BR: Always running (Luis J. Rodriguez)

The back cover reads:

By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings,
and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as drugs, murder, suicide and
senseless acts of street crime claimed friends and family members.

This book was written in 1993, and revised with an updated introduction in 2005. Luis wrote the book, in a large part to appeal to his son in an attempt to deflect the young man from the same path he took. The introduction of this version informs the reader that his son is serving a 28 year prison sentence for three counts of attempted murder. It's a sobering start to a serious piece of work, written as a novel but with the truth of autobiography, it reads with the punch of a newspaper editorial and the poetry of lyrical prose – readable, accessible and haunting. It has lessons applicable to us all.

Luis is the son of Mexican immigrants. His parents were forced to move to the US after Luis' father, a former school principal, fell out of favour with the local chieftains – powerful men with political connections – his transgressions so dire that he was imprisoned on trumped up charges, fed food scraps from a can, treated with contempt. The family finally escaped to America and sought to build a life in the face of poverty, homelessness and social rejection.

Our first exposure in America stays with me like a foul odor. It seemed a strange world, most of it spiteful to us, spitting and stepping on us, coughing us up, us immigrants, as if we were phlegm stuck in the collective throat of this country.

Luis is one of several children but his closest and harshest sibling relationship is with Rano, his older brother.

In fact, I remember my brother as the most dangerous person alive. He seemed to
be wracked with a scream which never let out. His face was dark with
meanness, what my mother called maldad. He also took delight in seeing me
writhe in pain, cry or cower, vulnerable to his own inflated sense of power.

Displaced at home, misunderstood at school, surrounded by violence and gangs, social exclusion and minimal prospects, Luis and several other boys with similar backgrounds form a gang. They are kids, barely teenagers yet they begin their evolution into a life where alcohol and drugs numb pain, violent crime signifies strength and all that matters is blind, unerring loyalty to
their homies, regardless of personal or moral cost.

Along the spine of the night, through the shrubbery, on the coarse roads, past
the peeling shacks, past the walls filed with the stylized writing that
proclaimed our existence, past La India's shed where boys discovered the secret
of thighs, in the din of whispers, past Berta's garden of herbs and midnight
incantations, past the Japo's liquor store, past the empty lots scattered around
the barrio we called "the fields" overlooking Nina's house, pretty Nina, who
lavished our dreams, there you'd find the newest and strongest clique. There
you'd find the Animal Tribe.

Before long, the Animal Tribe is forced to disband, their members split up and absorbed by larger gangs of older boys, young men with bloodied pasts, murder and revenge in their veins. The initiations into these gangs are brutal, but Luis has grown up with pain and takes the beatings just as he takes everything else that happens to him – with numb acceptance.

Everything lost its value for me: Love, Life and Women. Death seemed the only door worth opening, the only road toward a future. We tried to enter death and emerge from it. We sought it in heroin, which bears the peace of death in life. We craved it in our pursuit of Sangra and in battles with the police. We yelled: You can't touch this!, but Come kill me! was the inner cry. In death we sought what we were groping for, without knowing it until it caressed our cheeks. It was like an extra finger in the back of our heads, pressing, gnawing, scraping. This fever overtook us, weakening and
enslaving us. Death in a bottle. In spray. In the fire eyes of a woman, stripped of soul and squeezed into the shreds of her humanity.

As a young adult, Luis begins what will be a long journey toward turning his life around. He was born with a gift of writing, and he started this book when he was 15 years old though no-one believed that a low achieving Mexican boy could (or would want to) write a novel. As he matured, he developed a healthy distaste for the daily horror, the deaths and violent reprisals, the fear of someone he loved being taken out by a warring gang. Through school, he learned that there were options and alternatives, he gained a voice, organized activities, appealed to his homies to stop the madness though very few would listen.

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 require
more, a discipline as a bulwark within which to hold all I valued, a shield
against the onslaught.

On a broader scale, some people listened and are still listening, others don't and never will. While he has a voice, Luis will spread his message and though he failed to save his son from prison and accepts responsibility for at least some of Ramiro's despair, the lessons he has learned and the hope he shares will save many others. That is without a doubt.

Rating: ***** out of five