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
• First Transition
• Second Transition
• Third Transition
• Fourth Transition
• Fifth Transition
Early Years
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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. In first grade 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, later the south barrio of the City of San Gabriel. 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 street gangs at 11, including Las Lomas barrio. I began drug use at 12, including heroin. 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 at 15. By age 18, I lost 25 homies, friends, and acquaintances to gang violence, robberies, drug overdoses, police killings, and suicides.
First Transition
In the heyday of the Civil Rights struggle, I walked out of my middle school in 1968 during the East Los Angeles “Blow Outs,” the largest student walkout in U.S. history at the time. In 1970, I took part in the largest anti-war protest in a community of color: The Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War. Beaten, arrested, and held in the Murderer’s Row of the Hall of Justice jail, I had a cell next to Charles Manson. Sheriff’s deputies said they’d charge me for murder for allegedly starting the so-called East Los Angeles Riots. Three people were killed, including Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar. However, that upheaval resulted after Sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers attacked a largely peaceful crowd at Laguna Park. After being “disappeared” for several days and nights, community members and family finally found me. The police had to let me go because there was no arraignment and I was16 in an adult facility. After that I had one foot in destruction and one foot in revolution—a seesaw, not knowing where I’d end up.
I also found a mentor from the radical wing of the Chicano Movement. His influence got me to do amateur boxing (including the Junior Olympics and Junior Gold Gloves tournament), mural painting, photography, and martial arts. After finding refuge in libraries, I managed my first writing efforts. I returned to school where a couple of teachers and counselors assisted me in obtaining my diploma. I learned Aztec dancing. I wrote a column for the high school newspaper called “Pensamientos/Thoughts.” I won honorable mention in the Quinto Sol Chicano Literary Contest at 18 (winners that year were Rolando Hinojosa and Estela Portillo Trambley). All this creativity and social activity was led by a liberating vision and study of radical texts. Still, I had one foot in, one foot out.
Before leaving high school, I got arrested for attempted murder in which four people were shot, but homies scared all the witnesses, and I was let go. Later I was in a lineup for stabbing someone, but the victim was too scared to point me out. I finally got convicted on charges surrounding my last arrest at eighteen: I tried to stop deputies from beating a handcuffed Chicana in her twenties, defenseless in the parking lot of an after-hours club. I faced many years in prison. But community support, including letters, helped a judge convict me on lesser charges, which I served in county jail. There I began heroin withdrawals. I walked away from the iron bars & razor wire and decided to leave crime, drugs, and violence, a promise I’ve kept for fifty-five years.
I briefly attended California State University, Los Angeles, where I edited the MECHA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) newspaper and headed MECHA Central that organized among East Los Angeles students. There I met Camila Martinez at Garfield High School. I soon dropped out, and worked in industry, including as a school bus driver and a truck driver for a lamp factory.
By age 20, I married Camila just two months after she graduated from Garfield. We were expecting our first child and I 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 in those years. I learned welding, pipefitting, mechanics, and carpentry. I was a Bruce Springsteen song come alive!
I joined revolutionary circles in community and in workplaces. In the early to mid-70s, I began barrio gang peace circles with Chicano members of major L.A. gangs like Lomas, Sangra, El Monte Flores, Florencia, White Fence, Watts, Wilmas, and more. I also took part in meetings of California’s End Barrio Warfare Coalition. Unfortunately, law enforcement targeted us, killing three of our leaders, and I had to let this go. Just the same, 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 direction 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 weekly East L.A. newspapers, including the Eastside Sun. I also worked with the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, later becoming its director, and as an editor of ChismeArte Literary & Arts magazine. We also organized the Barrio Writers Workshops and the Raza Reading Series (bringing in writers such as Jose Montoya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Gary Soto). I had an office off Brooklyn Avenue at the old Self-Help Graphics & Art Studios. Spearheaded by Chicano writer Manual “Manazar” Gamboa, I also helped establish Galeria Ocaso in Echo Park, an art gallery and performance space.
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, writing for the weekly Deadline newspaper in the Bay Area. In the fall of 1980, I became a crime-and-disaster reporter in San Bernardino Sun daily newspaper. I had a 40-channel radio in my car and ended up seeing dozens of dead bodies—from murders, child abuse, car crashes, and suicides. I covered the Panorama Wildfire, almost caught up in the flames, and had bullets shot at me during SWAT raids. I reported on planes carrying cocaine from Mexico for the beginning of the Crack Epidemic. Eventually I quit and got blacklisted from working in daily newspapers after I tried to expose the police murder of a homeless man, which the Sun’s editor and local police chief tried to cover up. Then from 1982-85, I worked 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 Central America. In Juchitan, Oaxaca pro-government goon squads followed me around during a Zapoteco Indigenous takeover of city hall. And I had machine guns put to my head near San Quintin in Baja California Sur when I covered the partial enslavement of Mixteco Natives in tomato fields. I sat in a writing workshop with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal on the Solentiname Islands and talked to Marxist priests in Managua. In southern Honduras, I got bombed twice and shot at with .50 caliber bullets. I took photos and wrote stories—somehow, I emerged 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 the San Francisco Bay Area, San Bernardino, Miami, and Chicago.
In my twenties, I had relational instability. I divorced Camila, who held onto our two kids, Ramiro and Andrea. I lived with two other women (I bought my first house with one of them), and married again, this time to a Black actress named Paulette. 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. The madness kept “calling me back.”
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, West Virginia’s Appalachia, the Bronx (heart of Hip Hop), and Minnesota’s union battles. I also later worked on the night shift as a writer/reporter 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 first published the best of the Chicago Slam Poets, then all kinds of aspiring and accomplished writers from around the country.
Now close to forty years, Tia Chucha Press has released over 125 books by such notables as Patricia Smith, David Hernandez, Dwight Okita, Elizabeth Alexander, Kyoko Mori, Terrance Hayes, Virgil Suarez, Alison Luterman, Patricia Spears Jones, A. Van Jordan, Deborah Miranda, Chiwan Cho, Luivette Resto, Leticia Hernandez Linares, Mayda Del Valle, Alejandro Morales, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Claudia Luna Castro, Aimee Suzara, and more. Our anthologies include “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.” and “Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles.” For many years, Northwestern University Press distributed our books. We are now a distributive line of L.A.’s Red Hen Press.
In 1988, I married my third wife Trini. We had two 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, and my overall health, 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 doing ceremonies among 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 on 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 (Cloudy Serpent/Obsidian Blade).
Since I worked for barrio peace in the 1970s, I got involved in gang intervention and urban peace throughout Chicago and suburbs like Aurora with Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Black youth. In the early 1990s, during the worse urban street violence in U.S. history (most noticeably in L.A. and Chicago, but throughout the country), I helped establish Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and 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. I spoke at Gang Peace Summits in Chicago, Kansas City, El Paso, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz, CA, and worked closely with Barrio Unidos of Santa Cruz, CA.
Ramiro, on the other hand, 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. with my daughter and two younger sons to be close to her large family in the northeast San Fernando Valley. We didn’t want to lose any more kids.
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 1960s.
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. 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). In 2012, with other U.S. urban peace advocates, I helped the Salvadoran gang truce between MS-13 and 18th Street. Trini and I once taught poetry at an abandoned girls home and at a bilingual school for a month in Honduras. I also visited and/or talked in the slums of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico City (including the infamous Tepito neighborhood), San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Buenos Aires, Lima, Caracas, Medellin, and the colonias that lived off Guatemala City’s massive garbage dump. All this to integrate children of war and poverty with arts, peace, and social transformation.
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 over the years, 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. I also have audio books with Dreamscape Media and Tantor Audio as well as e-books with Open Road Media. C & C Press also produced three hand-made limited edition poetry books, signed and numbered, now in collector’s hands.
A version of “Always Running” was published in Mexico and in England. In 2023, a bilingual poetry book, “Todos los caminos llevan a casa/All Roads Lead Home,” was published in Mexico City by Chicanx Sin Fronteras. The University of Edinburgh in 2025 published “The Life, Literature, and Legacy of Luis J. Rodrigez: In the Long Run,” edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olquin, with academics, writers, poets, and activists contributing pieces for this 600-page reader (preface by John Densmore of the Door). That same year, my poem “Eastside of All Eastsides” was published in Paris with photos of East L.A. by Belgium photographer Stig De Block.
Since 1994 I’ve been a teacher at the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation's Men’s Conferences, youth events, poetry events, men-women summits, and more with Mosaic founder and mythologist Michael Meade, across the U.S. but mostly in the Mendocino Redwood Forest. Other teachers have included Jack Kornfied, Malidoma Some, Orland Bishop, and Duncan Allard. 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, 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 helped get the U.S. rapper/actor Common to take part. I befriended the Italian Hip Hop artist/rapper Flycat. 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 (he later ended up doing fourteen years in prison). 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 Café Cultural—an LLC with a coffee bar, bookstore, performance space, art gallery, and workshop center in the next-door community of Sylmar. In 2003, Angelica Loa Perez, Victor Mendoza, and myself created the nonprofit Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore. By 2007, we disbanded the LLC and turned all equipment and inventory over to the nonprofit. Tia Chucha Press became the center’s publishing wing in 2005. Among its immense programming, Tia Chucha’s sponsors the “Celebrating Words” Festival, an annual outdoor arts and literacy festival, and the Trauma to Transformation Program that sends artists, poets, theater people, and musicians to prisons, juvenile facilities, and re-entry programs. Tia Chucha’s also brought the first official lowrider show to the Guadalajara Book Fair, and one year we were special invitees to the Mexico City International Book Fair. 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 2006 to 2008, I participated with forty other gang interventionists, peace advocates, and researchers in creating the “Effective Community-based Gang Intervention” model, which the Los Angeles City Council adopted in 2008. I’ve taken this model to Chicago, Ciudad Juárez, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, England, and Colombia. With added resources, gang violence in Los Angeles, 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 voices in the country, now with eighteen 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. In 2025, I started my own Substack blog called Barking Rooster.
Among literary awards, I’ve received a Quinto Sol Honorable Mention (my first ever at 18 years old), and later at various times: 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, PEN Josephine Miles literary awards, an Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, an Algonquin West Literary Award from West Hollywood, a National Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an Illinois Author of the Year Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize and a Lifetime Achievement award, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, Chicago Arts Fellowship, a North Carolina Writer's Residency, a Carl Sandburg Book Award, Chicago Sun Times book award, San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center Book Award, one of several “Next Generation” writers for PEN International, a Premio Fronterizo of the Border Book Festival, a New York Times Notable Book, Skipping Stones Honor Awards, a Parent’s Choice Book Award, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and more.
In 2022, I received a California Legacy Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times gave me a Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2025, I was chosen along with 100 other Angelenos to be featured in ALTA: A Human Atlas of the City of Angels Project by Marcus Lyon of England and L.A.’s Getty Museum. Individual photos, a book featuring all of us, and recordings of our stories, were exhibited at the L.A. Public Library and the Glendale Public Library. In 2026, the Poetry Foundation honored me with the Pegasus Prize for Service to Poetry.
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 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 close to twenty U.S. states, as well as prisons/juvenile facilities 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 across the U.S. International cities where I’ve read, talked, and/or taught include Tokyo, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Xalapa, Coatepec, Guatemala City, San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Managua, Havana, San Juan, Lima, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Medellin, London, Manchester, Paris, Milan, Rome, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Tubingen, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Groningen, Copenhagen, Madrid, Montreal, Toronto, Sarajevo, and others.
Well-known festivals and venues I’ve participated in include Los Angeles Public Library’s Aloud Series, Get Lit’s Poetry Convergence, L.A.’s Hammer Museum, Getty Museum, Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Seattle’s Bumpershoot Literary Festival, Utah’s Sundance Film Workshops, Illinois’s Ravinia Festival, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Poetry Foundation, School of the Arts Institute, Hollywood’s Ford Amphitheater, Associated Writing Programs conferences, national Book Expos, Border Book Festival (New Mexico), Sonoma Valley Author’s Festival, Las Vegas Book Festival, the Buenos Aires Book Fair, the Mexico City Book Fair, the Guadalajara Book Fair, Caracas Book Fair and Poetry Festival, London Book Fair, Tokyo lowrider shows, New York City Book Fair, Miami’s Book Fair, Watts Jazz Festival, Grand Park BookFest (LA), L.A. Times Festival of Books, Celebrating Words Festival, Chicago’s Printer’s Row, New Orleans’s Pirate’s Alley Literary Festival, Rome’s “Ikasi, the Barrio, the ‘Hood” Hip Hop Gathering; Chicago’s Ill Noise and Red Noise concerts with dance, art, and talks; Milan’s Hip Hop gatherings, Rock-A-Mole Festivals in Los Angeles, Puerto Rico’s Hispanic Journalists Conference and Criminal Justice Reform Conference, PEN World Congress, the Heidelberg Poetry Festival, England’s “Freedom Fest” in Hull, the Sarajevo Poetry Festival, Cuba’s Casa de Las Americas conferences, Mexico City’s Encuentros Chicanos, Tijuana Book Fair, Guadalajara’s Chicano Fests, Medellin’s Public Library, and more.
I’ve done interviews on BBC Radio in London, read poetry at Shakespeare & Company Bookstore and the Village Voice in Paris (as well as universities), poetry and talks with musicians from East Los Angeles in Tokyo including radio shows.
I’ve done two TEDx talks—at the Los Angeles Public Library and in Venice, CA. I was Grand Marshal of the Latino Heritage Parade in Pasadena, CA and the Mendez Academies Parade along First Street in Boyle Heights. I also sat in a lowered 1965 Super Sport Impala and waved during one of East L.A.’s Mexico Independence parades for the Mexican Cultural Center. In 2010, Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena did a ceremony of having my handprints and signature in cement (ala Hollywood’s Chinese Theater) for an author’s “Walk of Fame,” which included a public dialogue with writer Lynelle George and myself about my work.
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. In the 2000s, I also published books as Barking Rooster Books, including prisoner writings.
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; Artistic License Award from the California Lawyers for the Arts; and an “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” Award, presented by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Trini, in her own right, has been awarded La Opinion’s Mujeres Destacadas Award; Mujeres de Corazón Award from Comisión Femenil; Community Hero Award from the Los Angeles Dodgers; and Maestro Award, Latino Arts Network; among others. Chicanx Sin Fronteras in Mexico City published Trini’s first poetry collection, also bilingual, in 2026.
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, Chicago Reader, Associated Press, L.A. Weekly, Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Sun, Alta Magazine, and many more publications, including in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela, Japan, Germany, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and others.
Besides working at Chicago’s WMAQ-AM, I’ve done radio production/writing for L.A.’s KPFK-FM, California Public Radio, and Chicago’s WBEZ-FM. I’ve been an honorary co-host with Dominique DiPrima on KJLH-FM's “Front Page” talk show in L.A. and appeared frequently 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. Cornerstone Theater Company produced a play based on “Always Running” 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, and in Guadalajara in 2026. I wrote librettos for songs in the Save Elephant Hill public ceremony in 2022. Casa 0101 Theater also did a play based on my short story “Miss East L.A.” written by John F. Cantu. Elusive Films did a short film of my short story “Finger Dance.” My short stories “Finger Dance” and “Oiga” were performed by actors for WORDTheater in Los Angeles. I also helped produce a documentary film (“Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams,” directed by John F. Cantu), wrote 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.”
I’m now working with the Chicano “Ink Master,” Freddy Negrete, a leading tattoo artist in West Hollywood, on film and TV projects. He is also the author with Steve Jones of the memoir “Smile Now, Cry Later.” Former enemies (Freddy was from my main rival gang Sangra—he once shot at me and I tried to burn his house down), we now collaborate for peace and culture. Freddy lost two sons to gang violence and drugs. My son did many years in prison, and I lost a grandson to drugs. We are united to help change all this through our art.
For a couple of years in the mid-2000s, I took part in a dialogue/event called “The Three Louies” with three of the most well-known and respected Chicanos: Louie Perez of the iconic East L.A. band Los Lobos; Luis R. Torres, award-winning radio journalist and writer; and myself. We did events at East Los Angeles College, Grand Performances/California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, and the Aspen Literary Festival, among other venues.
My essays, poems, and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reporter, The Nation, 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, Grand Street, Huffington Post, The Progressive, the Guardian, Santa Barbara News & Review, Westways, Brooklyn Rail, Catamaran, Alta Magazine, World Literature Today, Entertainment Today, 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 2012 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 also received the endorsement of the Peace & Freedom Party, garnering around 125,000 votes.
From 2024 to the present, photographs I took in the 1970s and 1980s of my barrio Lomas, including homes, people, and murals I painted, and other parts of L.A.’s Eastside, were exhibited in the art galleries of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, Plaza De La Raza, Inner-City Struggle, Casa 0101 Theater, Rio Hondo Community College, California State University, Northridge, and the Vincent Price Art Museum of East Los Angeles College.
In this rich life, I’ve met, sometimes befriended, and in some cases worked with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, John Densmore, Danny Glover, John Trudell, Harry Belafonte, Jackson Browne, Yo-Yo Ma, Tom Morello, Zack De La Rocha, Common, Andrew Garfield, Robert Redford, Eduardo Galeano, Josefina Lopez, Danny Trejo, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Martin Espada, Reyna Grande, Julissa Arce, Joseph Rodriguez, Denise Sandoval, Victor Villasenor, Luis Valdez, David Hilliard and Erica Huggins (Black Panthers), Johnny Spain, Luis Talamantez, Angela Davis, Tomas Borges & Daniel Ortega (Sandinistas), Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez, Howard Zinn, Adrienne Rich, John Leguizamo, Freddy Rodriguez, Zack De La Rocha, Willie Colon, Celia Cruz, Rudolfo Anaya, Helena Viramontes, Wanda Coleman, Eduardo Galeano, Santa Cecilia, Culture Clash, Chuck D., Flavor Flav, Eazy-E, Common, Wayne Kramer, Moby, and John Singleton. I’ve shared stages with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Riatt, Cheech Marin, Saul Williams, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Hirschman, Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean Breeze, Kool Herc, Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, Ana Castillo, Viggo Mortensen, Quetzal, Tex Nakamura of War, and 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. As mentioned, my grandson Joshua passed from 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.
Trini and I also mentored young leaders and entrepreneurs at Tia Chucha’s. In addition, we do community healing utilizing Indigenous circles and ceremonies; Trini with women for close to twenty years. In 2015, Trini and I began podcasting “The Hummingbird Cricket Hour” available at http://hchpodcast.libsyn.com, among other outlets. Here we address every imaginable issue drawing from ancestral knowledge with the tagline of “Moving Hearts, Moving Thoughts.” In 2015, we also taught revolutionaries and activists from Ferguson MO; Chicago; Baltimore; New York; Los Angeles; Oakland; Salinas; Mexico; Brazil; South Africa, and more for the Popular Education Project in the Hudson Valley, New York, and Salinas Valley, California. We continue to work with and write for the University of the Poor: https://universityofthepoor.org
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.