Gangs, drugs, and ignorance blocked opportunities for Luis J. Rodríguez for many years, until he was able to rid them from his life. This is what the author deals with in his autobiography: It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing.
Award-winning author Rodríguez, who recently visited San Quentin, grew up in Los Angeles with no direction in life, exposed to gangs and substance abuse. This made him a troubled man and oblivious to his cultural history. “I was hurting yet asleep to my pain,” he explains.
He acknowledges that heroin, alcohol and pills had a grip on him. “I used to like combining those damn things,” he writes, “I was an equal-opportunity drug user until heroin forced me to become more discriminating.”
Rodríguez’s loyalty to his barrio gang, Las Lomas in the San Gabriel Valley, misguided him throughout his teenage years. When the gang did robberies or other crimes, he would go along proving he was “down with the fellas.” While attending a funeral of a fellow gang member, he remembers his erroneous thought process as he tells a girlfriend, “I can hardly wait to have a funeral just like this,” he said with a far off look, “to have the mothers crying, the homies and girls missing me, with all this love. That would be the best day of my life.”
Rodríguez always felt that his gangbanging lifestyle was in conflict with his wish for a better community.
Rodríguez describes that being part of a minority group in the U.S., he felt unappreciated and constantly sought ways to improve his life. He argues that the mainstream media’s stereotypical depictions of minorities added to the problem of misrepresentation of his community.
After digesting volumes of books, Rodríguez found that his outlook on life had changed. He began to attend meetings with members in the neighborhood to figure out how to improve the community. He describes how he met people whom he calls “salt-of-the-earth folk. They looked like America—white, black, brown, red, and yellow. These leaders were mostly women, people of color, and working class.”
Rodríguez succeeded in getting clean and sober, reconciled with his children, and settled into a stable marriage. Since then, he has been able to write poetry and a successful novel, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. The success of Always Running generated enough income for him to start a publishing company.
In August, when Rodríguez visited San Quentin, he told the creative writing class that inmates have an important role in telling the story of the poor, the disadvantaged and those behind bars. He said prisoners’ stories must be able to resonate with all readers and invoke empathy. Rodríguez says he is interested in publishing writers if inmates send him copies of their work at Tia Chucha Press: www.tiachucha.com
Juan’s Book Review
