“I love L.A. I can’t forget its smells.
I love to make love in L.A.
It’s a great city, a city without a handle,
the world’s most mixed metropolis,
of intolerance and divisions.
How I love it, how I hate it . . . ”
—FROM “LOVE POEM TO LOS ANGELES”
“The Big Orange”?
Los Angeles is more a prickly pear cactus than an orange, cactus being natural to the region anyway. From the early 1920s to the late 1950s, the San Fernando Valley, where I live, had up to fifteen thousand acres of a fruit the Spanish first planted in California in the 1500s. Now the orange groves are gone, replaced by single-family homes, palm tree–lined streets, strip malls, and warehouses.
Due to years of drought, in 2017, my family removed all the grass from our front yard and planted succulent plants, sage, an elderberry tree, mint, and other herbs, including the yerba santa (Eriodictyon californicum) used for healing by Native peoples in California for generations. And, of course, we have prickly pear cactus, which has been on the continent for at least ten thousand years.
A friend of mine living in London visited soon after the garden bloomed and took photos. I said, “Nothing much to see, dude.” He gazed at me, paused, and remarked, “This is exotic where I’m from.”
I suppose it would be. Los Angeles is a dreamland, popping up in Hollywood movies even when the scenes call for New York City. LA images have blown up in flicks from Rebel Without a Cause to Blade Runner to Grease to The Terminator. The Hollywood sign, as well as downtown’s high-rises with their flat tops (for heliports), are known in every corner of the world. Venice, Santa Monica, or Malibu beach piers and sand get prime time on TV and in film.
I don’t think of “El Lay” that way. I’ve lived in the parts of this City of Angels furthest removed from heaven. My story is the story of the “other” Los Angeles.
My family settled here in the mid-1950s, when I was two. We lived in Watts, an African American and Mexican ghetto/barrio. We stayed in several homes, were evicted a few times, and were homeless for a spell during a time when my mother tried to leave my father (she ended up going back).
The house I most remember was a tiny clapboard structure on 105th Street near McKinley Avenue. My youngest sister, Gloria, was born at East LA’s General Hospital when we lived there— a tiny, red-faced infant my mother brought home.
I have a much older half sister—some twenty years older—named Seni. She preceded us to Watts with a husband and two daughters (another daughter came later). They lived on 111th Street. I stayed there a couple of summers when my family departed for vacations in Mexico and left me behind (I never knew why). Soon after the Watts Rebellion of 1965, this home was torn down to make room for Locke High School—decades later I spoke there and mentioned to the students they might be sitting in my old living room!
I first attended elementary school at 109th Street School. I skipped kindergarten, since Amá (a shortened form of “Mamá”) didn’t want me in school until another sister, Ana, a year younger than me, could attend.
On my first day, I went from classroom to classroom because I couldn’t speak English and teachers didn’t want me among their students. A teacher finally let me stay, but she had me in a corner playing with building blocks most of the year. I’d pee in my pants since I didn’t know how to say I had to go to the restroom. Whenever a Spanish word left my mouth, I was punished, including being swatted by the school’s principal. I made the mistake one day of stepping into the kindergarten class my sister was in so I could pick her up. The teacher slapped me across the face in front of everyone.
And that was the better part of the day. At home, my brother José, three years older, beat the shine out of me whenever he could. He once threw me off a rooftop. Another time he dragged me around the yard with a rope around my neck. He even solicited his friends to knock me around.
Over the years José became one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to know—a hard-working, law-abiding brother, and also a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather. Unfortunately, in 2019, suffering from early Alzheimer’s, he passed on at age sixty-eight.
Watts was then, and is now, the poorest neighborhood in Los Angeles. The iconic Watts Towers are here, built by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia over a thirty-three-year period. When Rodia finished, in 1954, he left the towers in the care of a Mexican family and never returned. As a child I climbed those structures—so sturdy even rambunctious children couldn’t compromise the cement, rebar, and wire mesh spirals with seventy thousand embedded pieces of porcelain, tile, and glass. Even earthquakes and man-made machines the city once used could not knock them down. Today the towers, still standing, are behind a chain-link fence in a park housing an art gallery, art studios, meeting rooms, and an outside amphitheater. In my early twenties I returned to live in Watts, and another South LA neighborhood known as Florence, with my first wife. My oldest son, Ramiro, and daughter, Andrea, were born during that time, in 1975 and 1977, respectively.
Annual Watts jazz and drum festivals have brought thousands to the park and towers. In 2015, I read poetry at one of those festivals with Ramiro, who was then forty, a kind of homecoming. Yet even with new housing and a few refurbished alleys and streets, not much has changed in Watts. Its poverty rate is over fifty percent today. It is now majority Mexican and Central American. Many African Americans in the city have been pushed out, especially after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and even more so after the 1992 LA Uprising. This is “Riot City” after all, including the 1970 East LA Uprising—there have been more civil disturbances here in the past hundred years than any other city.
With gentrification and other displacement, much of LA’s African American population and many Mexican/Central Americans are now in desert towns like Lancaster or in the “Inland Empire” (where Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties meet)—or living along streets, alleys, and freeway underpasses near where they once had a home. They have been pushed out, discarded, again.
I started out in Watts, but over the years I’ve lived in far-flung communities in and around Los Angeles. From age eight to nineteen, I resided in the “other” valley, the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), a former fruit- and nut-growing area that by the 1960s became industrialized and suburban. Wham-O Inc., a toy company, had a factory there, as well as other assembly companies. Majority white then, the SGV was dotted with a hundred or so poor Mexican migrant communities, many named after the landscape, such as Las Lomas (“the hills,” my barrio), Canta Ranas (“singing frogs”), Monte Flores (“mountain flowers”), Cherryville (for the fields the migrants worked in), or El Jardin (“the garden”). These barrios often had dirt roads, no sidewalks, abandoned cars, and goats and chickens in backyards.
In the SGV, our family first lived with Seni and her family in a two-bedroom apartment, a total of eleven of us with all the kids and adults. The children slept on blankets in the living room. Unfortunately, a family member ended up with bipolar disorder—although it wasn’t called that then, and we had no idea what the hell was going on. A stabbing incident brought police to the house; the landlord evicted everyone. The two families split up, and my dad, mother, brother, two younger sisters, and I ended up in a one-bedroom squat in South San Gabriel.
When I was nine, my mother told me to find a job, because at that age she picked cotton in Texas. I took around a rusty hand-push lawn mower to my neighbors and cut their grass for 25 cents, although many yards were mostly dirt. Next I threw newspapers from a beat-up bicycle. I also cleaned well-off white people’s homes and yards, and even learned to clean their swimming pools. In my teens, I packed boxes in warehouses, cleaned up at a car wash, and served as a janitor/handyman at a discount store and as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant.
These migrant communities began in the 1930s with “Okies” and “Arkies,” poor whites driven from their fields due to the dust storms that ravaged their homes. By the 1940s, the communities became predominantly Mexican. When the 1960s came around, the time in which my family moved there, a uniquely organized and influential gang culture sprouted in South San Gabriel and other barrios. Called cholos, a word originally meaning “low-life Indians,” Chicano gang members created the now famous fine-line, black-and-gray tattoo style and sported oversized but perfectly ironed khaki pants, long white T-shirts or Pendleton flannel shirts, and lowrider hats or beanie caps. Specialized cholo graffiti covered fences, utility poles, and underpasses. Cholos had their own way of talking, of walking, of keeping the pachuco traditions. Almost every gang from other cultures in LA has since emulated the cholo style—Bloods and Crips as well as refugee youth from El Salvador, Cambodia, or Armenia.
I was a cholo from eleven to nineteen as part of the Las Lomas street gang, using every known drug at the time, mostly heroin, as well as spending stints at three sheriff’s substations, local city jails, juvenile hall, and two adult facilities. I was arrested for crimes including stealing, rioting, attempted murder, and assaulting police officers. Once, at sixteen, I spent days on “murderer’s row” of the Hall of Justice jail in a cell next to Charles Manson (the murder charges never materialized, and I was let go). Despite my detention record, I was only ever convicted for substantially lesser charges at eighteen (for resisting arrest and drunk and disorderly conduct).
Las Lomas had one of the most violent gang wars in the 1960s and 1970s with another barrio surrounding the old San Gabriel Mission called Sangra. One of the first and biggest lowrider car clubs, Groupe, came from the unincorporated South San Gabriel community that included Las Lomas. And the Mongols, for a time the most violent “1 percenter” motorcycle club, who took on the Hell’s Angels and other gangs, were born in the South San Gabriel/Montebello area.
As an active gang member, I got kicked out for fighting in my first year of high school and from another high school on the first day I showed up. I tried one more high school before I dropped out altogether. When I was fifteen, my parents threw me out of the house (by then we had moved to the city of San Gabriel). I slept where I could—along the LA River, or in abandoned cars, all-night movie houses, church pews, shuttered warehouses, or vacant lots. I carried a .22 handgun for protection and to mug tourists on Olvera Street (the original city pueblo) or in Chinatown.
My refuge, however, was downtown’s Central Library, where writers like Ray Bradbury and Charles Bukowski had spent time. I hungered for books—my initial favorites being Charlotte’s Web, The Martian Chronicles, and the black experience books of the 1960s: The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown; Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas; books by James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Nikki Giovanni, and George Jackson.
I returned home after tiring of the freezing nights and abysmal situations I witnessed living in the street. My parents were livid—they didn’t want me back. I didn’t care. I cleared out a small room adjoined to the garage that had no running water or heat. But it had a roof.
In the garage, hidden amid boxes and piles of old clothing, I found an old Remington typewriter with stuck keys and a worn-out ribbon and began to write vignettes, thoughts, feelings. A youth organizer entered my life and became my mentor, and despite tensions between us (due to my defiance), his persistence finally got me to paint murals and became a community activist. While I still burglarized homes and shot up heroin, I also took part in Chicano movement marches, protests, and gatherings. In an agreement with this mentor, I returned to school, helped lead three school walkouts, wrote a column of my thoughts for the school newspaper, and studied revolutionary theory. I let go of the heavy drugs for a while, since I was seen as a leader and organizer. Against all odds, I caught up on lost credits and received my high school diploma even though it was too late to be part of the cap-and-gown ceremony.
For some reason I became depressed after this—perhaps feeling no one would ever see me again in that same way. I went back to heroin.
When I was eighteen, community members saved me from a long prison term for allegedly fighting with sheriff’s deputies (the truth is I was trying to stop deputies from beating a handcuffed Chicana while she was on the ground). Teachers and neighbors wrote letters on my behalf; a few showed up in court. A judge gave me the break of a lifetime—he said he’d never seen such support for a defendant before. I ended up sentenced to time served in the county jail. I also began the process of owning my life instead of turning it over to gangs, drugs, and crime. In jail I began my first withdrawal from heroin. I was done, soul exhausted, tired of being trapped, tired of being tired. My family had given up on me. By then I’d also lost twenty-five friends to gang violence, police killings, heroin overdoses, and suicide.
I now had a vision and drive to become active—in ending barrio warfare, in establishing gang truces, and in practicing the political teachings needed to build a youth movement informed by revolutionary knowledge, organizing, and the arts—away from the vortex of violence and drugs (similar to what was happening at the same time in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and other urban war zones).
Unlike what is generally believed, people in America’s poorest communities worked hard to raise themselves up. Activists invested time and sweat equity (often with no pay) to overcome the systemic devastation overwhelming their streets, schools, and businesses, despite being undermined by police, politicians, and policy. Such leaders also contributed to ending the crack epidemic that began in LA in the early 1980s, again exploding in inner cities across the land, with complicity from government entities, gangs, and a susceptible clientele. Such brave and committed souls continue organizing till this day.
My late teens and twenties were marked by considerable instability.
After being hounded by police and sheriff’s deputies due to my community activism and gang peace work and shot at by two homies (one of whom I later heard was a police informant), I snuck out of my garage room at nineteen. I found my way into a dilapidated federal housing project in San Pedro, living with and learning from revolutionary thinkers and organizers.
After a couple of months, I moved into the Mexican barrios east of the LA River, including the White Fence and Cuatro Flats neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, and Geraghty Loma in City Terrace. Over the years, I also stayed in Pasadena’s Northeast ’hood when it consisted of poor Blacks and Mexicans, as well as the working-class communities of Huntington Park and Maywood.
I labored in some of the worst industrial/construction jobs—on bloody meatpacking floors, cleaning out oil and grease in massive pipes, in sewer treatment plants, as a lead foundry smelter. And I worked highly paid skilled jobs in mills and refineries.
In the middle of my twenties, I embarked in a new direction—a journalism and writing career. Myself and my second wife—a journalist and actress—moved to the Angelino Heights neighborhood, next to Echo Park, a thriving Mexican/Central American area whose residents have now been largely displaced by high-end development.
When my new wife left after a mere six months, I moved in with another woman and later bought my first home with her in Highland Park, a strong Mexican community. I remember walking from Avenue 57 to York Boulevard among panaderías, botanicas, and taquerias. Now, thirty years later, it is another highly gentrified community with boutiques, cafes, and juice bars. In recent years, a homeless enclave has sprung up nearby in a plant-infested area of the LA River, consisting of former Highland Park residents.
After two years, I broke up with my live-in partner and returned to Boyle Heights. I moved into a house owned by my brother José, who worked as a phone installer and lived with his second wife and their two daughters. For everything we went through when I was a child, I’m grateful for my brother for being there when I most needed him.
The next big turn was in 1985, just before I turned thirty-one—I moved to Chicago. There I got together with my last and greatest love, Trini. After three years of dating and living together, we married in 1988. By 1994 we had two boys, Ruben and Luis (also known as Chito). Trini also helped me raise Ramiro and Andrea. After Ramiro got into trouble with gangs, crime, and prison, I wanted to push him away, but I couldn’t. We held on tight as he took us on a roller coaster through hell.
At the same time, I helped create urban peace and youth empowerment organizations in Chicago like Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace network, and Humboldt Park’s Teen Reach.
Although Trini and I had bought our first house together in Chicago’s Logan Square, by 2000 we moved back to Los Angeles. This was mostly to keep our young sons away from the entrapments that held their older brother. We couldn’t lose any more boys. Andrea and her daughter, Catalina, later joined us in LA.
Trini grew up in the ghetto/barrio of Pacoima in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Once known as the “Mexican” side of the Valley, it’s now majority Mexican and Central American, with a significant, although declining, African American population. Today Pacoima, with a population of one hundred thousand, has around a 50 percent unemployment rate, federal housing projects, and gangs. At the elementary school Trini attended (as did my son Chito), 25 percent of students are homeless. Interestingly, Trini’s large Mexican family of eleven children never got involved in gangs or drugs despite the environment. We wanted to be close to this amazing family—there were now tons of nephews and nieces. We lived in Pacoima for six months before buying a house in the two-square-mile city called San Fernando, surrounded by the Los Angeles communities of Pacoima, Mission Hills, and Sylmar.
In 2001, Trini and I helped establish Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural and Bookstore in the Sylmar community (now a nonprofit called Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural). At the time there were no bookstores, movie houses, or comprehensive arts spaces in the northeast San Fernando Valley, home to half a million people.
Tia Chucha’s also sponsored annual concerts for a few years at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, which brought Cheech Marin, La Santa Cecilia, Tierra, Ceci Bastida, and many other Mexican/Xicanx performers, but also African American, Filipino, and Japanese American performers. Once, Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (famous for 1960s hits “Express Yourself” and “Love Land”) played there.
These concerts were organized by the singer/performer/activist Rubén “Funkahuatl” Guevara, who fronted Ruben and the Jets in the 1970s and Con Safos in the 1980s. In 2017 Ruben published a memoir, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer (University of California Press).
Ruben even directed the staged production of my one-man poem/play, “Notes of a Bald Cricket,” at the John Anson Ford Theater to a full house. To my surprise, Annette Bening showed up with her teen daughter, who had read Always Running for her high school English class and wanted to say hello.
After almost twenty years, Tia Chucha’s serves upwards of eighteen thousand people a year. We have classes in music, guitar, keyboards, and drumming, as well as son jarocho. We have writing, theater, mural painting, and other arts workshops. We’ve taught Nahuatl language and Mexicayotl (indigenous cosmology) classes. A Mexica danza group, Temachtia Quetzalcoatl, provides workshops and ceremony. We have a youth empowerment program, the Young Warriors. We also created Trauma to Transformation, working with incarcerated men and women, the formerly incarcerated, and families of the incarcerated with writing, theater, and visual arts. And we host the only annual outdoor literacy and arts festival in the San Fernando Valley, Celebrating Words: Written, Performed and Sung.
In the fall of 2014, I was designated as the official poet laureate of Los Angeles. The press conference to announce this appointment was held in the Central Library, next to those very shelves I once wandered past as a lost, drug-addicted gang youth—shelves that now hold many of my published poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.
When Ramiro moved in with the family, he brought much needed positivity and genuine heart. My son Ruben graduated from UCLA, magna cum laude. My youngest son, Chito, is writing stories and scripts, and carving out a creative path for himself. Andrea is back in Chicago, with a five-year-old son, Jack Carlos. And my granddaughter Catalina, who as of this writing is twenty-three, graduated in 2018 from Bennington College in Vermont and is now in the master’s program in poetry at Rutgers University of New Jersey.
As the Diné say, I’m walking among beauty and blessings.
If you go to the San Gabriel Valley now, you’ll notice the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Japanese lettering on top of buildings and strip malls. The SGV now has the largest Asian population in the United States. Most of the white people have left the area. Many of the Mexican migrant housing structures were razed. Mansions and townhouses, for a while, were being built next to small wood-frame shacks. This process began around the mid-1980s—a sort of gentrification, since this involved people with money, not the poorer Asian immigrants from Cambodia or Laos.
There’s a park in Monterey Park called La Loma. White residents once chased me out of there when I was eight years old. Even though there was no official sign saying so, Mexicans were apparently not welcome. A few years ago, at the invitation of my friend, former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz, I threw out the first baseball for a new Little League organization at La Loma Park, with teams consisting primarily of Asians and Mexicans.
Then, in 2017, a Luis J. Rodriguez Reading Park was created at the Sanchez Elementary School in Rosemead. I attended that school when it was part of the blighted South San Gabriel neighborhood. Poverty, gangs, even human trafficking of girls, often through motels along Garvey Avenue, permeated the area in those times.
Now the homes there are larger and stuccoed. Dirt roads have been paved. The school looks clean and modern. The day of the dedication I talked to the children, who were mostly Asian, though sprinkled here and there were Mexican indigenous faces. I was a sorry-ass student—shy, bullied, awkward. I joined a gang, and everything changed. It was unimaginable to me as a child that I’d return in my sixties to celebrate this space with my name on it.
Los Angeles is in deep transition. Its 469 square miles traverse deserts, beaches, wooded mountains (with snow in the winter), and dense urban communities (South Central LA is the country’s most overcrowded area). The city is an increasing cost-of-living miscreation, having seen a 32 percent rise in rents since 2000. It has the lowest home ownership rate of a major metropolitan area in the country. The county has the largest homeless street population—around fifty-eight thousand people—while 58 billionaires reside in the city’s richest zip codes. The inequalities here are dismal, and they’re spreading.
Since my return to Los Angeles I’ve taken friends, guests, and journalists from around the United States as well as England, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and Australia, including TV news crews and TV writers, on what Ramiro calls “the cholo tour”—no beaches, Hollywood trappings, or Disneyland. I take them to the “other” LA—to places I’ve laid my head, where there are people on the streets, all kinds of violence and poverty, but also life, murals, poetry. These places don’t exist on tourist maps. The visitors are amazed by how much character there is—by how disheveled some of the streets appear, but also by the wonderful smells, sounds, and sights of Mexican food, auto shops, and children’s laughter. They gawk at the old brick buildings and Victorian structures that pop up here and there. And even if the homes are small and wood framed, they are mostly clean and alive with color, with flowerpots and, at times, stalks of corn and chicken coops.
One TV crew from Europe wanted me to show them gang members. I said I don’t do that. They were disappointed, but what they saw was eye-opening just the same. Ironically, as we sat at a taco stand to take a break, a gang shootout exploded across the street. One dude ran up to a car and began firing into it. The car sped off. It was fast and furious. In fact, the TV crew was so busy eating and talking they didn’t even think to look up. I didn’t say anything.
This is the Los Angeles where Santa Ana winds scatter dry leaves, and droughts make tinder out of the formerly green brush. Where wildfires are metaphor and reality for our internal and external terrains. Where the city is music but also muscles, a rain dance often with no rain, neon glare and smog-tinged skyline, held together in a spiderweb of freeways. It’s a place where even jacarandas and palm trees are transplants.
This is where the city’s buildings are bricked and nailed together with survival stories, war stories, and love stories—the kind of harrowing accounts Los Angeles unfurls at three a.m., when ghosts meander along the upturned pavement or rumble by on vintage cars, and all-night diners convert into summits for the played out, heartsick, and suicidal.
There’s a migrant soul in this rooted city: Skid Row next to the Diamond District, waves of foam against barnacled piers, cafes and boutiques next to botanicas. Ravines and gulleys turn into barrios, rustic homes with gardens dot bleak cityscapes, and suburbs burst with world-class graffiti.
Fragmented yet cohesive, Los Angeles demands reflection on ourselves and the unstable ground we call home, where people die for lack of a roof or food or compassion. As renowned LA writer John Fante would say, these persons are “songs over sidewalks,” imaginations on the interchange, humanity that deserves connection, touch, breath. These roads, bridges, and alleys also contain concertos. Breezes over the ocean’s darkest depths are replete with harmonies, and a howling moon and red sunset serve as backdrops for every aching interlude.
Los Angeles is where every step rhymes, where languages flit off tongues like bows across strings, skateboarders and aerosol spray cans clatter in a daily percussion, and even angels intone “We can do better,” while haggling at garage sales.