biography

“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

Early Years

In 1954, I was born on the border in El Paso, Texas. My family lived in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. My father was from Guerrero with Spanish, Nahua, and African roots. My mother’s family had ties to the Rarámuri Indigenous people of Chihuahua, who have been in that area like “forever.” Both parents were totally Mexican! I mean José Alfredo Jiménez y Agustín Lara loving Mexican. I mean ¡Ajuá! Mexican.

I had two sisters and a brother born in the United States. My dad also had four other children born in Mexico with other women, including one that died as an infant. At age two, the family migrated to Watts in Los Angeles—a poor working-class Black and Mexican community. My first day in school, I got placed into a corner with building blocks and forgotten. Once a teacher slapped me in front of the class for speaking Spanish. At around nine, the family moved to the unincorporated barrio of South San Gabriel, then the south barrio of San Gabriel City. Although my parents were educated, my mom worked in the garment industry and cleaned homes before ending up as a stay-at-home mom. My dad labored in factories and in construction, until he landed a job as a laboratory custodian in a community college.

Unlike my siblings, I fell through the proverbial crack. I joined a street gang at 11. I began drug use, including heroin at 12. From 13 to 18, I ended up in eight jails, including juvenile hall and two adult facilities. I was also a high school drop-out and lived in the streets for three years. In this “Crazy Life,” I got shot at on six different occasions, including point blank, but never hit. I also shot and stabbed people. I overdosed but survived, including a near-death experience. By age 18, I lost 25 homies, friends, and acquaintances.

First Transition

By age 20, I married my “high school sweetheart” in East Los Angeles, expected my first child, and worked at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Southeast L.A. I also worked in a paper mill, a lead foundry, a refinery, and in construction. I drove a truck and school bus, and did welding, pipefitting, and carpentry. I was a Bruce Springsteen song come alive!

I joined revolutionary circles in community and in workplaces. I fought for working class unity, for social justice, for peace in Vietnam and everywhere (including for barrio peace). I organized against police terror, against homelessness, and for the liberation of communities of color, women, and children. I supported Cuba, Palestine, and Central America against U.S. and Israeli aggression. I studied revolution and breathed revolution. This vision and work helped me transcend the rage and disorders of my highly troubled youth.

Second Big Transition

As the country underwent a devastating deindustrialization, in 1980 I quit all my industrial work and became a writer/photographer for local East L.A. newspapers. I took night classes at East Los Angeles College and got accepted into the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the University of California, Berkeley. I became a crime-and-disaster reporter in San Bernardino Sun daily newspaper, seeing more dead bodies than anybody should ever see in a lifetime. In addition, I worked briefly for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO), including in the largest union representation campaign at the time. I also did freelance journalism in the early 1980s, covering Indigenous and campesino uprisings in Mexico and the Contra War in Nicaragua and southern Honduras. In Mexico I had machine guns put to my head, and in Central America, I got bombed twice and shot with .50 caliber bullets. I made it unharmed

While I lived in various Los Angeles Eastside communities like Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and City Terrace, in my life I’ve also resided in San Pedro, Pasadena, Florence, back to Watts, Echo Park, Angelino Heights, Huntington Park, Highland Park, the San Fernando Valley, as well as San Francisco, San Bernardino, Miami, and Chicago.

In my twenties, I had relational instability. I divorced my first wife who held onto our two kids, Ramiro and Andrea. I lived with two other women and married again. All these relationships failed. After leaving drugs in my teens, I drank for twenty years. I tried to maintain an intense political life, but my own internal turmoil often took me off track.

Third Big Transition

In 1985 I moved to Chicago. I became editor of the revolutionary publication People’s Tribune. I covered stories of labor struggles in Chicago, Michigan, and Minnesota; the beginnings of the Union of the Homeless; support of the undocumented; electoral battles in the Deep South; and the rise of pirate radio. I traveled and spoke around the country, including in New Mexico, Appalachia, the Bronx (heart of Hip Hop), and Minnesota’s union battles. I also worked as a writer for WMAQ-All News Radio (variously for CNN, Westinghouse, and NBC). On the side I did typesetting, once for the publications department of the Archdiocese of Chicago. I got active in anti-censorship struggles in music/art as well as the burgeoning Poetry Slam movement. In 1989, I started my own publishing house with designer Jane Brunette, Tia Chucha Press, by releasing my first poetry book. We then published the best of the Chicago Slam Poets and moved onto all kinds of aspiring and accomplished writers from around the country—now close to forty years.

In 1988, I married my third wife Trini. We had two more children, Ruben and Luis, while my oldest son and daughter moved in with us. Unfortunately, Ramiro at 15 got involved in a gang in our Puerto Rican neighborhood of Humboldt Park. I did all I could to keep him out of this life, including writing my bestselling memoir, “Always Running.”

For Trini and my children, I sobered up completely in June of 1993. After trying other sobriety programs, I entered the Red Road—Indigenous spiritual practices. For over thirty years, I’ve had elders and teachers among the Lakota, the Diné (Navajo), Rarámuri, Mexica & Mayan (in the U.S., Mexico, and Guatemala), as well as the Pipil in El Salvador and Quechua in Peru. I’ve been given Indigenous names from the Diné and Mexica. A Diné elder and his wife adopted Trini in 1998, and we’ve done ceremonies and family visits ever since in the Rez.  In 2020, at around 65, in a ceremony with the Calpulli Tloqueh Nahuaqueh of the San Fernando Valley, I received the Mexica name, Mixcoatl Itztlacuiloh.

Back in Chicago, Ramiro took us through “a roller coaster ride through hell.” He wouldn’t quit the gang, like I didn’t want to in my youth. I saw him get kicked out of three schools, stitched up in a hospital, and undergo three-months in a psychiatric treatment hospital. I was there for his arrests and after police beat him up. In 1997, after already serving a short stint in prison and boot camp, Ramiro got convicted for attempted murder and shooting at two police officers. We fought the forty-years-to-life sentence the state wanted to give him. He received 28 years (which he did in thirteen-and-a-half years). Three years later, with Ramiro in prison, Trini and I decided to move back to L.A. to be close to her large and stable family in the northeast San Fernando Valley. I didn’t want to lose any more kids.

Since I worked with Chicano youth for barrio peace in my twenties, I got involved in gang intervention and urban peace throughout Chicago and suburbs like Aurora. I helped establish Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach. In Chicago we pioneered restorative justice programs and used arts and creativity, as well as Indigenous ceremony, in turning youth around. After the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising following the acquittal of police in the Rodney King beating, I visited L.A. to help with the Crips-Bloods peace as well as work with the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gangs.

Fourth Big Transition

The publication of “Always Running” in 1993 changed everything. Curbstone Press of Willimantic, Connecticut, founded by Alexander Taylor and Judith Doyle, took a risk on this memoir of Chicano gang life, the only one of its kind at the time. The book got boosted from the L.A. Uprising the year before when people wanted to know, “what’s up with L.A. gangs?” These gangs were blamed for the fires that made this the worst urban unrest since the 60s.

To promote the hardcover, Curbstone Press sponsored a major tour. I traveled to forty cities in three months. I ended up on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Good Morning America,” Studs Terkel’s Radio Show, National Public Radio, and other media, as well as in newspapers and magazines like “The New York Times,” “Los Angeles Times,” “Chicago Tribune,” ‘The Face Magazine,” “Entertainment Weekly,” “People (En Espanol),” and many more. With Trini’s blessing, I quit all my jobs, including in news radio. I never looked back—I’ve worked for myself ever since.

That summer, I did the first Slam Poetry Tour of Europe with poets Alan Kaufman, Patricia Smith, Neeli Cherkovsky, Dominique Lowell, and Paul Beatty. Later, with a fellowship from the Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University, I traveled to Los Angeles and El Salvador to write about MS-13. Since then, I’ve been to El Salvador six times addressing the growth of crime and violence from deported L.A. gangs (also in Guatemala and Mexico). Trini and I once taught poetry to abandoned girls and at a bilingual school for a month in Honduras. All this to integrate children of war and poverty with arts, peace, and social change.

In 1994, Simon & Schuster did the paperback of “Always Running,” and I went on more book tours and events. I obtained a literary agent, a lecture agent, and a Hollywood agent. Other doors opened, including getting another memoir with Simon & Schuster, a novel and short story collection with HarperCollins, two children’s books, including one with Lee & Low Books, and four poetry collections with Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. Seven Stories Press did two nonfiction books.

Since 1994 I’ve also been part of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation's Men's Conferences, youth events, poetry events, men-women summits, and more with Mosaic founder and mythologist Michael Meade. At these conferences, the complex but vital issues of race, class, gender, as well as personal rage and grief, are addressed with story, poetry, dialogue, ritual, drumming, dance, and living rituals involving people of all walks of life, including those in street gangs and the formerly incarcerated.

In 1998 I went to Chihuahua’s Sierra Tarahumara, home of my mother’s people, the Rarámuri. They are one of the few cave dwellers in the world—some 80,000 at the time. They still speak their language, have their customs, and walk for miles across six canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon. Although a chabochi (stranger), they accepted me because I sought my heritage there. They said when people leave, they generally don’t come back.

In the year 2000, I did the largest writer’s residency in North Carolina, where I drove from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Outer Banks, doing around twenty-one events a week for ten weeks in libraries and public schools, turkey and tobacco farms, colleges and universities, juvenile lockups and prisons.

In the mid-1990s I also took part in a massive Hip Hop Gathering in Rome, Italy. I did workshops, talks, readings, and even had a mural on a wall there with one of my poems, painted by renowned L.A. artist Fabian Debora. I ended up there with my daughter Andrea and another young woman from our Chicago youth group. I tried to take three gang members, but one got killed the weekend before we left, another was arrested the night before the flight, and the third guy never showed up. Such is “the life.”

Fifth Big Transition

In 2001, a year after moving my family to Pacoima, then to the City of San Fernando, Trini and I with our brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez, co-founded Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural—a nonprofit bookstore, performance space, art gallery, and workshop center in the next-door community of Sylmar. Tia Chucha Press became the center’s publishing wing. Among its immense programming, Tia Chucha’s sponsors the “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung” Festival, the only annual outdoor arts and literacy festival in the area, and the Trauma to Transformation Program that sends artists, poets, theater people, and musicians to prisons, juvenile facilities, and re-entry programs. After running Tia Chucha’s for seventeen years, Trini, our director, and I, the board president, turned the place over to young people who had come around when they were barely out of high school and are now in their forties. We are a powerfully unique example of “where arts and minds meet—for a change.”

From 2004 to 2008, I participated with forty other gang interventionists, peace advocates, and researchers in creating the “Effective Community-based Gang Intervention” model, which Los Angeles adopted in 2008. I’ve taken this model to Chicago, Ciudad Juárez, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, and England. With added resources, gang violence in the city, once the “gang capital of the world,” fell dramatically. Also, for many years I became a gang expert testifying through affidavits, phone testimonies, and court appearances in around a hundred cases, mostly deportation cases to Mexico and Central America, as well as a couple of state cases.

Despite that slap from a teacher when I was six years old, which kept me voiceless for most of my childhood and adolescence, I emerged as one of the leading Chicano writers in the country, now with seventeen books. In the summer of 2002, Dos Manos Records released a CD of my poems called "My Name's Not Rodriguez" with original music by Ernie Perez and the band Seven Rabbit.

Among literary awards, I’ve received a California Arts Council Legacy Fellowship, City of Los Angeles Arts Fellowship, a Sundance Institute Art Writers Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, an Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, an Algonquin West Literary Award from West Hollywood, CA, a National Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an Illinois Author of the Year Award, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, Chicago Arts Fellowship, a North Carolina Writer's Residency, and the 2001 Premio Fronterizo, among others. In 2022, the Los Angeles Times gave me a Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award.

From 2014 to 2016, I served as Los Angeles Poet Laureate, selected by then Mayor Eric Garcetti. I ended up doing over 300 events in two years, including visits to forty libraries. I spoke to 35,000 people in person, and to millions in Spanish-language and English-language mass media.

Moreover, I’ve spent over forty-five years facilitating writing workshops, doing poetry readings and talks, as well as healing circles in prisons, juvenile facilities, and jails. I’ve done this in some twenty U.S. states, as well as prisons in Mexico, Central America, South America, Italy, and England. I’ve also done events in homeless shelters, migrant camps, universities, public and private schools, libraries, bookstores, conferences, churches, and Native American reservations. International cities where I’ve read, talked, and/or taught include Tokyo, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Guatemala City, San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Managua, Havana, San Juan, Lima, Buenos Aires, Caracas, London, Manchester, Paris, Milan, Rome, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tubingen, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Montreal, Toronto, Sarajevo, and others.

Besides the urban peace organizations and Tia Chucha’s, I helped start organizations like Chicago's Guild Complex, one of the largest literary arts organizations in the Midwest, and L.A.’s Rock A Mole (rhymes with guacamole) Productions, which produced music/arts festivals, CDs, and films.

For my community work, I’ve been recognized by Inner City Struggle of East L.A. with its “Spirit of Struggle”/Ruben Salazar Award; the “Local Hero of Community Award (with Trini Rodriguez and Enrique Sanchez) from KCET-TV of L.A. and Union Bank of California; “Hero of Nonviolence” Award from Rev. Michael Beckwith and the Agape Christian Center in Culver City, CA; and a "Unsung Heroes of Compassion" Award, presented by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

My work has been widely anthologized, including in “Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters” (1997 Broadway Books), “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry” (1999 Thunder's Mouth Press), and “Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam” (2001 Three Rivers Press). Other TV shows I’ve been on include NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” PBS-TV’s Jim Lehrer News Hour, Discovery Channel’s Health Network’s “Life Force,” PBS-TV’s “Making Peace,” National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” CNN’s “What Matters,” and Head Line News’ “Leaders with Heart.” My poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in college & high school textbooks throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Articles on me and reviews of my works have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, La Opinion (L.A.’s leading Spanish language publication), Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, Associated Press, L.A. Weekly, Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and many more publications, including in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela, Japan, Germany, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and others.

Besides my news radio work in Chicago, I’ve done radio production/writing for L.A.’s KPFK-FM, California Public Radio, and Chicago’s WBEZ-FM. I’ve also been an honorary co-host with Dominique DiPrima on KJLH-FM's “Front Page” talk show in L.A. and appeared a few times on DiPrima’s “First Things First” talk show on KBLA-AM, owned by Tavis Smiley.

In addition, I created a one-man poetry play, “Notes of a Bald Cricket,” for the John Anson Ford Theater in Hollywood, and had poems staged at Chicago’s Blue Ryder Theater Festival, the Firehouse Theater, and Club Lower Links. A play based on “Always Running” was produced for the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Public Library and Hollywood’s Ivar Theater. In 2019, I wrote another version of “Always Running” with Hector Rodriguez that got staged at Casa 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights/Los Angeles. I wrote librettos for songs in the Save Elephant Hill public ceremony in 2022. I also helped produce a documentary film (“Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams,” directed by John F. Cantu), written a feature film, a TV pilot, and I’ve been a script consultant on three TV shows: Fox-TV’s “Gang Related,” Hulu’s “East Los High,” and two seasons of FX’s “Snow Fall.”

My essays, poems, and reportage have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reporter, US News & World Report, L.A. Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Bloomsbury Review, San Jose Mercury, San Francisco Chronicle, Grand Street, Utne Reader, Rock & Rap Confidential, Fox News Latino, National Public Radio’s Latino USA, Huffington Post, The Progressive, Alta Magazine, and others.

Over the years, I’ve also run for political office: In 1976-77 for the Los Angeles School Board at age 22; in 2912 for Vice-President with Rocky Anderson for President under the Justice Party; and California governor twice for the Green Party—in 2014 and again in 2022. In the latter I received the endorsement of the Peace & Freedom Party and garnered around 125,000 votes.

In this rich life, I’ve met, sometimes befriended, and in some cases worked with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, John Densmore of the Doors, Tom Morello, John Trudell, Jackson Browne, Stevie Wonder, Zack De La Rocha, Common, Andrew Garfield, Josefina Lopez, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Martin Espada, Reyna Grande, Patricia Smith, John Leguizamo, Wayne Kramer, and John Singleton. I’ve shared stages with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Riatt, Cheech Marin, Saul Williams, Amiri Baraka, Jack Hirschman, Allen Ginsberg, Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, Jack Kornfield, and many others.

Besides my four children, I also have five grandchildren, three half-grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. While Ramiro has been crime-free, drug-free, and gang-free since his release from prison in 2010, unfortunately, a granddaughter did prison time in Illinois due to Crystal Meth—she’s now out and no longer on drugs. I also lost a grandson to fentanyl in 2022 when he was 22 years old. My heart breaks at the conditions that continue to chain us. I still do all I can to help break those chains.

What I’ve seen and done in this life, from “La Vida Loca” to “La Vida Mocha,” including many mishaps, missteps, and mistakes, have turned out to be blessings. They are also wellsprings to bring more beauty, truth, and decency to this world.