Mosaiko

Former Gang Member Says Art Is an Antidote to Violence

• Comments
• Email This Post
• Share on Facebook

Erica Marrero

Author and activist Luis J. Rodríguez helps troubled youth in Mexico

By age 11, Luis J. Rodríguez was already a veteran of the gang wars in East Los Angeles. He escaped that world through poetry and literature, he says, and found success as an author and community activist. In his memoir, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., he captured his experience as a gang member and his use of drugs, testifying to the city’s dark underside. He now shares his story with youth across the United States and Latin America to provide those at risk for violence with hope and the tools for change.

During a weeklong program in February sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City, Mexico, the writer and community activist drew from his experience to share ideas about how to create community in violent times. Rodríguez spoke with youth at juvenile detention facilities, gave presentations at the state’s largest university, conducted workshops with community organizers and participated in poetry jams.

His stories resonated with audiences at a personal level, allowing for honest and constructive exchanges. The goal he says, is to help repair communities, like Ciudad Juárez, that have been most affected by drug-related violence.

Rodríguez said his philosophy for community building focuses on empowering young people through the arts, creativity, imagination and looking at the roots of violence. “These are the things that [have] worked in some of the most violent communities of L.A. and Chicago that, even though it’s not the same as Ciudad Juárez, there were some good lessons,” he said. “I have a friend who used to say, ‘If you don’t turn the young people toward their beauty, they will turn toward violence.’ In many ways, the creation of beauty, art, music, dance, theater pulls away from that uninspired, sad existence that they’re in.”

With more than 4,300 homicides over the past year in Ciudad Juárez, violence is rampant there. In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton led a delegation of top-ranking officials to Mexico, where the issues of violence and drug trafficking were discussed.

INSPIRING YOUNG PEOPLE TO CHANGE

Rodríguez visited the Juárez Juvenile Detention Center and forged a connection with many of the juvenile inmates by sharing details about his own incarceration at a young age. Rodríguez said the dentition center is the only juvenile facility in that area that provides arts and expression training.

“I met with poets and artists. A rich and intimate discussion was held with spiritually hungry and intelligent young people — although many have committed serious crimes, including murder,” he wrote on his blog. “The facility’s director, a young woman with a big heart, even allowed five of the youth to leave the detention center and show me several murals they painted with members of the community along the high concrete walls.

Rodríguez told inmates about the gang life that put him in jail, his transformation through writing and poetry while there, and the struggles he faced as he began to reconstruct his life after serving a prison sentence. Many of the inmates were serving sentences for similar crimes and also felt that they had little voice within a community surrounded by violence.

SHARING A BRIGHTER SIDE OF JUAREZ

On his return to Los Angeles, Rodríguez shared his positive experience in Mexico with community members and activists. “I just feel bad that nobody wants to hear the positive side of Ciudad Juárez or Chihuahua,” he said. “The other side of the story is that most people in places like Juárez or Chihuahua and probably most of Mexico are working hard to not have the violence, to work with the kids. They are doing the very best that they can with very little resources.”