33 pages • 1 hour read
Luis RodriguezAlways Running
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The Prologue begins with Luis J. Rodriguez, a former Los Angeles gang member turned artist and father, living with his family in Humboldt Park, a low-income Chicago neighborhood with its own share of gang violence. Luis’ 15-year-old son, Ramiro, is fast becoming entrenched in gang life, despite Luis’ best efforts to keep his son on a path towards higher education and a better life. After an explosive fight, Ramiro runs away from home, with Luis chasing after him. Ramiro is gone for two weeks before Luis can locate him. The family begins a difficult, long process of helping Ramiro, which involves his school and a mental health facility. Seeing his son struggle, Luis is inspired to write the story of his own gang years and his eventual escape, a story that has been fifteen years in the making. With this book, he aims to illuminate the violence entrenched in poor neighborhoods and how Americans can reduce the “casualty count” of young people lost to gang warfare. “The more we know,” Rodriguez writes, “the more we owe” (10).
Chapter 1 Summary
Luis is nine years old. He is driving with his family to Union Station in Los Angeles and introduces us to the various members of his immediate family. There is his mother, Maria, volatile and outspoken, who wants to return the family to Mexico. There is his father, Alfonso, who “stated the way things were” (13) and refuses to return, having been accused of theft there by the school he worked for as a principal. Thrown into the mix are Luis and his brother and two sisters.
Luis establishes his family’s backstory: his father is an educated man who worked as a principal in Juarez, a crime-ridden border town. After completing a study program in Bloomington, Indiana, Luis returned to Mexico and married his much younger secretary, Luis’ mother. Alfonso was accused by his enemies of stealing funds from the school; and, though he was found innocent, vowed to leave Mexico. Maria unhappily followed him to Los Angeles with their children, and they settled in Watts, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood in LA.
The family struggles to make ends meet, and the lights and heat are often turned off. Luis, not yet in school, is baffled by America and the constant sense that his family—Mexican, poor, and non-English speaking—does not belong in this country. When Luis and his brother, Rano, accidentally cross in the white part of town, they are savagely beaten by local boys. Luis enters kindergarten a year late and is summarily neglected by the school district. His teachers ignore him, frustrated that he can’t speak English, and no one bothers to explain aspects of American school culture, such as fire drills.
Luis father finally lands a job teaching Spanish at a wealthy, white school and moves the family to a nicer house in a better neighborhood, a place where the Rodriguezs are “the only Mexican family around” (30). Luis begins to learn English at his new school, his mother gets a set of false teeth to replace her rotted ones, and his father “went nuts” buying furniture and appliances. Maria worries about the money being spent, but Alfonso defends it—“We were Americans now” (31). Then, Luis’ father is fired, as his accent is difficult for the white children to understand. The family moves in with relatives, but the house is too crowded and the relatives too mentally unstable. Maria declares that she is taking the children back to Mexico, with or without Alfonso. They drive to Union Station, the first moment in Chapter 1. The children say goodbye to their father, but at the last moment, Maria changes her mind. They will stay in Los Angeles.
Chapter 2 Summary
A local charity assists the family in finding a new home in the San Gabriel Valley, a community of Mexicans and poor whites from the Ozarks. They live in a hilly part of town nicknamed Las Lomas. Luis’ neighborhood, or barrio, is isolated and dangerous. “Buses refused to provide residents there any service” (41). Without access to traditional boyhood groups like “boy scouts … sports teams or camping groups” (41), 11-year-old Luis’ friends form a clica, or clique, a clear precursor to gang life. Miguel, the leader, names the clique “The Impersonations.” Luis, sick of being “shy and fearful” wants “the power to hurt somebody” (42).
Luis begins junior high at Garvey Intermediate, known for being particularly unskilled at academics. He begins to notice girls, falling madly in love with a girl named Elena, who is sexually experienced. Luis gets a homemade tattoo and “wreaks havoc” at school (48). Rano, meanwhile, discovers theatre and sports. He excels at school and eventually changes his given name from Jose to Joe. Luis joins a new gang, this one called “the Animal Tribe” (51). Luis is 13, a very young member of a gang quickly “taking over everything” (51), having absorbed dozens of smaller gangs. Miguel helps Luis find his place, shepherding him through the initiation process, in which Luis sees a girl being gang raped as part of her own initiation.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
In this first few chapters, the author describes his parents’ backgrounds, his move to America, and his early childhood prior to joining his first gang. While it may initially appear as though this is simply linear storytelling, a memoirist chronicling his life from beginning to the present, these early chapters accomplish more than that. Each detail from Luis’ childhood acts as a foundation upon which his gang membership will be built and solidified. In Chapter 1, we learn Luis is a younger son, with a domineering mother and cruel, violent older brother. He is powerless at home and soon finds he is powerless at school, as well. His teachers ignore him and write him off as not worthy of a real education. As Luis ages, he will gravitate towards groups that allow him the power he lacked in his early childhood—namely, gangs. He will also continue to struggle in educational environments. His kindergarten experience in which he was isolated and shunned will follow him even through high school. He does not believe that school was meant for him and just cycles through them, one after another.
Another aspect of Luis’ early years which influences his gang membership is his experience of anti-Mexican racism. In one particularly memorable instance, Luis and his non-English speaking mother are harassed in a public park by a white woman, who tells them “‘This is not your country’” (19). At an impressionable age, Luis is told by his school, by geography, and by random strangers that “you don’t belong” (19). Luis quickly discovers that A) above all things, he is Mexican and B) His status as a Mexican precludes him from truly being American. His brother solves this issue by anglicizing his name, excelling at sports and music, and befriending white classmates. Luis, however, finds a place of belonging among other Mexican-American children, eventually joining a gang made up entirely of people just like him. If these first few chapters, white American society rejects him, and rather than changing to please that society, he joins an entirely different one.
