Always Running

“Mama turns to us and announces we are not leaving. I’m just a ball. Bouncing outside. Bouncing inside. Whatever.” 

Luis sees himself as an object in this quote, devoid of personhood and his own will. He is carted back and forth with no consideration for his wants and his feelings. His “whatever” demonstrates that he is learning early on to disassociate, to hide his hurt under a guise of indifference. 

“Jesus Christ was a brown man. A Mexican Indian. A curandero. Not a stringy blonde-haired, blue-eyed icon. He was like me…This is the Christ I wanted to believe in.” 

Despite the racism he faces as a child, Luis holds fast to a sense of pride in his ethnicity. His family is Catholic, and so Luis identifies Jesus Christ as being like him, as opposed to the white depictions he sees in the world at large. If Christ is his Savior, then Christ must look like Luis.

“In the barrio, the police are just another gang.” 

Luis draws a comparison between his own gang and the violent, insular Los Angeles Police Department. This is one of the ways Luis justifies his actions. Isn’t everyone, he suggests, in some kind of gang? 

“If you could pull a gun on someone, with only a heart pulse holding the trigger, then you can do just about anything.” 

This quote describes Luis’ first attempt at a robbery. While the robbery itself does not go as planned, Luis’ participation means he has crossed a threshold. He has pointed a gun at another human being with the intent to kill him, should the need arise. Now that Luis is able to do that, he has no boundaries. From this point on, he will descend deeper and deeper into violence and drug use.

“The school had two principal languages. Two skin tones and two cultures.” 

When Luis enters high school, he discovers that the school is strictly divided by race. The white students keep to themselves, taking high level classes and playing sports, while the Mexican students take vocational courses. Luis accepts this without struggle. He has no desire to mix with white students, a sentiment his older brother does not share.

“Already a thug. It was harder to defy this expectation than just to accept it and fall into the trappings.” 

Luis is barely fourteen, but he has already adopted a defeatist attitude. Because he has been treated like he must be a thug due to his race and class, he has decided that this is what he was meant to be, anyway. This self-fulfilling prophecy will follow Luis for the rest of his adolescence. 

“It wasn’t so much he thought he was white. It was more in defense of what was ‘right.’ It was wrong to jump on innocent people. It was wrong to focus on the color of skin. It was wrong to throw rocks at cars, police and homes.” 

Here, Luis describes an Asian student who calls Luis out on attacking innocent white students. Luis sees the Asian boy’s perspective—Luis’ actions are wrong. And yet, Luis and his friends beat up the Asian boy anyway, for daring to call their actions what they are. Luis never seems to fully acknowledge his own immorality.

“Those of us still in school were expelled. This was fine with me. I hated school. And I loved fighting.” 

This is another example of Luis masking his feelings with indifference. His family values education, and being expelled must have made Luis upset on some level. But, as he shrugged off being bounced around as a child with “whatever,” he does the same here. He hates school anyway, so his expulsion doesn’t matter. The fact that he chooses to attend other schools later on reveals that he does value his education. 

“…I was transported away from what was really there—yet it felt soothing. Not like the oil stains we sat in. Not like this factory air that surrounded us. Not this plastic death in a can.” 

Here, Luis evokes the same images he used to describe the Los Angeles he saw as a young child to describe what huffing paint does to his mind. He no longer sees or feels all of the things that make his neighborhood so grimy and unappealing—sooty air, oil-slicked streets—but feels set free. Doing drugs allows him to escape his home. 

“He wasn’t the first to wonder about this enigma of a boy, who looked like he could choke the life out of you in one minute and then recite a poem in another.” 

Through this quote, Luis shows the reader how he sees himself: as an enigma, something impossible to understand. Luis is also a stranger to his mind. He sees in himself the possibility of a peaceful, artistic life, but cannot reconcile this with his violent, rage-filled tendencies. 

“The words were a fascinating revelation for me. Another culture. I had never experienced anything like it. Here all perceptions were challenged.” 

Luis’ life is changed by his invitation to a political action discussion group. Where the world had been black and white before, with lines clearly drawn, his explorations into philosophy and social activism challenge everything Luis thought he knew. This will spark him to take political action within his own high school. 

“[Chente] gazed at the wood fences and brick walls with markings that have been there for 30 or 40 years. Names upon names. Nobody ever erased them. The graffiti stayed and every new generation just put their placa over the old.” 

Chente visits Luis in jail. The wall, Luis notes, is covered with layers of graffiti. Each mark represents another boy lost to a violent system. The layers upon layers of graffiti show just how cyclical and endless gang violence and crime are. 

“‘There are a lot of people involved in your life now. When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.’” 

Chente says this to Luis at the conclusion of his jail visit. Chente and the political discussion group are all invested in Luis’ life, as are Luis’ parents and teachers. But, Chente makes clear, Luis must help himself if he expects support from others. If Luis is unable or unwilling to make good choices, that support will disintegrate. 

“For a time it appeared the internal warfare had given way to a struggle for land, language and liberty—when we had something more important to fight for.” 

Luis finds that his Mexican classmates, regardless of gang affiliation, are able to come together to protest racist and unfair school policies. He attempts to recall this phenomenon much later on, when the Lomas decide to jump Chava. He uses similar language, begging them to recognize the common enemy just as his classmates recognized the school administration as their common enemy. 

“‘Somehow, I could tell. Something about being in jail changes a dude’s expression, his voice; how he feels to touch.’” 

Viviana, who has just met Luis, intuitively knows that he has been in prison. This signals to the reader that though Luis brushes off his prison experience, it has changed his soul more than he knows. 

“Esme could have been a priestess from Tenochtitlan, her face pure and brown, with slight makeup that accented her already slanted eyes.” 

While performing as the school mascot, Luis describes his Mexican friend Esme as resembling an Aztec goddess. Notably, he highlights certain aspects of her appearance—her dark skin, her slanted, Indian eyes—as particularly beautiful. These very characteristics are things that white American culture does not value. Pale skin and big, wide eyes are valued. Luis’ valuing of Esme’s appearance shows his ethnic pride. 

“‘What we’re here to do is transform the way people have been accustomed to living,’” Sergio said. ‘The first step is removing the shackles on our minds’” 

Sergio, the leader of the political discussion group, imparts this crucial piece of advice to the group. In this moment, Luis learns that people must want change in order to affect it. Society cannot be improved until individual citizens are able to look past “the way things are” and actively seek a better future. No one can be liberated from racism, classism, or sexism until they can identify them as oppressive structures.

“Jail in the barrio is only a prelude; for many homeboys the walls would soon taste of San Quentin, Folsom and Soledad, the pathway through The Crazy Life.” 

Luis remarks that jail is the first step for many gang members. He then names several of California’s largest, toughest prisons, all maximum security facilities. In doing so, Luis paints a vivid picture of what awaits many of his friends, as well as Luis himself, if he continues on his current path. 

“‘You can’t walk out every time something isn’t to your liking.’”

Mrs. Baez, one of Luis’ most sympathetic teachers tells him this after he becomes enraged after a teacher allegedly slights one of his female friends. She makes clear to him that sometimes things won’t go as he wants. If he walks out each time, it lessens the effectiveness of the act. Luis rejects this advice of hand. 

“We needed to obtain victories in language, built on an infrastructure of self-worth.” 

Luis digresses slightly from his narrative structure to examine the way the two languages in his life—Spanish and English—were treated in the educational system. He was forbidden from speaking Spanish at school, even as a five-year-old who knew no English, and yet did not receive adequate, equitable instruction in English. Because of this, Luis and others like him felt voiceless, unable to express themselves in either language to white Americans. 

“‘You see—Lomas is so tiny, nameless, it doesn’t even warrant a dot…The vatos defend a land which doesn’t even belong to them. All that death—for what?’” 

Chente shows Luis a map of California, and Luis is shocked that his neighborhood—or even the surrounding area—is not labeled. Chente makes the point that in the grand scale of things, Lomas doesn’t register. So many teenagers have died for an insignificant plot of land. 

“‘There’s some things to fight for, some things to die for—but not this. Chava, you’re alive.’” 

Luis has not lost his scrappy, strong-minded personality. He still believes that sometimes a person must fight for what they believe in. He can see reasons a person should even die for their beliefs. But revenge, he tells Chava, is not one of him. In this quote, he implies that simply living, and living as fully as possible, is the best revenge and the only way to heal. 

“‘If I thought my life could cleanse you of the hurt, of the memory, I would open up my shirt and let you take it from me. But it won’t…’” 

Luis, who has spent much of this story distancing himself from his actions and sidestepping responsibility, offers his life to Chava. But, Luis continues, the loss of his life can’t and won’t heal Chava. Where once violence was Luis’ main tool for solving problems or soothing hurts, he now advocates against that instinct.