Luis J. Rodríguez > Quotes

“cry, child, for those without tears have a grief which never ends.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“The more you know, the more you owe.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Always Running

“You 'will never belive it.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“Wich is the ultimate struggle, the one fight really worth fighting.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“Piece by Piece Piece by piece They tear at you: Peeling away layers of being, Lying about who you are, Speaking for your dreams. In the squalor of their eyes You are an outlaw. Dressing you in a jacket of lies —tailor-made in steel— You fit their perfect picture. Take it off! Make your own mantle. Question the interrogators. Eyeball the death in their gaze. Say you won’t succumb. Say you won’t believe them When they rename you. Say you won’t accept their codes, Their colors, their putrid morals. Here you have a way. Here you can sing victory. Here you are not a conquered race Perpetual victim —the sullen face in a thunderstorm. Hands/minds, they are carving out A sanctuary. Use these weapons Against them. Use your given gifts —they are not stone.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989-2004

“It never stopped, this running. We were constant prey, and the hunters soon became big blurs: the police, the gangs, the junkies, the dudes on Gaarvey Boulevard who took our money, all smudged into one. Sometimes they were teachers who jumped on us Mexicans as if we were born with a hiduous stain. we were always afraid. Always Running.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“go ahead and kill us,we're already dead...”
― Luis J Rodriguez

“there are choices you have to make not just once, but everytime they come up.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“my task is to make you hear,to make you feel ,and ,above all,to make you see,that is all,and it is everything”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“i'm sorry young man but the classes you chose are filled up.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“oh,you'll get over it... eventually-la payasa de lomas”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“You have a worth outside of a job, outside the "jacket" imposed on you since birth.”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“Vive La Vida LOCA (Live the crazy life)”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“it is the violent peotry of the times written in the blood of the youth”
― Luis J Rodriguez

“Friendship is greater than the colonial and dominating race ideologies of hundreds of years." -"Some of My Best Friends”
― Luis Rodriguez

“you dont have solo rights to anything anymore,not even your crazy life”
― Luis J. Rodriguez

“they say of the poet and the madmn we all have a little”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“It doesn't work that way”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“you choolos have great storys about climing fences”
― Luis J Rodriguez

“Yeah,we rate all right”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“A la brava! understand?”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“Pegale,Pegale!”
― Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running

“When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

“I don't mind paying for my mistakes but it seems like we're paying for everyone else's mistakes too. Sometimes we pay even when there's been no mistake. Just for being who we are, you know what I mean? Just for being Mexican. That's all the wrong I have to do.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez

“A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times

“The way the girls used the word, "chueca" stood for bent lives, bent minds -- not the narrow, straight existence that girls were expected to have. Not these girls -- abused by drunken fathers, humiliated by scornful mothers, beaten by raging brothers. They were pushed into all kinds of shape by forces stronger than their innocence could withstand. They also felt harder than most girls, survivors, who took the worst beatings, sexual assaults, putdowns, and were still able to stand up without tears and declare, "You ain't changed me."

Their hearts were bent, but not broken.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“The difference was that the children in Bryn Mawr were expected to succeed (which is its own distorted pressure). In my neighborhood, however, they were expected to fail, and if someone manages to succeed, they are often considered special, "not like the others," establishing a breach between that youth and their community. The young man who wondered why us "inner city" folk lacked the fortitude to "pick ourselves up" didn't even see how many resources and support systems existed for him to make it. Nobody does it alone. The self-made person, the so-called rugged individualist, is mostly farce. We all need help.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times

“...he felt this gnawing emptiness cradled in anger, like he was owed something.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“He only moved to his own impulses, leaving his wife a cold, lonely and withered woman. This bothered Clarita for years -- how her father treated her mother with a lack of emotion, of connection. Santos never beat her mother, but he would give her a devastating look that caused her to wilt like a water-starved flower. Clarita recalled how as a little girl, she hid away in her room, beneath blankets surrounded by dirt-caked dolls, distressed that Santos would come in and destroy her with such a look.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“...saying her name the way she did, it felt like being baptized all over again.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.