March/April 1999

Never Say "You'll Never Amount To Nothin'"

A Talk by Luis Rodriguez

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Talk by Luis Rodriguez

For any of you who don't know, I am probably the least likely person to talk to you today, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I was really a terrible student. School seemed to be a place where I felt I disappeared. There's something about the schools I went to, that who I was and what I was did not matter. One of the things, of course, is even though I wanted to do art, and I always wanted to be learning. Learning is something I think all kids want, whether they do it in school or not School wasn't the place where I could really develop.

But something happens to some kids, and something happened to me, where, regardless of that, I did not lose the love for learning. I think one of the results of not being visible in a school is that eventually you think there's no school for you, there's no place to learn. But I did find a place to learn.

In high school I was kicked out of all my English classes, which was kind of a funny thing, because now, twenty-five years later, I've become a writer and I'm well known and I always feel like going back to all of my English teachers and showing them all these books that I've written. You know, just to let them know that I wasn't going to fail. The problem with me is when kids are failed, what are they failing? Who are they failing? And that's an issue that I'm concerned about.

I work with a lot of marginal youth -- I don't know what you call them -- at risk?--that the schools don't want, and nobody else wants. The parents don't want them, churches don't want them. And what we tried to do is prove to people that we can create a situation in which young people can move toward their own destinies. Their own innate attributes. Their own powers. Their own gifts. We talk about gifts a lot, but I want to spend a little time with it, because I don't think this is what the schools do.

To me, the schools seem to have a whole different cosmology. Their cosmology is not about everybody being born with a gift, and that you can really work with somebody and develop these gifts. It's a cosmology that says everybody's like a clean slate, and that as teachers and school administrators, we're going to write knowledge on them. We're going to fill this empty vessel.

And there's a difference between education and instruction--- the root of the word education means to draw out. And I think it's a beautiful way to really think when you look at a kid with gifts. What your job really is is to draw out their own beauty, their own art, their own creativity, their own trajectory. If you look at it the other way, instruction--the root of it actually means to pack it in. And I think this is where the problem is. We're doing too much instruction and not enough education. You've got this brain that doesn't seem to have any matter in it, so you're going to put it in there.

There're two cosmologies and I believe there's a clash going on here. On the one hand, if you see young people the way James Hillman calls it in "Soul's Court" --he has a really beautiful metaphor, where he says that every young person, when they're born, they're like an acorn. And if you look at the acorn, the whole oak tree is already imprinted in that acorn. With proper nourishing, environment, whatever, it's going to be an oak tree. You already know that. It's built in. It's in its cells.

Well, human beings have a similar quality. He calls it the acorn theory--which is basically that human beings already have imprinted the things that they're really capable of, are willing and able do in this world. And it's really our job to create an environment, with nurturing and everything else, to make sure that the acorn will become that particular person that was born with its seed of destiny already within it. This is a very interesting theory to me because, again, it's another cosmology. It's different than what we get in the schools.

In schools, we have other interests besides the interest of the individual child. I'll give you an example. I went to Montabello High School in LA and I go back to the LA schools a lot. There used to be a really great superintendent there, a very open-minded person who had me go to the school and had me meet with the principals and some of the teachers in the schools. I told her and the whole gathering of teachers that I had a premise, and I wanted to see if they believed this. My premise was that every child had value, that every child can learn, and I wanted to know who actually believed that. That sounds like a great thing, right? You would be surprised how many of them did not really believe that was true.

We already have another viewpoint, another metaphor, another image, that's driving our educational policy. It's built in that not every child can succeed or should succeed. It's built in that you will have to have failures in order for some people to make it. What is the grading curve? What is that? You already built it in: the F's, the D's, the C's, and then the A's and the B's. And when you get a D or an F, you're already being put in what I call the jacket. You're going to carry this jacket through your future grades. It's a jacket that, even though you try to take it off, they keep putting it back on. You're no good. You're going to be a failure. You're not going to make it. And if you start off on that ball, guess where the ball's going to go? It's going to go exactly where we set it. It's going to go the failure route.

I remember going to school, and that's exactly how I felt. When I was in junior high school, they had a special class for us: troublemakers' class. They didn't want us in any of the other classes, so they would put me in a special class with a few other kids, and all we would do is pick up trash in the school all day long. That's all we did. And, of course, we did a lot of other goofy things, because it was like, "Good, now I don't have to go to school."

When I went to high school, I remember the look of these teachers. They already had me down, you know what I mean? They had my number. They already said, "You know what? You ain't no good. And don't you cause any problems in our school. The first time you say a peep, we're going to throw you out." I didn't even have to say anything. They had me cornered. They had me covered. They knew who I was. I was trouble. I was a failure. And, unfortunately, for a long time I actually believed it, and I acted accordingly. That's what we do to kids.

You'd think this was an archaic thing, but I have two small kids, and let me tell you about the battles I'm having with their teachers, in this day and age, 1999, just so they can see the acorn within my own kids. My little boy has been labeled a troublemaker and, at one point, psychotic by his teachers. This kid is the greatest kid at home. We get along really well. He has a lot of spirit. Maybe because of the way my wife and I raised him. He likes to speak out. He's so smart. He reads like 25 books a year--more books than I read a year, to my shame. But he's really into reading. And of course he loves video games, and he loves playing, and he loves TV and all that stuff; but he's really a smart kid.

But as soon as he got into the school, his first class had 41 kids in it. There was no way anybody was going to pay attention to his special needs. Because he had needs. And they all do, but everybody has different ones. And as soon as he would speak out, they just told him, "Shut up. Shut up." Over and over, "Be quiet." He couldn't understand. One year we went to his classroom, and we noticed that his desk was facing the wall. We asked, "What's going on here?" And the teacher says, "Well, he's disruptive, so we put him at the desk and he's facing the wall." I said, "Well, how long has he been sitting like that?" "For four months," the teacher says "Well, eventually, he got to like it," this teacher says. "So I just kept him there." And I was livid, because I could already see a repeat of my own path and what I went through.

Another instance is how I grew up with this thing that teachers used to always say, "You will never amount to nothing." That seems to be a litany that they teach in some schools. I don't know why, but I hear the same words, "You'll never amount to nothing." And when I was growing up, that's one thing I remember pretty well: You'll never amount to nothing. Well, my oldest kid is 23 years old, and I remember he had gotten kicked out of a high school class. So I went to the class. I didn't want him kicked out of school. I told them I know he may have messed up but they could just do some punishment, just do something, but not throw him in the street, 'cause I knew what was going to happen.

So I went to talk to the teacher. And sure enough, we're talking and talking, and my son's standing right there, and he starts arguing with her about something and she turns around and says, "You will never amount to nothing." I stopped getting mad at my son, and I just turned around and started losing it, because I remember hearing those words over and over again growing up. I said, "how can another generation go through this? Those words should never, ever, ever, ever be used in schools ever again. Do you hear what I'm saying? It should never be something we'd tell any kid: You will never amount to nothing. Because, unfortunately, if they hear it long enough, they probably won't amount to nothing."

We're not all going to make it the same way, or all be good and successful, but everybody has their own seed of destiny and a trajectory that they're going to have to go. And they will have to find their own way to get there, but we're not going to be the ones blocking them. We're not going to be the ones making sure they don't make it. Putting all the roadblocks in the way.

There's a Jefferson School in Chicago, the largest juvenile prison in the US. It's got hundreds and hundreds of kids. Eighty percent of them are African-American and the rest are Latino. So I'm at that school and the kids are going into the classrooms, and from the first minute they walk in the teacher is screaming and yelling at these kids, "Shut up. Sit down. Do that." Screaming and yelling the whole time that I'm sitting there. And then she's really nicely introducing me. "Well, here's Luis Rodriguez. And he's a poet. And he's coming to do a workshop." So, I'm kind of feeling bad for these kids.

But I decided I wasn't going to give her a hard time. I thought, well, maybe I could prove something to her. That these kids deserve some dignity here. I don't care what they've done. They deserve to be treated with some respect and dignity. So I gave them an exercise in which they were to write three scenarios about something in their life and after they finished writing it, they were going to read it. Well, the kids went at it, and then I had them read aloud. And the beautiful words, and the sentiments, and the longing, and these things that these kids came out with--I turned around, and that teacher actually was starting to have tears come down her cheeks.

Later on she told me, "You know what? I apologize, 'cause I really didn't think they had it in them." That's what she said. And I don't want to put her down. I think we're all part of it. We do it to our own kids. I see it. We do these things, and we don't realize the damage that we do, because we're playing into a certain paradigm, a certain cosmology, as I call it.

Cosmology just means how you see yourself in the cosmos, you know? And if you see it as that only certain people can make it and the rest not, you build your whole theory and life around a certain metaphor and image. And everything you look at tends to prove it. You know what I mean? You look at Congress. Well, those are the elite. Everywhere you go it has to be this way, 'cause we have all these poor, dumb people in prison. We have all these dumb people that can't get nowhere. They must be failures, and the rest of the people must be quiet. And so we start believing that this is true. And we don't realize that what we've done is create a fact when it wasn't a fact. We made it happen. Again, in the grading system it's already built-in that people are going to fail. And schools should not be about anybody failing. It doesn't have to be possible.

Now I'll tell you why I know it doesn't have to be possible. I've told this story to teachers all the time, and I'll tell it here. I've gone to the worst schools, I've gone to the most crowded old school in the country, which happens to be Roosevelt High School in East LA. I've gone to the least crowded in some cornfield in Nebraska. I've gone to Brooklyn schools. And I've seen some of the worst and best that our schools have to offer.

But I also happen to have gone to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. You know this is one of the most elite communities in the country. There are about five or six private schools that I visited. The parents paid like seventeen thousand dollars a year for a kid to go to these schools. I had such a great time there that I did a residency. And the kids were great, because I don't care what race, or color, or class background; kids are always great to me. So the kids were wonderful. I had no problem with the kids.

But I saw something. The kids were very involved in the school, from the elementary on up. Their artwork was on all the walls. They were paid attention to. I saw something different between the school I went to and the school that my own kids are going to. In my kids' school, the teachers got mad at the kids and threw keys at them one time. We had to go in there and try to stop this stuff. But at this other school, nobody was throwing keys at people, nobody was telling kids to shut up.

"Shut your face." I heard a kindergarten teacher in one elementary school say to a kid, "Shut your face." And this was before I got ready to talk. And you know how hard it is for me to talk under those conditions. Then I go to this other mainline school, and nobody's yelling at kids like that. I don't hear any disrespect. And so I asked one of the teachers there, "What's the deal here?" She said, "Well, we have a policy. A 100 percent graduation rate, and a 100 percent college entrance rate." Nobody fails those schools. Nobody. Now I know why. They get $17,000 per year per kid and, you know, some parents are going to come in really pretty mad if their kid fails.

But there's another issue here as well: those kids were made to feel special. And I will tell you, those kids aren't any better or more intelligent than my kids. They're just not. They're not any better. They're not more capable. That might be a challenge for some people to accept, but they're not. I'll tell you something else: those kids are very troubled. Because the more I spent time with them, the more I realized they're hurting, too, those kids. You know, the pressure to succeed is a terrible pressure. Of course, in my neighborhood the pressure was to fail. So we had another kind of pressure. [laughter] But the pressure to succeed is very hard for those kids. They had a high suicide rate, I found out and a high alcoholic and drug use rate.

These people aren't any better, any less troubled; they just have a lot of resources. And they have a different cosmology: money talks. Okay, but that's fine. That money has allowed them to have a school that says, "Nobody's going to fail here. I don't care how troubled you are."

It's really funny, because it's in that school where a kid actually, for the first time, asked me -- we were sitting with a group of kids -- and he says, "Well, why don't you inner-city people pick yourselves up from your own boot straps?" And I had to pause for a long time just looking at him, to see if it sunk in what he was trying to say. This kid actually believed that he was picking himself up from his own boot straps. He actually believed that nobody did anything for him. He actually believed that nobody made sure that he was not going to fail. He actually believed he did it all by himself. And he thought because nobody was making it in my community, for example, that we just didn't have the brains, the guts, whatever, to make it. It's just not that simple.

That's something I would like to address. Why do we continually allow this to happen? We need to have a whole new cosmology here, and we to start clashing with some of the old ones. The acorn theory seems like a pretty good way to start. If every child is born with gifts already imprinted in their souls, then our job is to help them on the path they have to take themselves. We're not going to do it for them. Part of the acorn theory is that you have to develop the character to match your destiny. You have to develop the courage and strength to do what you have to to get there. But that's something we have to help them get to understand too. We can do that.

Maybe you look at some kids and you think, "Well, this kid's a troublemaker, but maybe he's also good at something else." I could not conform to a classroom of 30 kids, where everybody was sitting in a row. Maybe most people did but I couldn't fit into it. First of all, 'cause nobody was paying attention to me. And people say, "Oh, these kids cause trouble because they want to be paid attention." I go, "That's exactly what they want." I wanted to be paid attention. I wanted people to see who I was. I wanted people to see me. I didn't want people to just say, "Well, you're just another number or just another name. You're another Mexican going to the school of all these Mexicans that can't even speak English. And just a big problem. And woe is me."

I want people to see Luis Rodriguez, to see what I was about, 'cause I couldn't see it sometimes. My parents couldn't see it. Somebody, somewhere had to see who I was. That's what teachers got to help do. You know, parents can't do that, though people say, "Well, our parents job is to help do that." Well, parents can contribute, parents are vital; but there's a good reason why parents can't see their kids. Partly, it's because they're too busy just trying to take care of them. Too busy just raising them. Too busy loving them. But sometime they don't see their own kids--see them, really see who they are.

You know the basic root word for respect? It's respicere--to see again. And this is what respect really means. See that child again. Maybe he speaks out. Maybe he talks loud. Maybe he or she is out there in the street and they don't want to come into class. Stop, turn around, and see them again; because then maybe you'll find what's breaking out of their souls. Maybe you'll find what's really eating at them, what they would really like to see happen in their lives. And if other adults can't do that, it doesn't happen. Many of these kids don't know where to go, and many of them don't even care anymore.

I have a feeling that the suicide rates, the homicide rates, the gang stuff, all this drug stuff is related very clearly to how much we, as a community, can see the very essence of these kids. And if we don't see them, I think it's commensurate to how lost they are. I just believe that to be true. I have seen some lost kids, and I know they didn't have parents who could pay attention to them; they didn't have schools that cared enough about them; they didn't have mentoring. Most kids today do not have an adult mentor in their life. They don't even have respectful relations with any adults. Most adults are so busy trying to keep things the way they are, that they're just hurriedly telling these kids, "Get your life together. Stop being a bother to me." Well, they have to be a bother, because that's what we're about.

That's the reason why we even exist, to take care of a whole new generation. And we don't live in a culture that allows that to happen, unfortunately. We live in a culture that says, "You've got to hurry up, grow quick, make your money. Get going." A level of success has nothing to do with the real success, which is how you're going to raise a whole new generation of people who feel empowered, who feel adequate, who feel confident and competent so that they can go through this world.

Joseph Campbell says -- and I believe this is an important thing -- "The world is a match for each one of us. And in reality, each one of us is a match for this world." We would not be brought into this world if we did not have the capacity to meet every challenge. Now, that's a hard thing to accept, but the more I think about it, the more I let it sink in, the more I realize that has to be true. We are a match for this world, and the world is a match for us. But how many of us believe that? How many of us actually go to schools and teach that to kids? How many of us actually get young people to realize that they, in fact, have the attributes and faculties and capacities to do everything that they want to do in this world. It doesn't happen. It happens in Bryn Mawr maybe; it doesn't happen in my school.

In fact, do you know what happens when you don't fail in my neighborhood? What happens to people like me who end up speaking and then talking and writing books? What do they say? "You're special." "You're different." "You're not like the others." So they always separate you from your own community. Okay, so you got A's. "You're not like the other people. "You're different." "You're special." It's making it seem like you were supposed to fail; but, okay, you rose above it. Good for you.

I really think that if we can set a whole new way of imagining how to work with kids, really imagining what their worth is in this world, we'll find that it's not that they become productive. That's what people say, "You're worthwhile if you're productive." That's not what their worth is, because most people can't even get a job in my neighborhood. They're never going to be productive. So that means they have no value? And when you think that, then it doesn't mean much when the cops come down and beat up on these kids. When they're sent to prison for years and years and years for the most minor conviction. Because they don't matter, they're unproductive; who cares about them?

So you can't have that idea that it's productivity that determines the value of somebody. You've got to have the idea that they've got value just because they're human beings, just because they were born into this world. And that value should not be shaped by other things that we throw in there.

I do these workshops with homeless people, with mentally ill women who are in different shelters. -- This particular one was for mentally ill women, substance abusers, who the administrator told me were hard-core homeless. And I asked, "What do you mean by that?" She says, "They'll never have a home. They'll never have any kind of life like that." So, I was supposed to do six weeks of workshop with them, and I ended up staying for four years. The women wouldn't let me go, and I couldn't let them go. But I realized something, man: their value is not dependent on if they have a home. The women had value just because of who they were.

And in that poetry class, they tapped into that power within them. And I'll tell you something about that creativity that we all carry; it's inexhaustible, man. It is so powerful. And if we ever teach our kids how much they have just with them, the abundance they carry, they'll never find a point where they feel like, "I'm going to blow my brains out." That creativity is never gone; you never use it up. Do we ever teach our kids that? That no matter what happens in their lives, they can always find that within them to carry forward? We don't teach it to them. And these women learned it, and it changed my whole life when I actually saw what it meant. Then I saw their poetry. Some people say they were crazy, but I don't know; after awhile, they were pretty sane to me. Maybe I was going crazy, but they seemed pretty sane.

I wanted to bring these experiences to you, because I wanted us to look at this in a different way. To look at schools, to look at our kids, to look at homeless people, to look at gang kids differently. To see them again -- if we have to go back to respect -- and see them again, and don't see them through the rosy colored eyes that the media, politicians, and the other powerful people in this country want us to see these people with.

My son, for example -- he's the reason I wrote my book, Always Running. I joined a gang when I was a kid. There are some of you who might have read the book and know the situation. I was two-years old when we moved from Mexico; even though I was born in El Paso, we lived in Juarez. And we went to Watts in South Central LA. Went to school there. At about 10 years old, I ended up in the San Gabriel Valley. That's when I got about with the gang. At 10 years old, my best friend was killed; 11 years old, I joined a gang. When I was 12, I started doing drugs from sniffing, to pills, to heroin. When I was 13, I started getting arrested for stealing, fighting. At 17 years old, I was arrested for attempted murder, in which four people were shot. By the time I was 18, 25 of my friends were dead.

Now I somehow changed my life. The Chicano movement was very helpful. The fact that I found poetry and art was very important. The fact that I found mentors, that was very important. And for 25 years, I kept myself out of jail, kept myself out of -- I let go of the drugs. After seven years of doing drugs, I let it go. And, unfortunately, I was drinking for 20 years. But, still, I was not the same as I was before.

Now, my 15-year-old joins a gang in Chicago. And I'm thinking, "If I barely survived it, how's he going to survive it?" Because it didn't get better, it got worse. And I wrote the book because I figured, "You know, I got something to give him that very few fathers have: this experience." And I wanted him to learn from it. And in the process, other people had picked up the book and have learned. And other young people have realized, "That's my story, too. And you told me something I didn't know. And I want to know what you know." And I've been able to save a lot of kids; that's why "You Struggling for Survival" was created--so that we can have a kind of an organization of adults and youth working together for the benefit of youth. Gang and non-gang kids. Not judging them, not putting them down, but working through the capacities of every person, and honoring each one of these kids.

The elders in our community hold the ground while the kids make their glorious mistakes. 'Cause when we don't do that, they make their destructive mistakes. That's what the adults have to do, just hold the ground for them. They've got to go through something. Don't be putting them down, knocking them down, and making sure they don't make it. Hang in there through all their hard times. And, finally, they end up maturing and growing, and they make their own way. That's what we have to do. But I'm going to tell you how hard it is. There's a lot going against us.

And, unfortunately, my son, despite every effort, despite the fact that he actually got out of the gang and was going to college, and the family and the whole group worked to make sure he would make it...He was a poet. He was getting well-known. Still, this past September, he got convicted and sentenced to 28 years for three counts of attempted murder. Even then, I couldn't save my own kids.

And I know that this is not just about one father, 'cause there's too many of these kids out there; and there's too many fathers and mothers who don't know what to do. And they're good people. It's bigger than that, because I can't go around and just blame myself over and over again. I know I wasn't a good father. I'm the first one to admit it. I know I drank away too many years when I should have been with my kids. Five-and-a-half years ago, I went sober, precisely because I couldn't see my kids go through this anymore.

So, I can change my life, but what can we do to make sure that the rest of us pull our end of it? He's not just my kid. He's your kid. Just like all of you and your kids become my kids. And you should take care of these kids, 'cause that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for anything else. They're asking for love. They're asking for respect. They're asking for a measure of dignity. They're asking for somebody to just pay attention to them, and maybe again, to see who they are. If that's too much to ask for, then I rest my case. But I don't believe that's too much to ask for.

And I'm not going to just exploit my son's situation, 'cause it's a hard, hard time between here and 28 years. And we're not going to abandon him. And we're not going to just let him go and say, "Well, he's trash now," like some people do, because they're in prison. He's still going to be my son. We're still going to love him. We're still going to work with him. But we need everybody's hand in the lives of these kids. We need everybody to see them, as you would see yourself, as you would want to be seen. 'Cause I'm going to end with the golden rule, 'cause it's the best rule in the world. It's the one that we keep forgetting. It's the one that every religion goes by. It's the one that's the basis for Christianity. And we keep forgetting it. And that is: Treat others the way you want to be treated. That, to me, is the most beautiful thing. And you won't ever do what some people would do to kids if you would stop and think, "What if I was that kid?" They wouldn't do it. We're connected. There is no separation between us.

And as the prisons get built on one end, three million people in prison today in the U.S.; the gated communities get built on the other end. And don't you think that's the other side of the prison? It sure is. It even looks like prison. They've got gated communities. They've got guards walking around to make sure nobody can come in and out, unless they've got permission. And people hide in them, and they watch TV, and they're scared. And they won't even want to get out, because they think this is the only safe haven. They built their own prison, sentenced themselves to prison while they sentence other kids. It's two sides to the same coin. And, by the way, there's about three million of these, too. Three million people in gated communities, and three million over here. This is what we created in this country, and we have got to stop it. Thank you very much.

Moderator: Luis, before you take questions, I was wondering if you would just read a few of your poems for us?

Rodriguez: Yeah, I would love to do that. Let me just read a couple, so you know what I do. And I'm going to read one to my daughter. Because people know about my son, and they don't realize I have this beautiful 21-year-old daughter who was also treated very badly; went through abuse with stepfathers who abused both her and my son, and was homeless. But somehow, she has a dignity and a strength that I admire.

And I want to honor her too, because she means so much to me. One of the sad things about it is that she once told me, "I never had a father that could hold me and be there for me when I was a kid." And I felt really bad, and I didn't know what to tell her, except that, "You know what, I can't make up for that. I just can't. But, you know, I'm your father. Let's do it now. Let's change it now. Let's make sure that we do talk and communicate, and that we're not ever going to have that kind of excuse again." So this is kind of my poem to the distance that I created between us, and how I've been trying to build it up again. Her name is Andrea Victoria, and the poem is called "Victory Victoria, my beautiful whisper."

"You are the daughter who sleeps beauty. You are the women who birth my face. You are a cloud creeping across the shadows, drenched in sorrows, and to heart sees terrain. Victory Victoria, my beautiful whisper. How as a baby you laughed into my neck. When I cried at you leaving, after your mother and I broke up. How at age 3, you woke me up from stupor, so I would stop peeing into your toy-box, in a stupor of resentment and beer. And how later, at age 5, when I moved in with another women, who had a daughter about your age; you asked, "How come she gets to live with daddy?" Muneca, these words cannot traverse the stone path of our distance. They cannot take back the thorns of fallen roses that greet your awakenings. These words are from places too wild for hearts to gallop, too cruel for illusions, too dead for your eternal gathering of flowers. But here they are, really offerings from your appointed father, your anointed man-guide. Make of them your heart's bed." Thank you. [applause]

And let me just say a real short one. I have a short section of poems called "Poems Too Short to Braid." And I'm just going to read you the last one in that section, "Believe Me When I Say." "Believe me when I say water is the skin of the earth; trains are arteries with corpuscles of people. A sight is an ancestor praying. A women's body is suspended over the land. Tears come from clouds in your head. Writing a poem is like fathering a river. Waiting is the art of desire. Something about a city makes you want to kill. Fetuses scribble on the walls of wombs." [applause] So let's have a little bit of a discussion. Anybody want to start with questions?

Questions from the Audience

Person from Audience: You talked a lot about dignity in values. In this politicized environment, how do you start getting educators, people who take these kids seriously, to start talking about those kind of values? What principles do you draw on it?

Rodriguez: It's not enough to just say, "I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that." Let's talk about it. Let's find out who we are. How are we going to build a community if we don't even know who we are? I don't hear from you, you don't hear from me. To me, this is part of it.

Because, to me, the politicization is not going to happen unless the discourse happens. Do you hear what I'm saying? I used to have a romantic notion that I was going to overthrow the government in two years. I really believed that. But you know what? The thing is, that's not even my goal. My goal isn't about overthrowing the government; my goal is to revolutionize every relationship, every institution, every teacher/parent thing. I don't care if they're conservative or not. Those are the issues -- conservative and liberal, I don't care about that. It's totally meaningless.

I'll talk to the most conservative person, as well as the most liberal, but either way, we're going to extend this revolution, because our kids' lives are on the line.

Person from Audience: I teach and I use your book in my English class. I use it as a basis for discussing things that we don't seem to be discussing in school, but are part of our lives, like racism and prejudice.

Rodriguez: In fact, teachers are the best supporters of this book. They know that it's missing in other literature and other curriculum. The kind of literature that makes these kids say, "I know what this is about. I'm living this."

But it's actually being banned now. I don't know if you don't know it; you should know it. There's a big move. Some conservative people are starting to look at me and say, "This guy's a dangerous guy." So what they're doing is banning the book in schools. And it started in Rockford, Illinois. In San Jose they tried to ban it. In Santa Rosa and Fremont they banned it. In San Diego, right now as we speak, they're banning it. In Texas, some school districts have already stopped it from going into the school.

In Michigan, in fact, I went to Kalamazoo, to elementary schools and a high school, to speak there. I had my book in my hand and they stopped me at the door and said, "Well, you can come in but your book can't come in." [laughter] "Why?" "Because the school board banned it. The book can't go into the school." So it's starting to happen. And I believe it's because -- and they actually have said it -- it's not just the graphicness, it's got some really graphic scenes in here. I don't apologize for them. It's a hard-core book.

But they really have said it's because of what I'm saying. It's because kids are gravitating towards it. It's because they're afraid of getting people to think a little bit different than what they want these kids to think. So I see that as a challenge I'm trying to take on now. Fine, let them ban the book. We're going to take it on. You know, because this is part of our struggle. Ideas, right now, is what we have to address. This is not about guns, it's about ideas. This is about where we're at now. Let's get the ideas going. And if they want to stop those ideas, then we have to challenge that; because that's what we need, to have more ideas.

Person from Audience: Who inspired you to write poetry?

Rodriguez: I didn't know what poetry was, but when I was in jail, I started to write these little vignettes. And somebody -- an art teacher, not even my English teacher -- looked at it and said, "This is good stuff. This is beautiful." And I'm glad she did, because I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I used to do beautiful artworks too. I didn't know what it meant. But she said, "You have something here." Here's what I mean, where somebody can see a kid and see something breaking out of him. And she typed it up for me, because it was terrible handwriting. She typed it up and I couldn't imagine that it was my writing, that I could do this.

Now, it took me a long time to get back to it; 'cause, again, in order for me to stay out of jail and not go back to drugs, I worked seven years in factories and steel mills, just to have something else that would keep me from bouncing back, because it always calls you back. I have a whole chapter in a book I'm writing called, "It Calls You Back," because that's what it does. The body of the drugs. No matter how good things are going, you keep getting called back. So I spent a long time just surviving.

But I'll tell you what was happening. I remember I was standing in the steel mill. I had a hard hat, and I was in the overhead crane, and I was what they called an oil and greaser. I was the guy that greased and oiled all the machines and wheels and everything. I was all over the place. And I remember standing up there, and I saw the slag coming out. It's really a beautiful thing, all that steel coming down. And all of a sudden, I started to cry. And I know why, because my poetry was dying. And somehow I realized, "You know what? I can't live a life anymore unless I do what I really believe in."

Somehow this teacher had sparked something in me, many years before, and I believed her. And that stayed with me for a long, long time; because she helped me get an award soon after that. Eighteen years old, I won a $250 writing award. She helped send it in. And I was like dancing like crazy, because I had this crazy new money that I didn't have to steal for, you know? That it was actually something I could get for my art. And I decided I needed to do this. And one day I got fired from one of those jobs, at a chemical plant. I never looked back. I started working for newspapers. I started going to poetry workshops. Started, you know, becoming a writer. I've been doing this now for almost twenty years, since I let go of all of that stuff.

I will have to say there was one other guy that I need to mention. He came to a workshop we did in East LA. We had these writers workshops in East LA. And he came, and he had been in prison for 17 years. San Quentin, Fulsom, Soledad. A Fifty-year-old guy, who was also a heroin addict for 20 years. But he told me something that I didn't believe at first, but now I believe. He said poetry saved his life. And I thought about that. And I go, "That's right. Poetry can save lives." And I really understood it, because it saved my life.

And, in fact, he's still out there working with kids, going to juvenile halls, going to the prisons, and teaching poetry in the schools there, around the East LA area; but he had instilled in me a very important concept, "This stuff can save lives." This is why we do what we do.

About the Speaker

Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of the memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA, which won a Carl Sandburg Literary Award and was chosen a New York Times Notable Book for 1993. He is also an internationally recognized poet whose books, Poems across the Pavement and The Concrete River have won the Poetry Center Book Award and the PEN West/Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Click here to read two poems by Rodriguez.

Among other awards, Luis is also a recipient of a Hispanic Heritage Literary Award, and a National Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award. He has traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe reading, lecturing and conducting workshops. He is also the founder of Tia Chucha Press, a Chicago-based poetry press; and a founder of Rock-a-Mole which produces Hip Hop Jazz and Rap artists and urban youth arts festivals.

Rodriguez is a founder/board member of Youth Struggling for Survival, featured in the 1997 PBS-TV series. "Making Peace." He has visited juvenile facilities, prisons, public schools, community centers, Indian reservations, and youth programs throughout the country. Since 1994, he has helped facilitate events concerning violence, youth, and elders for the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation. He has four children and four grandchildren. Born in El Paso, Texas, raised in LA, he currently lives in Chicago with his wife Trini and their two young sons.

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