Gang Life, Deviance, and the American Dream in Always Running

Introduction: Lives Caught in the Fire

In his book Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., Luis J. Rodriguez uses his own experience and writing talent to tell the story of lives caught in the fire of bad luck. Children who happened to be born in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, as Rodriguez was, were condemned to contamination from the gang life spreading through the streets, around their homes, and creeping onto their porches. The United States was marching toward becoming a world leader while huge urban areas like those of LA and Chicago were infested and ruled by a way of life that had little or nothing to do with the American Dream. Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, and extreme violence were the four main driving forces of "progress" in the barrios. Life had little to no value as long as it did not fit into this landscape. This gangrene spread across the face of cities like LA and Chicago, covering huge areas and growing to such an extent that police forces became completely powerless.

Rodriguez looks back on thirty years of his own disorderly, gang-related life and forward at his children and grandchildren, describing how little one could do to actually escape the fate of being born in a gang-controlled neighborhood. This richness of perspectives and deep involvement in what for most researchers remains a parallel world gave his accounts their power of persuasion. The reader feels connected to the desperate father who risks his own life to bring his fugitive son home and get a chance to sort things out together.

Rodriguez opens his introduction to the 2005 edition of his book with the following statement: "WHAT HAPPENED IN THE more than ten years since Always Running first hit the book stands? My son, Ramiro, for whom I wrote this book, is serving a 28-year prison sentence for three counts of attempted murder." He goes on to describe how, in that same timeframe, people he once knew from the neighborhoods he lived in — or their children or relatives — ended miserably in prison, or simply ended, either in gang-related incidents or because of drug and alcohol abuse. He describes a world of insanity that appears to have spread through those homes like a plague. Much like residents of a plague-infested town, people born into neighborhoods ruled by gangs lived in quarantine for most of their lives.

Rodriguez perseveres, however, as hard as it is to imagine maintaining one's sanity through such hardships. In publishing the 2005 edition, he shares with readers his hope for something better. Violence — one of the worst forces devastating low-income communities in the United States — was being fought with far greater success than during those dark decades, he notes, and continued to decrease in both scale and intensity.

Deviance, Gang Life, and Mental Health

A life under the influence of a gang has a great deal to do with deviant behavior. The mental health of a young generation is at stake when an environment is saturated with deviance. As many have observed about violence, no one is born wishing to become a drug dealer, a prostitute, or a terrorist. Beyond his own personal example, Rodriguez describes the painful experience of having abandoned his two children from his first marriage at the age when they most needed guidance and protection. They became easy prey for alcoholic and abusive stepfathers, and what followed was profound imbalance. At a certain point in their youth, they required care in psychiatric institutions.

Rodriguez consistently moves back and forth between his personal experiences — or those of people he encountered — and the broader state of the nation at different moments in time, connecting the personal to society as a whole. The reader gradually develops a clearer understanding of how one person's life projects onto the rest of society, and how society in turn shapes individual lives.

The Sociology of Personal Experience

As Dalton Conley explains in describing his textbook You May Ask Yourself, he focused on issues of health and "its role in reproducing social class." Speaking about the interviews he incorporated into what he calls a book "not like the typical textbook," Conley insists on his aim "to humanize this process" of sociological research. The use of statistics is undeniably necessary for sociologists, but it is only one tool. Conley introduces interviews with sociologists discussing their own research methods — some of whom have themselves lived through circumstances similar to those they later brought into their field of research.

"Gangs are the effect of ineffective communities," said Juan Pacheco, a young former gang member, speaking at a March 12 forum at a university on global perspectives on youth and violence. Pacheco insists on why people who "rejected the American Dream of instant gratification" need a helping hand rather than a "hard hand." Like Rodriguez, Pacheco exposes the ugliness of lives imprisoned within their own neighborhoods by a mutual failure of understanding on both sides. These young people — the most vulnerable of all — lack the tools to properly make sense of the world around them and to engage with it in healthy, balanced ways. Society outside their neighborhoods does not understand them and mostly labels them, consigns them to prisons or correctional institutions, and the two worlds remain apart. As deviant behavior nurtured inside gang life flourishes, those worlds will clash and negatively impact each other.

Conclusion: Confronting an Uncomfortable Reality

Rodriguez's account of his own life is, as noted throughout, a story that compels the reader to think beyond their own small universe. He does not rely on pathos in his writing; he would rather present the facts as they are, however painful. Because of this frankness, some schools have banned his book from their library shelves or removed it from their reading lists. Those he writes about are too real and too close to the students who might encounter this book. The question arises whether some school officials feared the experiences described here could be harmful to the young minds and souls they were entrusted to educate — whether they worried students might be "contaminated" by reading it.

In fact, the deeper question is this: is it possible that the people populating this book could be seen as harmful to American society precisely because they are a part of it, and not the separate entity others would prefer to keep them? Rodriguez's work refuses that comfortable fiction. It insists that gang life, deviance, and poverty are not aberrations external to the American story but are woven into it — and that confronting them honestly is the only path toward anything resembling the Dream the country has always claimed to offer.

References

Conley, Dalton. 2013. You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist (Core Third Edition). W.W. Norton. New York and London.

Rodriguez, Luis J. 2012. Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. Open Road Media, June 12, 2012.

Pacheco, Juan. 2009. March 12 forum at [University] on "Global Perspectives on Youth & Violence." Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLCjpX9aDmY