Excerpts from a January 17, 2002 interview with KUOW's Steve Scher, host of Weekday on NPR's member station, 94.9 KUOW, in Seattle, WA. Luis Rodriguez was in Seattle as part of a Mosaic weekend with mythologist Michael Meade, including an evening presentation "Youth, Community & Cultural Change" at Seattle University and an intensive workshop "The Hand of Mentoring" at Seattle Asian Art Museum.


At the beginning of your new book Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times you write a whole chapter about the history of gangs in America. Why do you think young people come to gangs?

First of all, gangs run the gamut, but there is a particular social, urban gang that has a very long history in this country that isn't based on race as is often said, but on economic, social and cultural issues that aren't discussed enough in relation to gangs. For example, the first gangs of this kind in this country were Irish immigrants in the 1820s on the East coast. They were despised, put down and hungry, and the gang became the one place they could be fed. There was such overcrowding in the tenements and on the streets that the gang was the one way for many to survive. You see, forming a cohesive group in a world that's falling apart can make sense. It can be a natural, rational decision to join a gang. Are gangs destructive? Yes. The fact that its members are often lost is also true, but gangs exist because the community isn't willing to be there with these kids, to guide them through trouble, or even acknowledge and identify what it is they're often up against. Instead, the community gets scared and pushes them further away until the gangs get entrenched in their own pathologies, if you want to call it that.

You wouldn't call it pathologies.

No, they often are pathologies being suffered through, but any pathology offers an opening as well. Pathology can be looked at without fear as a wound and become ultimately life-giving. I was working with a community group just yesterday and was asked "Why can't we circumvent the trouble you're talking about?," and I had to keep them focused on the trouble because they wanted to sidestep it. Trouble is part of life. What's often missing is a community that will withstand the storm of adolescence and be there to see a complete human being come out on the other side. Instead of zero tolerance, we have to allow for trouble in order to see more, complete human beings emerge on the other end.

Day to day, what do you do to effect these kinds of change?

When I go to schools and talk with kids I come as an example not a program. I don't say "I'm going to teach you art." I try to work towards the art that everyone has within them. And I can honestly say to them: "Words have saved me." My example allows them to see the neglected art that they already have, whether it's dance, drawing, song or poetry; allowing them to ask about what I've been through develops relationships rather than a program. They know I'm not there to correct something.

And what's your involvement with "Mosaic"?

I've been working with Mosaic for a number of years. After writing Always Running, I came across the work mythologist Michael Meade was doing and wanted to get involved. It is hard, long-range work that Mosaic does and I haven't seen anything like it before. It's really about how to bring back the broken pieces of community through story, poetry, singing and other forms of art and practice. The work we do in Mosaic brings back the importance of sitting down to have real dialogue on a level of deep honesty. You see, each time Mosaic had a conference or retreat I could see these young people changing their lives. Something fundamental was happening for them and the older people involved as well. I realized then that this was the kind of work I wanted to be involved with.

Long term work that is. But long term can mean that in the short term people will try to change their lives and not necessarily do so.

Of course that's part of it. When I went to look for grants for Youth Struggling for Survival, a program working with gang youth that I started with my son in Chicago in 1994 after he had gotten involved in gangs, potential donors would ask us "How many kids have you saved?" But the kind of work we do in Mosaic isn't a quantifiable thing you can put in a little brochure and say "we saved twenty kids this year." It doesn't work that way. We're not talking about automobile parts. Young people go through ups and downs, take steps forwards and backwards. They might even do some terrible things but you still have to hang in with them. They'll frustrate you but you have to maintain this intentional place in spite of their mistakes; a place where they can be seen as capable of reaching a transcendent point. That's what Mosaic does. It can be heartbreaking work and you can even lose kids, but we're still there.

For example, we have an ongoing project in Mosaic called "Walking With" that maintains a relationship with those youth that we've worked with that have unfortunately wound up in prison. We get them books and have an ongoing conversation with them through phone calls and correspondence that gives them a sense that there is a community out there continuing to work with them, so that when they get out we'll be there walking with them, providing resources for them that most prisoners don't get when they're released. "Walking With" is a way to keep acknowledging them in order that they come back contributing to rather than taking from the community.

You were in a lot of trouble when you were younger. How did you become a writer and when did writing intervene so to speak?

Yeah, I got kicked out of a lot of schools when I was a kid to the point that trouble preceded me. I recall going to a concert at a new school and hearing this teacher say "Here comes trouble" before I even entered. I didn't even know her. After a while it becomes this jacket you wear, you take it off, but it keeps winding up on your back again. So, at a certain point I said "Ok, I am trouble, Big T." I started to become that.

At the same time there were people that could see something, some leadership, some art that I had just as I was becoming "Big Trouble." They kept hammering away at that, trying to bring that forward instead of the part that was angry with everyone, that hated everybody. Writing became one of the things I turned to when I had nowhere to go to. When you find your passion it can become a lifeline. Whether you're suicidal or at your lowest point, the practice becomes what pulls you through. My story happens to be one where I really started the practice of writing in jail.

You were there for demonstrating?

Well, there was a so-called riot and people had been killed, including the journalist Ruben Salazar who I named my first child after. We had been picked up in the aftermath and the Sheriff's department was threatening to charge us with these murders. The juvenile hall had been filled up, so they threw us into the "Glasshouse" as they called the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice then. We were put in with adults and serious criminals. I had a cell next to Charles Manson, for instance, and actually got to know him a little. But the first night there I had a razor put to my neck, because they saw us as "marks." A 13-year-old kid, two fifteen-year-olds and myself, 16. I was trying to protect this 13-year-old kid because, unlike my friends, I had already learned from the streets that you have to push your emotions so far down that someone can look into your eyes and see no fear. The problem is that eventually that pushing down just makes you more violent, more raging if and when you do get out.

Why does that rage manifest itself in violence?

Well, Michael Meade has a saying that rage is blind, goes everywhere and has no purpose, but anger has a direction, a destination or purpose. Anger has eyes that try to point you in the right direction while rage loses sight and turns you against yourself and others. I couldn't deal with my anger at the time in any formal fashion because school didn't have the time, my parents didn't have the time, and I was left to rage against a world that seemed unjust. I was in a position where the world embraced a caste system that says I'm supposed to stay there at the bottom. That was all I saw. But when I started to write and that fire was turned into a work of beauty, all the ugliness could suddenly be re-shaped, because in the end, it's really about shaping. How do you re-shape the life around you?

You write in Hearts & Hands that it was in the Glasshouse that you saw increased violence and learned more about how to be violent. How long were you there?

It was just a matter of days, not a long time, but I bring it up because now we're seeing more and more kids being put into adult facilities. It's now the law. You can do this. In those days they were doing it to scare us into admitting something beyond our involvement. But what is it doing to kids today? Now you have to become hard, without emotion, you have to hide all fear. You have to learn how to withstand people coming after you. These laws and practices say that these young people are valueless. And if they become enshrined as lost causes they will get arrested development and stay that way for a long, long time. We have to see in these young people the room to change. I've seen it happen.

What did the people that didn't give up on you, that hung on, do?

Rather than point the finger at me, they put up a mirror that exposed the rotten things but also the beautiful things that I carried. It takes skill and knowledge to do so, but they taught me things from outside the barrio without asking me to dismiss the barrio. They taught me that there were things outside the barrio that you could learn and have an impact on. At the time I thought I could live and die for the barrio and that would be great, but when my imagination started to open through their efforts, I began to wonder if I really wanted to die for this little piece of land. Maybe I wanted to learn more about the world.

Who was it that made such an impact?

One person in particular that I call "Chantan" in Hearts & Hands significantly changed the direction of my life. He withstood the fire I was inflicting on everyone around me and didn't say "you're ok," but withstood the fire and said "you're not ok. You need to do more with your life." At the same time, he could see the leadership that I had, the capacity, things I didn't even know I had.

Did you resent him or try to turn the rage on him?

For two years I told him to drop dead, but he kept persisting. I realized when I needed help that this guy was the only one that would listen. And that he could listen in a meaningful way because he had the resources to do so. A the time, I had dropped out of school and needed a job. He said, "Ok, I'll get you a job painting murals for the summer, but you've got to go back to school." I didn't want to go back to school, but I wanted the job. He set it up so that I was getting something but also having to give at the same time. It was a good set-up.

So, at 16 years of age, you were already putting your memoirs down?

I didn't know that's what they were. I was trying to tell the truth of my time in the limited way I knew how to do it. Somehow I felt that there was a story here, an important meaningful story that hadn't been heard. Putting it into words was giving it to other people so that it wouldn't be just my life. I mean you've got several generations of gang members in the barrios. You've got grandfathers and great grandfathers that have been in these gangs. When I moved back to Los Angeles after twenty years away, I remember seeing a grandmother chase a kid down the street and she had gang tattoos all over her arms. She was an old time gangster, but no one was telling the story. Thousands of people dead and so many hurt. Mothers that had lost two or three sons and still nobody telling the story. La vida loca was like a big web we we're wrapping ourselves into. I wasn't conscious of what exactly I was doing back then, but my telling the story began to connect with all these other stories.

How did your friends react then?

A good friend would make fun of me at the time, but he actually admired that I had found something too. They had it too, my homeboys, but I was tapping into it and pursuing it. The only time I really got hassled was when I stood up to the gang leaders about gang warfare. I mean I had cousins in other barrios that we were shooting at. It wasn't that I wanted to get out of the gang, but I wanted to stop the nonsense. Well, that challenge brought bullets. That's when I had to leave for twenty years. Still, most of my homeboys appreciated that I had something even then.

Do you think you've paid your debt to society? You write about shootings, fire bombings, violence; people no doubt ask if you went to prison for these things.

It's a problem, because, of course, I didn't go to prison or serve the big sentence that many of my friends and now my son is doing. I did some terrible things I got away with, but what I'm pointing out is that there is a way to give back. If we just focus on the punitive end of it, nothing essential will change and it will only get worse. There is a way of giving back that I know something about that is worth our attention. I realized that I had hurt people and that I did owe them something, but I owed it to them to bring out these gifts that I had as well. These kids have to give something from their own attributes, their own capacities, their own faculties, their own dreams. We can't ask them to pay us back with money or some product, but by becoming the complete, full human being they were meant to be. That's the only way of giving back and no prison does that.

That's a very individualized way of looking at social justice in America.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences or that in some cases people shouldn't be put away for awhile, but the idea that giving twenty, thirty, or forty year sentences says anything other than this life has no value is obvious. The cosmology has to change. We look at retribution in this culture the way a merchant would look at it. I've lived in a culture of retribution. Gangs revolve around that idea. I lost 25 friends and it ate me up. There is no closure in retribution. The only thing you close around with retribution is hatred. My own healing has been in direct relation to the healing I've been able to give to my own children but also to these youth that we work with, listen to and continue to walk with.

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