Luis J Rodriguez Quotes

If young people had love, hope, true education, the arts, full and meaningful lives they won't join gangs. My life since leaving the gang and drugs has been directed to making positive what it means to be Chicano, human, man, woman, and on how to draw out the imagination and creativity that all people have.

There are choices you have to make not just once, but everytime they come up.

I moved into the garage at my mom's house, she wouldn't let me into the house, and the garage didn't have any running water. It did have electricity though, but it didn't have any running water, no bathroom. But, you know, it was great for me because I had my books there.

Vive La Vida LOCA (Live the crazy life)

We [people] all need each other. Gangs do try to fill that void - but they can't do what healthy, balanced, and coherent families and communities can do. Let's strengthen our core relationships from the start - and all the way through a young person's life. This is the best way to avoid the growth of deadly and crime-involved gangs.

A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.

Gangs have always existed - they are primarily a community a young men trying to find intensity, meaning, a path to the outer world (outside of home) that most tribal groupings addressed with rituals, rites of passage, initiation ceremonies. We've lost this knowledge as a culture.

I had to find meaning in it. So I go through this, I see all these homies die; I see all this terrible devastation, people sitting in prison. I've been saved from prison, from death, and from heroine addiction. What am I going to do with that?

It doesn't work that way

I was kind of a weird homie; I was a weird kid. Nobody in my family loved books. I'm the only one.

When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.

You have a worth outside of a job, outside the "jacket" imposed on you since birth.

Nobody had books at home. My dad was a very educated person, so he would have books at home. All Spanish books. That helped. Most of my homies had no books at home.

It never stopped, this running. We were constant prey, and the hunters soon became big blurs: the police, the gangs, the junkies, the dudes on Gaarvey Boulevard who took our money, all smudged into one. Sometimes they were teachers who jumped on us Mexicans as if we were born with a hiduous stain. we were always afraid. Always Running.

Men need to be strong, but not bullies. They need to know how to not get emotionally lost in situations, but not be cold and emotionless. They need to know the full variety of emotions as well as thinking and acting. Not just the most limited ways of doing things.

I'm sorry young man but the classes you chose are filled up.

go ahead and kill us,we're already dead...

In order to stay out of trouble I worked in industry. You can't even do that nowadays; there were all those factories.

Cry, child, for those without tears have a grief which never ends.

Eventually I went back to high school. I went to a coaching center in my neighborhood. I had to leave the homeless situation because it was so bad and I knew that I was falling deeper and deeper.

Piece by Piece Piece by piece They tear at you: Peeling away layers of being, Lying about who you are, Speaking for your dreams. In the squalor of their eyes You are an outlaw. Dressing you in a jacket of lies - tailor-made in steel - You fit their perfect picture. Take it off! Make your own mantle. Question the interrogators. Eyeball the death in their gaze. Say you won't succumb. Say you won't believe them When they rename you. Say you won't accept their codes, Their colors, their putrid morals. Here you have a way. Here you can sing victory. Here you are not a conquered race Perpetual victim - the sullen face in a thunderstorm. Hands/minds, they are carving out A sanctuary. Use these weapons Against them. Use your given gifts - they are not stone.

Art is the heart's explosion on the world. Music. Dance. Poetry. Art on cars, on walls, on our skins. There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order.

Wich is the ultimate struggle, the one fight really worth fighting.

You 'will never belive it.

I'm not really anti-gang - I was a gang member and so was my son. I'm pro-youth, pro-community, pro-family, pro-arts, and pro-peace.

We need more leaders among our gente - more teachers, politicians, businesspeople, organizers, and such. Turn the energy that many young people are putting into "war" and "death" and put it into life and true justice.