Returning to Roots

A person's life can often be measured by their returns. People go out into the world, have adventures, trials, tribulations, initiations. Most, however, don't ever come back to original spaces, first contemplations, to various places called home, completing circles. I've been fortunate to have done this many times.

When I left my barrio of South San Gabriel in the west San Gabriel Valley, it took me twenty years to return. Like Odysseus, I had many wondrous but also tragic things happen to me in those intervening 20 years. When I did return, I came back with my recently released memoir, "Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA." I had been contacted by five homeboys and homegirls who wanted me to speak at our old schools, to the youth, many of whom were entering the same gangs we took part in during the late 60s and early 70s. A couple of the homeboys had lost their own children (one, a former heroin addict and friend of mine, lost two sons to the gang warfare that continues to this day).

I even went to "rival" territories, although warned that the battles between my old neighborhood and their so-called enemies were still going on. But they weren't my "enemies" anymore--I had to go and talk to these children and youth as well.

Of course, those talks were rich, powerful, and very respectful. I never felt in danger. I hope someday to return again to that area, by the efforts of teachers and some old friends who still see the need to raise some important issues of poverty, war, gangs, and a meaningful life.

Recently, in mid-February, I returned to another one of my old haunts--the San Pedro section of Los Angeles. San Pedro is part of the world's fifth largest harbor (Los Angeles-Long Beach, the largest in North America). I lived there at age 19 for two months in the old section of the Rancho San Pedro Housing Projects. I had just left the gang life a year before and had barely let go hard drugs, including heroin (which I gave up "cold turkey" with help from friends).

I was in San Pedro gathering myself in revolution: studying Marxist theory and taking part in collective study about society, the world, the present, and the future. I jogged every morning, part of my personal recovery routine, and visited the local San Pedro Library to read books and do research. It was an intense period, with intense study and equally intense activity (running off leaflets all night long for morning factory distributions, speaking at community meetings, bringing new people to study circles).

It was the only way to counteract an intense street/gang life.

I remember walking around those old harbor streets, with the bars, the fish stores, the modest homes, and markets. There was the old Warner Grand Theater, holding around 1,900 seats, built in the amazing Deco style of the 1920s. There was Pacific Boulevard and Gaffey Street. I recall the old canneries (and Joe Biff's bar, where many cannery workers hung out), the shipyards, including Todd's and Bethlehem, and the many warehouses, small bucket shops, and brightly-lit refineries.

The LA Harbor was very industrialized; still is, but not like in the mid-1970s.

On February 15 of this year, I spent a whole day back in San Pedro. I spoke to two large school assemblies at San Pedro High School, whose students were enraptured with my words, many of whom asked thoughtful questions. I met with leaders in the community, including those working in gang prevention (the Harbor has many old gang structures, mostly in the Chicano/Mexicano communities). I ended up on a cable TV show where a density of issues came to the fore. I hung out with old friends Dave Arian (director of the Harry Bridges Institute) and Diane Middleton (who runs the Middleton Foundation, funding important community organizations throughout the city, including film workshops at Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural).

And that evening, with my name in the marquee lights, I spoke to about 350 people at the old Warner Grand Theater--talk about completing circles. It was a great response, full of enthusiastic dialogue, and people lined up around one side of the theater for me to sign books.

It felt good to come back here and have such a tremendous response (of course, I was a working class youth, working in industry, the first time I was in San Pedro -- now I'm a well-known author with ten books to my name and a wonderful bookstore/cultural center in the San Fernando Valley).

Like Odysseus, I came home. I've done this many times. And each time, I've come with gifts, experiences, knowledges, and a spirit that can help enhance the places I once left behind.

Perhaps now, I won't take so long in returning to the Harbor. I have many friends and supporters there. It was another important example of returning to some of my roots.

Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural: Four Years and Going

To celebrate means to solemnize, to commemorate, but it also has connection with accelerate, which means to speed up. To celebrate is to brake something in motion, as in “holding fast,” as a time to stop the speed of the world and pay attention, acknowledge and honor a moment, a place, a person, a people, or a thing.

Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural started more than four years ago in the working class community of Sylmar, CA—one of many communities in the mostly Mexican/Central American populated Northeast San Fernando Valley. Founded by my wife Trini; my brother-in-law, Enrique Sanchez; and myself we have been going strong ever since, with barely a moment of rest, of long reflection or of “holding fast.” By celebrating our birth and our continued existence, we held the breath of our being to honor the community, the staff, resident artists and groups, the volunteers, and all those who have stepped up with their art, their ideas, their labor, and creativity to make Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural the amazing cultural/political/social and spiritual gathering place it has become.

Around 200 to 300 people made their way to Tia Chucha’s on the evening of February 18. We started with several dances by Cuauhtemachtotecayotl, our resident Aztec Dance group, and blessings from our indigenous spiritual guide in the Northeast Valley, Hector Herrera. We had poetry, primarily through the performance of Poets of the Round Table, including Mike the Poet, the Bus Stop Prophet, Phillharmonic, and Blackbird. We had the Nahuatl-chanting voices of XochitlQuetzalli, whose songs in the indigenous tongue of the Mexika people awoke something ancient and deep in all of us. We had a spirited performance by the conscious Mexika Hip Hop group, El Vuh.

We also had an amazing performance of Son Jarocho music (originally of Veracruz, Mexico) with members of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural’s Son Jarocho workshop (taught by Master musician Cesar Castro, formerly of the Son Jarocho group Mono Blanco) as well as Son del Centro (of Santa Ana, CA) and others. We had a local band from Pacoima (a major poor barrio in the Northeast San Fernando Valley) called Hijos de la Tierra that played amazing Mexican and South American traditional songs (and, man, did we dance).

And we honored our staff (Alicia, Esperanza, Joaquin, Melissa, Ray, Vanessa) and the women’s natural healing group, the Huehuetlatolli Xochitl Tonan Foundation, for providing natural juices as well as the various businesses, including the Chiropractor’s and the Dental Group businesses in our strip mall for donations of money and raffle items.

Most of all, I wanted to honor Trini Rodriguez, my wife and companion, and our family (my daughter Andrea, my granddaughter Catalina, and my sons, Ruben and Luis) for helping make Tia Chucha’s an organic, ancestral home of learning and expression.

Some of the important people who graced our place that evening included John Densmore of the Doors, Charles Wright (of the Charles Wright Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band), Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos, Fabian Montez of Homeboy Industries, Enrique Perez of Inner-City Struggle, David Sandoval of Cal State LA, Councilman Alex Padilla (who also honored us with a proclamation from the City of Los Angeles), Mari Riddle of the Liberty Hill Foundation, and many others (forgive me for not being able to name you all) who came by to celebrate with us.

It was a sweet and wonderful time, full of great words and blessings, great song and spirit.

While Tia Chucha’s Café,and its not-for-profit sister organization, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, is open to everyone of all races, nationalities, tongues, and artistic practices, we also make sure to focus and honor our roots in the indigenous peoples of this land, the first peoples, the original peoples, from one end of the hemisphere to the other.

I want to express my most heartfelt thanks to the incredibly creative community in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, but also throughout the LA area, who have visited our space; bought books and artwork; learned from our workshops; attended our theater, music, author, comedy, forums, and film events; and who have enjoyed our specialty coffee drinks or tamales. Tlazhokamati, gracias, thank you.

War or Our Children--The Choice We Face

"There will be peace when we begin to love our children more than we hate our enemies."

This is from a Lebanese citizen in the New York Times, quoted by Barbara Coloroso in her 1994 book "Kids Are Worth It: Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline" (Avon Books, NYC).

The statement struck me as I pondered the budget President Bush proposed last week--several trillion dollars (it's a fantasy number we can't even fathom), mostly for defense, with deep cuts in social services and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

We are cutting programs that will help our kids. Millions of US children today don't have access to health care. Millions go to bed hungry. Millions are seeing resources, books, and playgrounds being cut from their schools.

Why? Because we have to feed this monster we created, this military/defense industry that is wrapped up in a war we have no logical or rationale basis to be in (the arrogant claim that Iraq is better off with us than without us is nonsensical and bordering on the criminal). Why? Because the people who run this country will make sure their friends, the largest corporate interests, will get as much as they can from the public trough. Why? Because power, empire, enrichment, and revenge are dictating our policies--not the long-range, wholesome, and healthy development of kids.

The new budget even has plans to sell thousands of federally protected land to make up for the losses in resources for poor rural communities (this is being considered the largest sell of public property since Theodore Roosevelt created the National Park Service at the turn of the last century).

Yes, the US has enemies. Yes, they are capable of much damage and destruction. Yes, we should cooperate with the world in comprehensive plans and ideas to address this. But now it's mostly us (it's a sham to keep calling the troops in Iraq "coalition forces"), filled with hate and fear, and willing to sacrifice our own children to "win at all cost."

We won't win, trust me on this. And we'll sacrifice our future generations in trying.

It's time for new ideas, new strategies, new wisdom, and new leadership. One that puts our children (and at the same time, the children of the world) foremost and center.

We can't afford to do otherwise. Trust me.

Lies, Truth, and Memoir

Like most people, I've been following the James Frey fiasco about the lies and exaggerations in his bestselling book, A Million Little Pieces. Here are my thoughts:

It's a shame this situation happened. I think gaining the trust of a reading public is vitally important. It's already unfortunate that most people don't trust most words being thrown at them--from ads, to newspapers, religious personalities, to politicians. They all claim to have "the truth," although we know this is not always the case.

A writer on the other hand has to stand on truth. For one thing we're not beholden to anything else but the truth. We don't have to please a church, a government, or even any political or social trend. The truth at all costs.

The problem with Frey and his alleged memoir, from all that I've read and from his own "Note to the Reader" (that apparently will be part of subsequent printings of the book) is that he doesn't seem to thoroughly understand the depth of his lies in the guise of a memoir.

Although it's a relatively new genre, the memoir does have integrity and purpose. It's memory with unique and important insights through the prism of a singular, albeit subjective, experience and personal history that is often told in dramatic, literary, and readable style. Nothing in there says you can lie.

The best memoirs are written by the best writers. Good writing, important for any genre, is one of the best features of a good memoir. James Frey says he wanted his story "to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require." Yes, memoirs can do that. And from all accounts (I haven't read the book), Frey is an engaging and original voice in literature. But you can't lie.

Truth must not only sound and feel like truth. It must be verifiable. By more than one person. By people who don't have anything to do with the book or the writer.

I've written ten books. Only one is a memoir. My other books, all of which I'm fond of, are in children's literature, poetry, nonfiction, and including a short story collection and a novel.

I will venture to say that all my books have truth and stand on truth. But I can only vouch for the memoir and the nonfiction book as being verifiable.

While my fiction and children's books all have truth, they are stories of imagination--I made them up. My poetry is mostly about real events and people, but they are poems. There is license to change the facts as long as I don't alter the truth. You don't have to verify the facts in a poem. Poems follow a different cloud, are on another stream, gather into a deeper ocean. But they have to ring true, be cast in the spell of truth, even if they are not factually accurate.

Social or personal mythology have the same concerns. They are fantastic stories, full of images, events, people, dreams, and voices--yet they have so many ways to enter into the truths of our time, the truths of a people, or even the special, particular truths of one person.

I've been a journalist, off and on, for around twenty-five years. Facts and accuracy are the tools of our trade. But so is story. Only you have to tell the story without changing the facts. In the past few years, highly-publicized cases of people who have made up characters and quotes, and touted this as journalism, have tainted the trust that people should have for journalists.

But there's another basis for the mistrust. Too many journalists are constantly hounding the facts, but they don't always uncover any precious truths (the wholeness of a story, for example). Still I think most journalists today are thorough when it comes to the facts.

Memoir is one of those genres where truth is paramount even if you can't verify the actual conversations (who has a tape recorder during the most dramatic moments in their life?), the actual days and times of events, and even if your memory (again there's insight in a subjective prism, but also faulty recall) gets some facts turned around.

Still, you don't lie. You don't intentionally say something that you know is not verifiably accurate and call that a fact.

In Always Running, I put a statement in the preface, something that James Frey failed to do in A Million Little Pieces, saying that I changed names and some of the facts of the book. I did this to protect the innocent AND the guilty. I was privy to many crimes and rapes and deaths. I wanted to tell the truth of what I saw, experienced, and did without hurting anyone else in the process.

I do have newspaper clippings, school yearbooks, and some documents here and there verifying the shootings, deaths, and crimes. Anyone can go back into my life and verify where I claimed to have lived, about my family, my schooling, my arrests.

But they won't be able to verify my emotions, my thoughts, or what I went through; my conflicts, fears or angers. They have to trust that what I'm saying about these things is true. However, I have to earn that trust. I have to tell the truths and relate verifiable facts so that when I speak on things that can't be verified that trust is solid.

Also, my insights on my life and the gang life that I experienced are only my side of the story. My piece of the puzzle. My way of looking at things (which can't help but be askew). People have to be interested in this or they wouldn't bother with my book.

Yet, if you ask my family, my homeboys, the police, the principal of my last high school, they will most likely have another perspective, another viewpoint, another summation of the same circumstances I describe. Memoir is not all the facts, all the witnesses, all the sides. It's one side. One story. One viewpoint. Mine.

I take responsibility for that aspect of the memoir.

If somebody wants to do a riveting journalistic piece about the gang life in my neighborhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they'd be welcomed. But it would hardly have anything to do with my book (although, I'm sure much will intersect).

Always Running is based on actual events, actual people, and actual facts. Most of it can be verified. But I also altered names and circumstances. I tried not to alter anything to change the truth (although, my memory may not have gotten everything correct). I never tried to lie. I never thought I needed to lie.

In fact, and here you have to trust me on this, I kept many more things out of my memoir than kept in. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction. A litany of murders, rapes, crimes, and interesting characters just wouldn't work. I had to decide what facts I was going to use and what facts I wouldn't use. The truth can be edited.

The most compelling aspect of my book, any book, I hope, is its healing aspect. This could have happened if I wrote a novel. But it's a memoir. The healing had to be through the facts of my young life.

Still, it's a memoir because it's not a lie (even with all the changes and personal quirks and possible unintentional mistakes that may pop up here and there).

I would hope that writers doing memoirs keep all this in mind. Don't lie. Don't lie deliberately. And if you do make changes, just say so.

To summarize: Fiction has truth, although the facts and characters are most likely imagined.

Poetry has truth, although the words are condensed, filled with metaphors, images, emotions, and are unable to tell everything.

Journalism has truth but the facts, the people, and the dialogue have got to be verifiable and undeniably real (you can't change people's words, for example).

Memoir is also truth, based on facts, memory, real experiences, and events, yet it's allowed to have changes of names and events in the keeping of a dramatic, literary work. This does not give one license to lie. A good memoirist, of which there are many, are conscious and responsible to the differences.

State of Confusion

President Bush gave his State of the Union last night. And I can’t help but think—man, are we in trouble?

The headlines focused on Bush’s statement that the American people are “addicted to oil.” Come on. We’re not addicted to oil. That’s the main energy option we’ve been given. By oil companies. By a government catering to oil companies. By Bush.

It’s as if we were thrust a bottle of rum since we were born, and later told we’ve become alcoholics. How many environmentalists, scientists, and social activists have fought and argued for generations to remove the oil bottle out of our mouths? Remember that former presidential candidate Ralph Nader was a pioneer in raising the failure of oil dependency to a national debate. Has Bush become Nader? For all the rigged elections and millions spent, we should have elected Nader; he’d do a better job at the necessary recovery program we’re going to need.

That’s the problem. We’re told that we’re addicted to oil, but there was no plan for our sobriety. Given permanent tax breaks to the country’s wealthy is supposed to do what? Save us from our dependency to oil? Come on.

Our country is a joke now. But we have to take it back. I was just in Venezuela, where a revolutionary process is being carried out. I know Hugo Chavez is being demonized in the media and by the government. But I heard him speak for more than two hours. I thought I would fall asleep. Instead I was engaged and moved. He drew quotes from literature, the Bible, common folk, and had big ideas on the economy, the people, the poor, and more; he even sang a song (in tune mind you). You couldn't even compare the two speeches between Bush and Chavez.

Why is our country so low-level, mistrustful, and a joke? Venezuela is a poor and chaotic place, yet there they have some notions of justice and equity—and plans to carry them out.

Where's ours?