Dorothy Skiles, Marlene Hitt, Joe DeCenzo, Luis J. Rodriguez and Maja Trochimczyk
Sunland Tujunga Library, 2015
The Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga, led by current and former Poets-Laureate of our neighborhood, welcome to the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, the Los Angeles Poet Laureate, Luis J. Rodriguez. Mark your calendar for October 25, 2015, Sunday at 4:30 p.m. for this historic reading - an encounter between the representatives of the oldest (ST) and the newest (LA) Poet Laureate programs in our city. The site is historic, too: the Second Historical Landmark of the City of Los Angeles, built in 1913, Bolton Hall has recently celebrated its Centennial. Managed by the
Little Landers Historical Society, Bolton Hall is the site of many exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and poetry readings.
The reading, as always, will include two sections of Open Mike, and refreshments in the middle. The George Harris Hat will be passed around to collect $3.00 donations that pay for the venue and for refreshments.
Who is Luis J. Rodriguez? We find information on his website:
"For Luis poetry is soul talk, a prophetic act, a powerful means to enlarge one's presence in the world. Luis is also a novelist/memoirist/short story writer/children's book writer as well as a community & urban peace activist, mentor, healer, youth & arts advocate, husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He has 15 books in all genres, including the best-selling memoir, "Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." His latest book is the sequel, "It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing." He is founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, now in its 25th year, and co-founder/president of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley. And he's co-convener of the Network for Revolutionary Change. Luis is dedicated to a clean, balanced, abundant, cooperative, healing world. No more capitalist private property relations, exploitation, war, or inequities. "In essential things, unity; in nonessential things, liberty. In all things compassion."
“I met a fella named Luis Rodriguez, a writer and a poet, who had a ... cultural center in Los Angeles. These are people I've known and worked with for a long time. These are the people trying to fill the holes that should long ago have been filled by government. Those are the people who give me optimism. They're relentlessly hopeful, and they face it all on the front lines on a daily basis.”--Bruce Springsteen from
Rolling Stone magazine, November 15, 2007.
ABOUT LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ
(from luisjrodriguez.com/history)
The Luis J. Rodriguez Story--the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles:
By the year 2000, Luis J. Rodriguez was given the Dine name of Naayee' Neezghanii on the Navajo Nation not long after Anthony Lee, a medicine man, and his wife Delores spiritually adopted Luis’s wife, Trini, and consequently the whole family. The name means “Monster Slayer” and can represent one who has overcome many obstacles. Luis has been involved in indigenous healing practices from across the U.S. and the continent since 1995. He’s also a student of the Mexika (so-called Aztec) and Mayan cosmologies and has a Mexika name of Xikome Tochtli (Seven Rabbit) given to him in the mid-1990s by his teacher, Macuiltochtli, based on the Tonalmatl—the Mexika Calendar.
His other teachers include Tlacaelel of Mexico, Julio Revolorio of Guatemala, Tascara of Mexico, Ed Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses of Pine Ridge, John C. Smith of the Dine (Navajo), and a couple of teachers among the Quechua in Peru. Tlacaelel, Macuiltochtli, John C. Smith, and Ed Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses are now with the ancestors.
Luis’s obstacles have been many: In 1993 he became clean and sober after seven years of drug use and 20 years of alcohol abuse—having gone through three wives, two live-in girlfriends, other relationships, and many jobs. In the early 1980s, a right-wing editor of a daily newspaper blocked Luis from working in southern California newspapers, but this never deterred him from continuing to write for publications, books and other media. His oldest son Ramiro had been sentenced to 28 years in the Illinois state prison system for three counts of attempted murder, but after a total of fifteen years with three separate convictions Ramiro is now free, no longer involved in gangs or drugs, and has worked in gang prevention/intervention in Chicago.
Luis is now happily married to the former Maria Trinidad Cardenas (Trini), a father of three sons (Ramiro, Ruben, and Luis) and a daughter (Andrea), and the grandfather of five (Ricardo, Anastasia, Amanda, Catalina, and Jack Carlos). In early 2014, he became a great-grandfather to Xavier and in mid-2015 great-grandfather to Jayyda Marie. Since October of 2011 Trini and Luis have lived with a Chihuahua/Terrier mix named Chula; about a year later they took responsibility for his son Ruben’s cat Prudence.
Born on the Border
Luis’s earthly journey began in 1954 when he was born on the border—El Paso, Texas to be exact, although his family resided in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico at the time. He has deep roots in the Chihuahua desert (which covers part of northern Mexico and southwest United States) with ties to the Raramuri tribe through his mother—and Spanish, Nahuatl-speaking peoples, and African ties through his father, who was from Guerrero, Mexico.
At age two Luis moved to Watts, where the family lived in poverty and faced racial and social class discrimination along with his African American and Mexican neighbors. Despite a short stint in Reseda CA as the only Mexican family on the block, and facing more racially based attacks, the family ended up in the San Gabriel Valley (once living in the unincorporated community of South San Gabriel, former migrant area that at the time was one of the poorest neighborhoods in L.A. County).
Although Luis had hard-working and law-abiding parents, he fell through the cracks into an intense street life – stealing from stores at age seven; at nine getting jumped by two local boys who fractured his jaw (causing his chin to jut out and where only three of his teeth meet); and losing a friend who fell through a skylight after they had broken into an elementary school when he was 10 (later that year Luis suffered a ruptured intestine sac that caused him to be hospitalized). At 11, he joined his first street gang. By 12, he indulged in drugs and drinking, including sniffing toxic sprays, dropping illicit pills, LSD, and heroin. At 13, police started to detain Luis for stealing and fighting. At that age, his family moved to the City of San Gabriel after his father bought a house when he procured a laboratory custodian job 40 miles away at Pierce College, Woodland Hills CA. But Luis remained tied to South San Gabriel’s barrio gang, Las Lomas.
At 15 he was thrown out of two high schools for fighting, and ended up at a high school near his father’s job, from which he dropped out. That same year his parents kicked him out of the house, forcing him to live in the streets of downtown L.A. for a few weeks until he was allowed to move into a small cell-like garage room with no running water or heat until age 18.
At 15 Luis also got beaten into the hard-core section of Las Lomas. At 16, Luis was placed on murderer’s row of the old Hall of Justice Jail in downtown Los Angeles for taking part in the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War. He had a cell next to Charles Manson. Sheriff’s deputies threatened him and four other “cholo” gangsters with charges linked to the murders of three people in the disturbances, although this was not pursued and Luis was released. A year later, he was arrested for “assault with intent to commit murder” in the shooting of four people, but was released when his homies scared all the witnesses. By 18 Luis faced a minimum of six years for “fighting” with sheriff’s deputies and was being held in the Los Angeles County Jail, now the largest jail system in the United States. By then he had no family visits, no close friends (twenty five of his friends had been killed by gang warfare, drug overdoses, robbery attempts, police shootings, and suicide), and he was hooked on heroin.
Healing as a Revolutionary Act
That should have been the end of Luis J. Rodriguez.
But despite the intense years in "La Vida Loca"--including getting shot at a half dozen times, although never hit--it all ended in a whimper. Luis had a few saving graces: For one thing he loved to read books. At age 10 a teacher read “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White aloud in class and he was hooked. Books are how he learned English, and even living on the streets, in the gang, or on drugs he wandered into libraries as refuge. In books, his imagination was lit and his world broadened—books did not dismiss or belittle him, beat or abandon him. Walking into the Monterey Book Store in Monterey Park one day, Luis met Sy Feinberg, a Jewish-American communist who opened up a bigger world of books and ideas. He also hooked up with radicals in the old Midnight Special Bookstore in Venice, CA (and later in Chicago with the Guild Books).
Luis was also a graffiti artist, spray painting elaborate pieces on walls. He then met a youth worker at the local community center who turned him on to mural painting. This youth worker was an organizer in the Chicano Movement, part of the Brown Berets and a leader in Chicano school walkouts. Learning to paint murals at the Goez Art Studio in East Los Angeles, Luis also promised to return to high school, where he become a student leader, leading at least three school walkouts for Chicano Studies, a Chicano Student Center, and just treatment for Chicano/Mexicano students.
At age 17, Luis painted eight murals, several with thirteen gang youth, in the City of Rosemead and in South San Gabriel, including on the walls of businesses, a public library, a park, and a youth center/alternative school. He also learned Mexika (Aztec) dance and participated in Chicano movement strategy meetings. He finally graduated from high school, although too late for the gap-and-gown ceremony. He became a youth leader at the Bienvenidos Community Center and the John Fabela Youth Center in South San Gabriel. And he began writing verses, anecdotes, thoughts, including a column called “Pensamientos/Thoughts” for the student newspaper “The Aztec.” In 1973, he received honorary mention in the Quinto Sol Chicano Literary Prize, and ended up in Berkeley CA to be acknowledged, also attending his first poetry reading, which impacted him tremendously.
Luis let go heavy drugs for more than a year while finishing his schooling, but unfortunately became depressed around the time he left school and turned back to drugs and gang warfare. He even tried going to California State College, Los Angeles, and was active in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and editor of the MEChA newspaper, but dropped out.
In his last County Jail stint, Luis faced a crossroads. The one person who visited him was the youth worker, whom Luis called Chente in his memoir “Always Running.” This mentor/teacher also got letters on Luis’s behalf, which impressed the judge. The judge denied any possible felony charges of assaulting sheriff’s deputies—despite deputies clamoring for such charges—and instead gave Luis time served for “drunk and disorderly” and “resisting arrest.” Luis decided to leave the gang life and also underwent his first heroin withdrawals in the County Jail. Despite a couple of relapses, he finally gave up “La Vida Loca."
At 19, Luis embarked into a revolutionary life, studying Marxism and other political texts, and taking on issues of police abuse, school integration, labor justice, immigrant rights, and more. He began working with gang youth, turning their lives around and helping them get politically educated and active, including in the housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, other neighborhoods in Boyle Heights, in the Harbor Area, in the Florence barrio, in Pasadena CA, in Watts, in Echo Park, in City Terrace, and other areas. His youth work included football and forest trips in Pasadena, weekly talent shows and film nights (with films shown on the side of his house) in Watts, and study circles in peoples’ homes. He sold radical books out of the pantries of his homes.
In 1977, then 23 years old, Luis ran for the Los Angeles School Board, managed by Anthony Prince, which oversaw the second-largest school district in the country, as part of national “Vote Communist” campaigns. He traveled throughout the large district, garnering close to 23,000 votes, winning precincts in Watts, East L.A. and the West San Fernando Valley, although he was next to last place in the final tally.
In addition, after leaving the gang life, Luis worked close to ten years as a truck driver, bus driver, warehouse worker, a foundry smelter, in a paper mill, in construction, in refineries, and four years in a steel mill. He learned carpentry, pipefitting, welding, mechanics, and the millwright’s trade. He was a member of the Carpenter’s Union and the Steelworker’s Union, among others.
A Writer’s Life
One thing that held Luis back was his addictions and rage. Luis had post-traumatic stress disorder, although he didn’t know it at the time. He let go of drugs in his late teens more as a political act, but didn’t give up drinking. Luis married at age 20, and nine months later held Ramiro as a newborn in 1975 and promised he’d be the best father possible—with no drugs or gangs or crimes. He also had a daughter, Andrea, in 1977. But in 1978 he lost his first wife and became estranged from his children. Other marriages and lived-in relationships failed as well.
At 25, Luis stopped working in industry—which by then was mostly leaving Los Angeles, the country’s largest manufacturing center, TiredOfBeingTired.jpgand other U.S. cities in a deindustrialization process with the rapid introduction of new technology and the opening up of global cheap labor markets. In early 1980, he tried his hand as a writer/photographer for weekly East Los Angeles newspapers, including the Eastside Sun, for far less pay then his previous jobs. He also managed creative writing, journalism and speech classes at East Los Angeles Community College. That summer, he took part in the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, held at the University of California, Berkeley. He covered news in the San Francisco Bay Area and by the fall was working as a daily newspaper reporter in San Bernardino CA. He also freelanced pieces for the L.A. Weekly, Catholic Agitator, California Public Radio, KPFK-FM, and other media outlets. In addition, Luis wrote poetry and fiction, having later worked as director of the L.A. Latino Writers Association (and briefly as editor of ChismeArte literary and art magazine) and was the poetry curator for Galeria Ocaso in Echo Park, founded by his mentor and friend Manual “Manazar” Gamboa.
Luis wrote freelanced articles involving indigenous uprisings and farm worker land takeovers in Mexico as well as civil wars in Nicaragua and Honduras. He won a journalism award for an LA Weekly piece on immigration raids in elementary schools, which often left children alone and bewildered as their parents were rounded up. This reportage assisted in the national debate to end such raids, and to end using police in cities like Los Angeles as agents of the immigration authorities.
Nonetheless, he was blacklisted from working in journalism for his radical politics by the editor of the San Bernardino Sun. Luis then became a Public Affairs Associate for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO)—also participating in the largest union representation election in U.S. history at the time. He also traveled around the country helping in other union campaigns, but by 1985 Luis quit AFSCME. That May he moved to Chicago to edit the People’s Tribune, a revolutionary publication linked to the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
In Chicago, Luis facilitated writing workshops in homeless shelters for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and visited schools, juvenile facilities, and prisons for the Chicago Teacher’s Center. He became active in the burgeoning Chicago poetry scene, birthplace of poetry slams. Along with poet Michael Warr and others he co-founded the Guild Complex Literary Arts Center. He continued to work with gang and non-gang youth, having co-founded Youth Struggling for Survival (some 200 attended the founding conference, including organizer Patricia Zamora, his former wife, Camila, Ramiro, and Andrea), the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach, working with groups like BUILD, YMCA’s Street Intervention Project, Latino Youth, the Community Renewal Society, Mothers Against Gang Violence, several churches, and Native American sweat lodge circles.
Luis married Trini in 1988 and a year later self-published his first book, a poetry collection called “Poems Across the Pavement,” founding Tia Chucha Press in the process. He had two more children in Chicago—Ruben and Luis—and a total of four grandchildren during the late 1980s and 1990s. He worked as a typesetter in various publishing outfits, including for Liturgy Training Publications, which at the time was part of the Archdiocese of Chicago. There he met book designer Jane Brunette, of Menominee/German/French descent who has designed Tia Chucha Press books since then.
He also worked as a writer/reporter for WMAQ-AM, All-News Radio. He quit working for others after publication of “Always Running” by Curbstone Press in early 1993, embarking on a three-month, 30-city book tour. The book was written after his son Ramiro joined a Humboldt Park street gang. The book became well known due to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion sparked by the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. A year later, Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster published the paperback. From then on, Luis made a living by speaking, doing readings, conducting workshops, writing and editing.
In 1993 Luis also began sobering up through a Chicago-based recovery program and later Native American/Native Mexican healing practices. He had a major relapse on a trip to Europe, but by June 30, 1993 he’s remained completely sober. Those involved in opening doors to his native spiritual practices include Nane Alejandrez and Barrio Unidos, Frank Blazquez, Louie Ruan, and Francisco Chavez. He also helped create the Pacoima and San Fernando sweat lodges. In 1994, he took part in the Mosaic Foundation’s Multicultural Men’s Conferences, founded by storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade, and working with such teachers as American Buddhist Jack Kornfield, African tribal leader Malidoma Some, and Guyana-born healer Orland Bishop. Here story, poetry, song, dance, intense dialogues, and emerging rituals are used to help heal and address issues of personal rage, racial discord, and more.
Return to Los Angeles
Three years after his son’s last prison conviction, Luis and Trini decided to move back to Los Angeles, where they both grew up, to link with family. In 2000, Luis and Trini with sons Ruben and Luis moved to Pacoima CA. His daughter Andrea and a granddaughter Catalina joined them after Luis and Trini bought a house in San Fernando CA a year later.
In 2001, Trini, Luis, and their brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez created Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural, LLC—a full coffee bar with bookstore, performance space, art gallery, and arts workshop center. In 2003, Luis, Angelica Loa and Victor Mendoza started Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, a nonprofit to incorporate the growing workshops and arts aspects of the café. In 2007, Trini, Luis and Enrique disbanded the café/bookstore as an LLC, turning over all equipment and books to the nonprofit, which is now a full-fledge tax exempt organization in Sylmar CA. Trini has run Tia Chucha's full-time on a voluntary basis with paid staff and consultants—and other volunteers. In 2006 they also founded the annual outdoor literacy and arts festival: “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.” Both Trini and Luis never got paid for running Tia Chucha's Centro & Bookstore, Tia Chucha Press, for fundraising, and outreach. This was their gift to community.
While both Trini and Luis’ parents passed, their sons Ruben and Luis had many positive family relations and they thrived in school, the arts, writing, and in music. Both have been or are now university students. His daughter Andrea obtained her B.A. and became a teacher, then director of a preschool cooperative in Eagle Rock CA (of my dad’s eight children and around 30 grandchildren when he died, Andrea is the first to finish college). In the summer of 2010, Ramiro was finally paroled from prison after his last stretch of 13-and-a-half years for three attempted murder convictions. He obtained Associated of Arts degrees in prison and has become crime free as well as clean and sober.
Luis’s readings and talks over the years include a ten-week writer’s residency in North Carolina (doing 21 events a week), Seattle’s Bumpershoot Literary Festival, the Aspen Literary Festival, Sundance Film Workshops, Rock-A-Mole Festivals in Los Angeles, Illinois’s Ravinia Festival, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and The School of the Arts Institute, Hollywood’s Ford Amphitheater, Associated Writing Programs conferences, national Book Expos, the Buenos Aires Book Fair, the Mexico City Book Fair, the Guadalajara Book Fair, Caracas Book Fair, London Book Fair, New York City Book Fair, Miami’s Book Fair, Watts Jazz Festival, Grand Park Book Fest (LA), L.A. Times Book Festival, Chicago’s Printer’s Row, New Orleans’s Pirate’s Alley Literary Festival, Rome’s “Ikasi, the Barrio, the ‘Hood” Hip Hop Gathering, Puerto Rico’s Hispanic Journalists Conference, PEN International Conferences in Toronto and Montreal, the Heidelberg Poetry Festival, the Sarajevo Poetry Festival, the first “Slam Poetry” tour of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands as well as venues in Latin America, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, Groningen, southern Germany, Manchester, and London.
Luis has had his works produced as plays, poetry-theater or one-man shows at the Mark Taper Auditorium, Ivar Theater and John Anson Ford Theater in Los Angeles—and the Blue Ryder Theater, the Firehouse Theater and Club Lower Links in Chicago.
Accomplishments
In the fall of 2014, Mayor Eric Garcetti chose Luis J. Rodriguez as the official Poet Laureate of Los Angles. Presently Luis has a total of fifteen books in poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction including with Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Seven Stories Press, Curbstone Press, Children’s Book Press, Lee & Low, among others. Beyond the best-selling "Always Running" (around half a million copies sold by 2014), there is “Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times” (summarizing his thirty years in urban peace work and gang intervention); “Music of the Mill: A Novel,” “The Republic of East Los Angeles: Stories,” “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: A Barrio Story” (an illustrated bilingual children’s books), “America is Her Name” (an illustrated children’s book), and “My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poem,” among others. Audio books have been released through Dreamscape and he has e-books from Open Road Integrated Media.
CSPAN-PromotionMay2014.jpgFor his writing, Luis has received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Dorothea Lang/Paul Taylor Prize, a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, the Carl Sandburg Book Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a Paterson Poetry Prize, a Parent’s Choice Award, an Hispanic Heritage Literature Award, National Association for Poetry Therapy Award, Algonquin West Award, a Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, and fellowships from Los Angeles, Chicago, Illinois, California, and North Carolina, to name a few.
Since 1980 Luis has done talks, writing workshops and readings in prisons and juvenile lockups, having gone regularly to San Quentin Prison in northern California with visits to Soledad, Folsom, Chino, and Lancaster prisons as well as juvenile halls and lockups in northern, central and southern California. He’s done the same in Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and more. His prison visits and work with juvenile offenders have also included Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Italy, and England.
His decades of activism have been recognized by Corazon Del Pueblo in Boyle Heights, CA; Get Lit Poets, Los Angeles; Inner City Struggle in East L.A.; KCET-TV and Union Bank of California; the Agape Spiritual Center in Culver City, CA; the All-Nations Native Peoples Pow Wow in Los Angeles; and in 2001 the Wisdom in Action Foundation designated him as one of fifty “Unsung Heroes” from around the world, presented by his Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
Luis’s writings have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, Chicago Reporter, The Nation, American Poetry Review, the Bloomsbury Review, Poets & Writers, Grand Street, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, San Jose Mercury, The Progressive, Fox News Latino, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, and Huffington Post, among others. Textbooks, photo books and anthologies carrying his work or interviews include the “Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,” “Letters to a Nation,” “Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Café,” “The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop, and the Poetry of a New Generation,” “Eastside Stories” by photographer Joseph Rodriguez, and more.
TV and radio shows featuring Luis include “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” C-SPAN's "Book TV," CNN’s “Talk Live,” National Public Radio, Discovery’s Health Channel’s “Life Force,” PBS-TV’s “Making Peace” series, NBC “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” CNN’s “What Matters,” Head Line News’ “Leaders with Heart,” PBS’s “Jim Lehrer’s News Hour,” Univision, Telemundo, Sirius Radio, BBC London Radio, Power 106/Los Angeles, KPFK-FM, ESPN’s “30 for 30,” and more. Interviews and reviews of Luis’s work have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Chicago magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Denver Post, The Face, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, People (En Espanol), The Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Magazine, and others. For some ten years, Luis has been a recurring honorary co-host with Dominique DiPrima on the “Front Page” talk show, KJLH-FM.
In 2002 Luis created a CD of his poetry with original music by Ernie Perez and the band Seven Rabbit called “My Name’s Not Rodriguez” (Dos Manos Records). In the mid-2000s limited edition hand made, signed and numbered, art books and broadsides of his poems for archivists and collectors appeared from C&C Press of Pajaro CA, including “Seven,” “Two Women/Dos Mujeres,” and “Making Medicine.” In 2010, Luis along with Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Denise Sandoval brought the first lowrider bike & car show to the Guadalajara Book Fair in 2010.
In addition, Luis’ poetry has been featured in the C-SPAN's Book World, Lannan Literary Video Series; the Poetry Center of San Francisco State University’s Poetry Archives; 2001 “El Poeta” in the PBS-TV’s “Realidades” series; Rhino Records’ 1996 recording of “In Their Own Voice: A Century of Recorded Poetry” (later from Shout Factory); “This American Life” radio program in 1996 with Ira Glass; and poems in the CDs “From Earth to Sky: A Collection of Word and Song” (2004 Dos Manos Records); Italian Hip Hop artist Flycat’s 1998 recording “Una domanda alla risposta” (A Question to an Answer), recorded 1998 in Milan, Italy; “A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Chicago’s Spoken Word Performers” (1994 Tia Chucha Press); and was producer and had a spoken word piece in Olmeca’s “Contra Cultura” CD in 2010.
Luis’s latest book is the 2011 sequel to "Always Running," entitled "It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing," which became a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Urban Peace Leader
On top of this, Luis has more than forty years as a gang intervention/prevention leader in Los Angeles and Chicago; he has been invited to speak and help in this field throughout the United States and other countries. He helped broker peace and/or assisted in already existing efforts with Chicano gangs in the 1970s; Bloods and Crips in South Central L.A. as well as Chicano/Central American gangs in the early 1990s; and spent the 1990s working with gangs, black and brown, in Chicago. In El Salvador in 1996 he helped establish the first gang peace between members of the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street along with mayors of various cities, non-governmental agencies, police agencies, and faith-based organizations. In 2012, he took part in the Transnational Advisory Group in Support of the Peace Process in El Salvador to access, advise and assist a 2012 gang-led peace truce between MS-13 and 18th Street leaders that had international ramifications. In 2013, with the help of John Densmore of the Doors and Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos, Luis helped set up libraries in various Salvadoran prisons. And he has testified as a gang expert witness in close to 70 asylum cases since the late 1990s in federal immigration courts, and also to stop gang enhancements and the railroading of youth in a few state criminal courts.
In addition, along with forty other gang intervention experts, researchers and urban peace advocates, Luis helped create the Community-Based Gang Intervention Model from 2006-2008, under the auspices of then L.A. city councilman, now U.S. congressman (and Luis’s brother-in-law) Tony Cardenas. This model was adopted by the City of Los Angeles in 2008, helping bring about much lowered gang violence rates, and has been used as a guide in other cities and countries. Luis also helped with a House of Representatives bill based on this model, introduced by Congressman Cardenas in 2013.
Luis has also volunteered with the Spreading Seeds/Healing Network, National Gathering for Peace in Chicago, “In the Heart of Violence” documentary project, “Breaking the Cycle with Dignity” workshops with Fidel Rodriguez and Mike De La Rocha, Homeboy Industries with Father Greg Boyle, Homies Unidos with Alex Sanchez, La Vita Gang Intervention training, ArtworxLA (and the Hollywood Academy for Arts and Media), and Tia Chucha’s Young Warriors program, founded by Mayra Zaragoza.
And in 2010, Luis’s story was included in Amicus Curiae brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to end life sentences for juveniles in non-capital crimes, which the high court eventually declared unconstitutional.
Other projects
Starting in 2011 Luis took part in several public conversations with Louie Perez of the East L.A. band Los Lobos and famed Chicano journalist Luis R. Torres in a presentation called “The Three Louies.” In 2012 he was co-producer of the documentary film “Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams: How the Arts are Transforming a Community,” written and directed by John F. Cantu, as well as editing with Denise Sandoval the companion book of the same name.
In 2008, Luis also founded Barking Rooster Entertainment to do films, CDs, TV productions, podcasts, and Internet content. Its first book, 2011’s “Detoured: My Journey from Darkness to Light” by Jesse De La Cruz, documented the life of a 30-year California prisoner and state prison gang leader, now college professor.
In 2014, Tia Chucha Press became 25 years old, with readings/panels at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Seattle (the PlaqueTriniLouie4ChavezMemorial.jpglargest writers conference in the U.S. with some 12,000 participants). TCP is renowned as a leading cross-cultural small press in the U.S., publishing such notables as Patricia Smith, David Hernandez, Elizabeth Alexander, Kyoko Mori, Terrance Hayes, Virgil Suarez, Opal Palmer Adisa, Alison Luterman, Peter J. Harris, Deborah Miranda, and more.
And along with leaders in labor, immigrant rights, veteran’s rights, education and housing struggles, among others, Luis helped establish the Network for Revolutionary Change in Chicago during the fall of 2011 to unite as many practical leaders as possible with a vision of cooperation, peace and a healthy environment for all as the United States faces deep challenges to the capitalist economic and political social order. In addition, Luis became running mate of Rocky Anderson for the Justice Party during the 2012 presidential elections where they appeared on the ballot in fifteen states and were write-in candidates in twenty more—he was also on third party candidate debates with Democracy Now! and Huffington Post Live. They eventually garnered some 40,000 votes.
In 2014, Luis ran for California governor in the June primary, endorsed by the Green Party of California, Mexican American Political Association, Chicanos Unidos of Orange County, PODER of Santa Barbara, Corazon Del Pueblo of Boyle Heights, Brooklyn & Boyle magazine, Chicano scholar Rudy Acuna, Salinas City Councilmember Jose Castaneda, and El Hormiguero (The Anthill) of Pacoima, among others. His long-time friend Anthony Prince, now a lawyer, became manager, harking back 35 years when Luis first ran for office. His team traveled 12 times up-and-down the state, signed up some 200 volunteers, obtained around 5,000 signatures and/or money to qualify as a candidate, and ran a highly energized grassroots campaign. With only a few thousand dollars—against the $20 million war chest of incumbent Democrat Governor Jerry Brown and members of both parties with over a million dollars—Luis garnered around 67,000 votes, sixth among 15 candidates, and first among third-party and independent candidates. Articles on his candidacy or mentions appeared in the Orange County Weekly, Monterey County Weekly, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Mint Press, Truthout, TruthDig, KCET Departures, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Huffington Post, KPFK-FM, KPFA-FM, Univision, EFE Spanish-language network, and Fox News Latino, among others. A major outcome was the continuation of his “Imagine a New California” campaign and the beginning stages of a California Network for Revolutionary Change.
