My bloody life: personal narrative and memoir

¶ … Bloody Life Review

Reymundo Sanchez had two families, one was the biological family and the other was his Latin King family. Sanchez was a Latin King for six years from the age of 11. His biological father was 74 when he married Reymundo's mother at 16. The biological father died when Reymundo was almost five years of age. According to the book, his aunt's and cousins in Puerto Rico beat him as well. Reymundo, Alberto's cousin caused the worst of the abuse, violently sodomizing the young Reymundo (Sanchez, 2000, 1-3).

At the age of five, Reymundo's mother married his stepfather Emilio. He got arrested by the FBI when he got involved trying to steal money from social security. His mother then remarried another man named Pedro. His mother married Pedro for his money. He made a good amount of money by selling illegal lottery tickets. Eventually, Reymundo retaliated against Pedro for the frequent beatings (ibid, 4-7).

Hector his step brother was a drug dealer and almost everone of the people hanging around with or related to him was on heroin (ibid, 4-7). The beatings were the worst later on (ibid, 15). His mother protected his sisters, but not him from the beatings from Pedro (ibid, 16). The decision to leave his family was brought on when his mother got pregnant and she and Pedro had decided to move back to Puerto Rico. Since he was afraid of even worse beatings once the family returned to Puerto Rico, he decided to leave and stay behind in Chicago (ibid, 20).

By the time Reymundo Sanchez was thirteen, he was estranged from his Puerto Rican mother and stepfather when they went back to Puerto Rico and he stayed in Chicago. It was at this time that he was hanging out with the Chicago Latin King gang full time and they became his surrogate family. It was in this family where he lived for 21 years and he earned his nickname "Little Loco." Before the gang, he hung out with people outside of his family, Julio, Jorge and Noel who taught him English at school (ibid, 11). Early on, this showed that most of the affection and attention he got in his life did not come from his family, but from his friends. This made him susceptible to being attracted to the gang lifestyle because love never came from home, but from outside instead. The gangs were just a more structured society. His friend Papo introduced him to the Spanish Lords (ibid, 23). This was his first taste of the gang life and of a new home outside of the biological one.