Luis J. Rodriguez
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Luis Javier Rodriguez | |
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Born | Luis Javier Rodriguez 1954 (age 69–70) El Paso, Texas, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Occupations |
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Known for | Green |
Other political affiliations | Justice |
Los Angeles Poet Laureate | |
In office 2014–2015 | |
Luis Javier Rodriguez (born 1954) is an American
The founder and co-founder of nonprofit organizations including Tía Chucha's Centro Cultural,[4][5][6] Rodriguez has been active in politics. Rodriguez was the 2012 vice-presidential nominee of the Justice Party.[7] In 2014, Rodriguez ran as the Green Party of California's candidate for Governor of California[8][9] and received 66,872 votes (1.5 percent of the vote) in the June primary.[10] He ran again as candidate in the 2022 California gubernatorial election, endorsed by the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party.
Early life
Rodriguez was born in the
In Ciudad Juarez, his father was a high school principal, but in Los Angeles he worked in a dog food factory, a paint factory, in construction, and selling pots and pans and Bibles. He retired as a laboratory custodian at Pierce Community College in Woodland Hills, California, a wealthier neighborhood in Los Angeles. Luis's mother, who is descended from the
Legal issues
During the 1960s and 1970s, Luis was an active gang member and drug user
However, unlike other arrestees, Luis with four other "cholos" (Chicano gang youth) was held briefly in the Murderer's Row of the Hall of Justice Jail and threatened with charges in the three persons killed during subsequent rioting after law enforcement attacked a mostly-peaceful crowd.[14] He had a cell next to Charles Manson.[14] He was later released with no charges filed.[14]
Luis found a mentor through the John Fabela Youth Center, part of the Bienvenidos Community Center in South San Gabriel, who recognized Luis' capacity as a graffiti writer and community leader. With this mentor's help, in 1972 Luis painted several murals in the San Gabriel Valley communities of Rosemead and South San Gabriel. Although Luis dropped out of high school at 15, he later returned and graduated from Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra, where he led school walkouts and became president of To Help Mexican American Students (TOHMAS).
He got arrested for "assault with intent to commit murder" at 17 in an incident in which four people were shot, but witnesses failed to identify him and he was released. He later attended California State University, Los Angeles briefly from 1972 to 1973, becoming a member of the Chicano activist group MEChA but eventually dropped out.[5]
The two currents in his life came to an inevitable head when at 18, a sentence imposed for a criminal conviction in a case in which Luis had tried to stop the police beating of a young Mexican woman, who was handcuffed and on the ground, was mitigated by letters of support from community members who saw his potential. Feeling a sense of indebtedness to those who had helped him, Luis decided to quit heroin and other drugs and gang life, dedicating himself to Marxist study and revolutionary community organizing.
Career
In 1980, he began attending night school at
In 1993, Curbstone Press of Willimantic, CT published Luis's first memoir, Always Running as a cautionary tale for his son Ramiro, who joined a Chicago street gang at the age of fifteen.[12] The following year, Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster released the paperback. In 1994, Luis became a poet/teacher for men's conferences sponsored by the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, founded by mythologist/storyteller Michael Meade, and co-founded Youth Struggling for Survival (YSS) to work with gang and non-gang youth and their families. His son Ramiro and his daughter Andrea were also founding members. In addition, Luis began Native American and Native Mexican spiritual practices in 1995 with elder/teachers among the Lakota, Navajo (Dine), Mexica, and Mayan nations. However, Ramiro began state prison terms at age 17 for various violent acts, eventually serving a total of fifteen years, including thirteen and a half years for three counts of attempted murder. Ramiro was released in July 2010.[16]
In 1998, Rodriguez received the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature.[17] He has been awarded other prizes for his writing and community work, including the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award,[18] three PEN Josephine Miles Literary Awards,[19] a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, a Poetry Center Book Award of San Francisco State University,[20] a Paterson Poetry Prize,[21] and a Get Lit Players Ignite Award. Over the years, Luis received other recognition, including a writers "Walk of Fame" signature and hand print on cement at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, CA; the Spirit of Struggle/Ruben Salazar award from InnerCity Struggle, "Hero of the Community" from KCET-TV and Union Bank, "Hero of Nonviolence" by the Agape Christian Center, and as an "Unsung Hero of Compassion," presented by the Dalai Lama. In 1993, Luis also received a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in Journalism with photojournalist Donna De Cesare to cover Salvadoran gang youth in Los Angeles and El Salvador.[22]
In 2000, Luis moved his family, then consisting of his third wife Trini and their two young sons, Ruben and Luis, to the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. His daughter Andrea and his granddaughter Catalina later joined them. In 2001, Luis helped create Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural in Sylmar CA with his wife Trini and their brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez, and in 2003 the nonprofit Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural and Bookstore with Angelica Loa Perez and Victor Mendoza. In 2005, he brought Tia Chucha Press, now a renowned small press with more than 50 books of cross-cultural poets, to Los Angeles.
In 2012, Luis was co-editor with Denise Sandoval of Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams: How the Arts are Transforming a Community (Tia Chucha Press), which in 2013 won an award from the Independent Publishers Association at the annual Book Expo gathering in New York City. He was also co-producer of the documentary of the same name, written and directed by John F. Cantu. The film and book were shown across the country, including in San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, Pasadena, the Napa Valley, East L.A., and other cities.[6]
Beginning in 2014, Luis served as a script consultant on three TV shows: Fox's Gang Related, Hulu's East Los High, and FX's Snowfall. He became Grand Marshall for the Latino Heritage Parade in Pasadena, CA and the Mendez High School Parade in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. In 2019, Casa 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights, produced the full staged version of Always Running, co-adapted by Luis J. Rodriguez and Hector Rodriguez, selling out every weekend since August 31 and extended three times.
In October 2011, he became a co-founder of the Network for Revolutionary Change in Chicago, dedicated to bringing together revolutionary leaders, thinkers, and activists from throughout the United States to plan, strategize, and organize social justice, equity, and peace through cooperation, imagination, and meaningful actions. In 2018, he became active in the National Poor People's Campaign, spearheaded by the Reverend William Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis.[citation needed]
Los Angeles Poet Laureate
On October 9, 2014, Rodriguez was named the second Los Angeles
Politics
Early political activities
Luis ran for Los Angeles School Board in 1977 in a "Vote Communist" campaign after the California Supreme Court validated the right to run such campaigns based on the First Amendment. In addition, he worked as a bus driver, truck driver, in construction, a paper mill, a lead foundry, a chemical refinery, and a steel mill, learning the millwright trade, carpentry, maintenance mechanics, and welding. At the same time, Luis helped with various gang peace truces and urban peace efforts throughout the Los Angeles area.[5]
2012 United States presidential election
The
Rodriguez and Anderson were officially on the ballot in fifteen states and achieved recognized write-in status in twenty-five more.[24] The 2012 ticket received 43,018 votes, equal to approximately 0.03% of the total.[citation needed]
2014 California gubernatorial election
In 2014, Rodriguez was endorsed by the
Rodriguez's positions included a focus on clean and green energy and jobs, developing a
There have always been two states – one ripe for developers, corporations, financial institutions, and robber barons. The other state consists of the working class and poor, including immigrant whites and Asians, African Americans, natives, Mexicans, and refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Armenia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. ... Here is the California story we can't cover up or push aside: increased job eliminations, evictions, [and] home foreclosures as well as cuts in welfare and needed services in the face of a deepening poverty-creating economic crisis. Which way for California? Which way for the country?[28]
Rodriguez cited failures by incumbent Jerry Brown, stating, "with Governor Brown's budget cuts, his stand on prisons, the ensuing growth of poverty under his watch, he's just another bead on a long string of unresponsive pro-corporate politicians."[28] In an interview with Truthout, in May 2014, Rodriguez also criticized Brown's policies on incarceration, stating:
Governor Brown has proposed a $10 billion prison budget. I would stop warehousing people (and generating better criminals at taxpayers' expense) and provide rehabilitation, restorative justice practices, alternative sentencing, mental and drug treatment, healing circles, the arts, training and jobs. As proven around the country and world, this is far cheaper and more effective.[29]
2022 California gubernatorial election
Rodriguez ran for Governor of California as a Green Party and Peace and Freedom Party candidate in 2022.[30] In the June primary he received 1.8% of the vote with the support of 124,456 California voters.[31]
Awards
- Carl Sandburg Literary Award[32]
- Chicago Sun-Times Book Award[32]
- San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award (1989)[20]
- Duke University Lange-Taylor Prize (1993)[22]
- Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award (1996)[18]
- Hispanic Heritage Award (1999)[33]
- PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award (1992, 2003, 2013)[19]
- Paterson Poetry Prize (2005)[21]
- Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement (2022)[34]
Bibliography
Poetry
- Rodriguez, Luis. J (1989). Poems Across the Pavement. Tía Chucha Press. ISBN 0-9624287-0-1.
- Rodriguez, Luis. J (1991). The Concrete River: Poems. Curbstone Press. ISBN 0-915306-42-5.
- Rodriguez, Luis. J (1998). Trochemoche: Poems. Curbstone Press. ISBN 1-880684-50-0.
- Rodriguez, Luis. J (2005). My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989-2004. Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition. ISBN 1-931896-24-0.
- Rodriguez, Luis. J (2016). Borrowed Bones: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-3364-8.
Nonfiction
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (1993). ISBN 1-880684-06-3.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (2001). Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. ISBN 1-58322-263-4.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (2011). It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing. New York, NY: Atria Books. ISBN 9781416584179.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (2019). From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer. New York, NY: ISBN 9781609809720.
Fiction
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (1996). América is Her Name. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press. ISBN 1-880684-40-3.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (1999). It Doesn't Have to be This Way: A Barrio Story / No tiene que ser así : una historia del barrio. San Francisco, California: Children's Book Press. ISBN 0-89239-161-8.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (2002). The Republic of East L.A.: Stories. New York City: Rayo. ISBN 0-06-621263-4.
- Rodriguez, Luis J. (2005). Music of the Mill: A Novel. New York City: Rayo. ISBN 0-06-056076-2.
Discography
- My Name's Not Rodriguez, Dos Manos Records
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png)
- Luis J. Rodriguez's Bibliography
- The Alliance for California Traditional Arts video on Luis J. Rodriguez's creative writing class in high security prison yard of Lancaster State Prison, California
- Daniel Olivas interviews Luis J. Rodriguez, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 19, 2014
- 2014 Gubernatorial campaign website
- 2014 Interview with TruthOut.org
- Official site
- "George’s gang policy shows the Administration’s true colors", The Progressive, August 2005
- Interview on The Gregory Mantell Show on YouTube
- Poetry.LA's video of Luis J. Rodriguez' reading, Word Benefit Poetry Marathon at Avenue 50 Studio, Highland Park, CA, 09/27/08
- KCET Departures interview with Luis Rodriguez life on the river
- Appearances on C-SPAN
References
- ^ a b Kellogg, Carolyn (2014-10-09). "A new L.A. poet laureate was announced Thursday by Mayor Garcetti: bestselling author Luis J. Rodriguez". LA Times. Retrieved 2014-10-09.
- ISBN 9780816524273.
- ^ "Author Luis J. Rodriguez "From Our Land to Our Land"". Los Angeles Times. 5 February 2020.
- ^ "Full Biography for Luis J. Rodriguez". www.smartvoter.org. Retrieved 2020-02-21.
- ^ a b c Moore, Jina "Books were salvation for L.A. gangbanger". Christian Science Monitor. 2009-09-07. Retrieved 2014-05-27.
- ^ a b Sanchez, George B. "Tia Chucha's celebrates new location in Sylmar". Dailynews.com. 2009-03-28. Retrieved 2014-05-27.
- ^ a b Gehrke, Robert (July 17, 2012). "Rocky picks activist-author as his VP running mate". The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
- ^ Schwab, Dave (July 19, 2013). "Luis Rodriguez announces Green campaign for Governor of California". Green Party Watch. Retrieved 19 July 2013.
- ^ "Redefining Democracy in California: An Interview With Luis Rodriguez". Truthout. 2014-05-28. Retrieved 2014-05-31.
- ^ a b California Statewide Election Results (June 4, 2014) Governor - Statewide Results. Archived 2014-06-05 at the Wayback Machine (Retrieved 6-4-2014.)
- ^ Rogers, John (14 October 2011). "Words prevailed over gangs for Luis J. Rodriguez". TODAY. Retrieved 27 July 2022.
- ^ a b Barrios, Greg (31 March 1993). "A Father's Gift : Poet Luis Rodriguez Hopes His Memoirs Can Save His Son and Others From Mayhem of Gang Life". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 27 July 2022.
- ^ a b Baldonado, Kim (27 August 2020). "Chicano Moratorium Nears 50th Anniversary Amid Today's Racial Justice Movement". NBC Los Angeles. Retrieved 27 July 2022.
- ^ a b c "An Interview with Luis J. Rodriguez". Evanstan Public Library. 29 June 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2022.
- ^ "Chisme Arte: Chicano Art". KCET. 2011-11-07. Retrieved 2020-02-21.
- ^ Rodriguez, Luis. "Biography". luisjrodriguez.com. Archived from the original on 2005-03-07. Retrieved 2007-12-08.
- ^ "Hispanic Heritage Awards for Literature". Hispanic Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 11 January 2011.
- ^ a b "The Art of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Awards" (PDF). Wallace Foundation. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ a b "Awards & Award Winners". PEN Oakland. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ a b "The Poetry Center Book Award". San Francisco Poetry Center. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ a b "Luis J. Rodriguez, co-founder of Tia Chucha's in Sylmar, is Los Angeles' new poet laureate". Los Angeles Daily News. 9 October 2015. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ ISBN 9781609809737. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ Romboy, Dennis (2011-11-30). "Rocky Anderson forms Justice Party, plans to run for president". Deseret News. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
- ^ "MISC ARCHIVES – Rocky Anderson". Retrieved 2020-10-22.
- ^ "Green Party Announce California Governor Candidate | DC". Democracychronicles.com. 2013-08-17. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
- ^ Richmond, Josh "California's very weird governor's race". San Jose Mercury News. 2013-05-02. Retrieved 2014-05-27.
- ^ "GPCA 2014 statewide candidate questionnaire - Luis Rodriguez, Governor". cagreens.org. Retrieved 2014-05-27.
- ^ a b Rodriguez, Luis "A New Vision for California". rodriguezforgovernor.org. Archived from the original on 2014-05-28. Retrieved 2014-05-27.
- ^ Hudson, Matthew "Redefining Democracy in California: An Interview With Luis Rodriguez". Truthout. 2014-05-28. Retrieved 2014-05-31.
- ^ Loera, Juan Esparza (26 April 2022). "Who is the third-party gubernatorial hopeful who kicked off his campaign in Fresno?". The Fresno Bee. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ "California Governor Primary Election Live Results". NBC News. 22 July 2022. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ a b Gonzales, Ron (4 November 2011). "Luis J. Rodriguez, author of "Always Running," will speak at Libreria Martinez". Orange County Register. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ "Past Hispanic Heritage Awardees". Hispanic Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
- ^ "The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes to Honor Luis J. Rodriguez and Reginald Dwayne Betts". The Los Angeles Times. 23 February 2022. Retrieved 25 July 2022.