Poet of the Streets

Luis J. Rodriguez, finally, has stopped running.

His fast-paced criminal life long over and his demons now at rest, Rodriguez’s world is converging here in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where he and his wife have bought their first home and are now hoping to stir young, neglected minds and awaken future artists. Eight years after his award-winning memoir, “Always Running,” hit a national nerve with its raw and honest depictions of L.A. gang life, Rodriguez is ready to stand still, to “get smart with heart” and try to change the broken society he has poignantly chronicled in his poems, memoir and his latest book, “Heart and Hands.”

It’s been 18 months since Rodriguez returned to Los Angeles, where he spent his childhood and adolescence in Watts and San Gabriel running from the cops, his teachers and parents who tried to pull him from the crazy street life--”la vida loca”--he wrote about in his memoir. On Saturday, with the opening of his bookstore, coffeehouse and cultural center--Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural--in Sylmar, Rodriguez realized his long-held dream of community empowerment using art as the unifying force.

“There is an old saying that a culture is made around what we do with young people,” he writes in “Heart and Hands,” a nonfiction guide for community-building. “... Young people carry the dreams of the whole society. If we don’t establish and maintain a space for those dreams, the community as a whole loses its dreams and their attainment.”

If Tia Chucha seems like an odd name for the center of art and culture that Rodriguez hopes his bookstore will become, consider the eccentric aunt it is named for, his first muse, the adult of his childhood who sparked his imagination the way he hopes to provoke young readers, writers and artists. Tia Chucha never married or stayed in one place for long, but entertained her family with her guitar, her songs and poems, and the wild concoctions she called perfume.

“That spirit of being creative and not letting anything bind her I really appreciate,” says Rodriguez, standing in the storefront he’s been developing for a year. “I just want to keep the name alive, the spirit of the woman, because her creativity fired up the creativity within me. What’s weird about L.A. is that it’s the entertainment capital of the world, but still there are so many culturally barren communities. When I was in trouble, books saved my life. But an adult who cares is also important.”

By selecting Sylmar as Tia Chucha’s locale, Rodriguez and his partners (his wife, Trini Rodriguez, and her brother-in-law, Enrique Sanchez) hope to lift the neglected Latino pockets of neighboring San Fernando, Arleta, Sun Valley and Pacoima, which have no bookstores, movie houses or community centers for the arts. Eighty percent of the area’s 400,000 residents are Latinos who, Rodriguez believes, are hungry for intellectual and artistic stimulation.

“The population of gifted and talented people we have is huge, but when we came on visits from Chicago, I would get depressed,” says Trini Rodriguez, who was raised in Pacoima. “I would see a cultural desert when I visited here. There was a well-founded respect for the creativity and contributions of the Mexican community in Chicago that I don’t see here. People here are alive with their culture, but there’s something about bringing it together in a place that is empowering. We hope to help people reach their particular gifts the way Luis was able to.”

At 47, Rodriguez is on his third marriage, a father of four and grandfather of four. He is a compact man with close-cropped hair and a goatee. He knows firsthand the value system of gang members and uses that to help turn them from violence and enfranchise Chicanos. Sober for eight years, he now realizes that during all those decades of fast living, he was mostly running from himself. But even in those violent, drug-induced days, reading and writing helped to mend his broken spirit and “aligned me to a level of sanity.”

“In spite of all the obstacles, I was able to find my own path,” he said. “That coming together, when you find your art and your path--that’s when the world aligns. If you’re off doing something else that you’re not supposed to be doing, then it doesn’t work. My writing has been my healing.”

Rodriguez was a boy when the running began. By 12, he was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare, running from rival Sangra gang members and grieving the death of his best friend, who fell through a skylight as the two were being chased by police. Over the next four years, he was homeless, addicted to heroin and PCP, and served time in jail half a dozen times for robberies, fire bombings and drive-by shootings.

Moved by the urban literature of the 1960s, which he devoured at the Central Library, he participated in the Chicano Moratorium to protest the disproportionate numbers of Latinos serving in Vietnam. He was arrested in the riots that ensued after the killing of journalist Ruben Salazar in 1970. By his 18th birthday, 25 of Rodriguez’s homeboys from Las Lomas gang had been killed on the streets, and he was facing six years in state prison for assaulting a police officer.

But a judge, community activists and a high school counselor who had read the poems Rodriguez had scribbled on scraps of paper in jail over the years, looked past his street-tough facade and saw an up-and-coming revolutionary who could recite Malcolm X, Claude Brown and Eldridge Cleaver and use his pen as a weapon against his suffering and the pain of his community.

When the judge cut him a break, Rodriguez quit his gang life at 21, got married and had a son, but was not quite ready to stay put. He tried various jobs as a carpenter, welder and truck driver, had a daughter in 1977, and drank a lot. By 25, he was divorced and an alcoholic, but the words kept flowing, and his dream of becoming a writer would not subside.

After writing for a small weekly newspaper in East L.A., Rodriguez was offered a newspaper job in 1984 in Chicago, where he hit the poetry slam circuit, immersing himself in the writing life. Four years later, when his 13-year-old son started failing school in Los Angeles and running away from home, Rodriguez moved him to Chicago to protect him from following in his path. His plan backfired.

His Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago’s west side was home to some of the most dangerous gang activity in the city. The boy sank deep into the gang life, even after Rodriguez enrolled him in new schools, got them in family counseling and participated in a youth group they formed together. Turning to his pen, the beleaguered father completed the autobiography he had begun in a jail cell at 16, hoping the blueprint of his life would serve as the strongest warning of all.

That was 1993, the year Rodriguez became sober. “My family was taken aback with the book,” Rodriguez said. “For me, it was about healing, about having the truth in my face. Not just my truth, or the truth of my family, but the truth of the whole community. There’s a lot of hurt that hasn’t been dealt with through a lot of generations until I wrote about it. I did it for my son mostly. The honest truth is that I wasn’t a good father. I thought I could help him that way.”

He couldn’t. Ramiro Rodriguez, 26, has been in an Illinois prison for five years on three counts of attempted murder stemming from a road rage incident during which he shot one man and fled, and then shot at police officers who were chasing him. He was sentenced to 28 years and must serve a minimum of 14.

“He’d already left his gang life behind him, but he had that gun and that rage was still inside him and he started shooting,” a crestfallen Rodriguez explained. “It’s that rage that you carry inside from living in an environment where you’re getting shot at and people are chasing you all the time. It doesn’t just go away. I did drugs and drank for 20 years to deal with mine. Every year, I get better. But it’s there. He hadn’t dealt with his yet when this happened.”

In June 2000, Rodriguez, his wife, and their two sons, Ruben, 13, and Luis, 7, moved to San Fernando to be close to his wife’s large family, a decision that made Rodriguez feel he was abandoning his family in Chicago: his 24-year-old-daughter, grandchildren and, most of all, Ramiro.

“But Ramiro told us to go, and everything was pointing to coming here,” says the author of seven books and the upcoming HarperCollins short story collection, “The Republic of East L.A.” “I felt this was the place we needed to be. Growing up, the Valley wasn’t with me. It was where all the whites ran off to. I maintain my ties to East L.A., but there is a lot of energy and momentum here, and I saw the need here.”

So does Angel Cervantes, a Morningside Elementary School teacher who grew up in San Fernando and has to send his students either to Northridge or Burbank to buy books. A fan of Rodriguez’s work, Cervantes is volunteering at Tia Chucha’s, hoping his assistance will help turn the venture into a community-based enterprise.

“As both a kid who grew up here and now a teacher, I’ve seen firsthand that the students of this socioeconomic level do not have books at home,” said Cervantes, 29. “They don’t have the literature or the literacy that is available to kids in other neighborhoods.

There will be plenty more than books at Tia Chucha’s. A combination bookstore, art gallery, performance space, computer center and cafe (where patrons can drink coffees and refreshments with a Latin twist), Tia Chucha’s will mainly serve as a creative outlet for local artists as well as a learning lab for young people who want to develop their talents. Trini Rodriguez, a former newspaper editor and bilingual education teacher, will develop writing, art and computer workshops for the public.

“It’s very easy for Chicanos to organize against something,” said Diane Correa de Rempel, an artist who is part of the recently formed art collective Artino, which will regularly showcase its work at the store. “We can be quick to boycott, to voice against something but very difficult to unify for positive reasons. People don’t value the arts because they don’t see the immediate monetary value, yet art is a reflection of how we think. Art, in all of its forms, is a reflection of society and where it is in a particular time in history.”

To open the store’s doors, Rodriguez received a $30,000 grant from the Liberty Hill Foundation as well as private donations and proceeds from a benefit auction at the Border Book Festival in New Mexico. “The reality is that Tia Chucha’s has a double bottom line,” said Michele Prichard, director of special projects at Liberty Hill in Santa Monica. “It has a social purpose as well as an attention to generating money from sales. They will provide an alternative culture and a gathering place for people in an area where it is badly needed.”

In the frenetic trajectory of Rodriguez’s life, Tia Chucha’s stands as a resting place, a haven for his cultural expression where he can reconcile with past ghosts and work to redefine power and beauty “remembering that real ugliness comes from the abuses of beauty and power,” as he writes in “Hearts and Hands.” Since returning to Los Angeles, Rodriguez has reunited with his elderly mother, who gave up on him as a teenager. And he is learning to find peace in his newfound stillness, the legacy he had hoped to pass on to his oldest son in the last lines of his memoir.

“You have worth outside of a job, outside the ‘jacket’ imposed on you since birth,” the father implored his son. “Draw on your expressive powers. Stop running.”

The father finally has.