure that the book is something that will influence a lot of people to change . . . and realize that life is something valuable to everyone,” Bonner said.

Although Rodriguez often discusses the larger mission of “La Vida Loca,” he said the book was a gift to his 15-year-old son, Ramiro, who had joined a gang in Chicago. Father and son have toured the country promoting the book on television talk shows and at bookstores.

And while Rodriguez said he is grateful for the attention the book has received, he said film and literary portrayals should steer away from the extremes of glorifying or demonizing gang life.

“Either way they are distortions of reality; either way you take them out of their context,” Rodriguez said. “What I try to do with my book is to put that context in there, the economic, social, political and cultural reality that created the barrios, the gangs. . . . We know about the violence but there are a lot of dimensions that we don’t get into.”