blueprints

62 | luis rodriguez
ships, and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Award. Tia Chucha Press and the Guild Complex became instrumental in
the Chicago Poetry Festivals—called Neutral Turf—where some three
thousand people came to readings along Lake Michigan. With city funds,
we sent slam poetry winners to places such as Accra, Ghana; Prague,
Czechoslovakia; and Osaka, Japan. My community work at the time also
involved poetry workshops in prisons, juvenile lockups, schools, and shelters
for homeless people. I helped create Youth Struggling for Survival
(YSS) for gang and nongang youth and, later, the Humboldt Park Teen
Reach program. I wanted to expand my work with poetry to include
communities kept outside the margins of literary funding and expression,
which is highly marginalized in the larger culture as it is. I wanted to
remember where I had come from—and to give back to those still caught
in the street life’s steely grasp. I traveled around the country spreading the
gospel of poetry—and then over the years to Canada, Mexico, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Puerto Rico, Japan,
England, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
across Germany.
I married my third wife, Trini Cardenas, in 1988 (we’ve had two sons
since then). But ten years later, Ramiro, my oldest son from my first marriage,
was sentenced to twenty-eight years in state prison for three counts
of attempted murder. I had written the 1993 best-selling memoir Always
Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. to help Ramiro avoid just such a
situation, but though I had helped many gang youth get out of the madness,
I could not help my son. I also had a daughter and four grandchildren to
worry about. We had many friends in Chicago but no family. Trini had a
large, active, and healthy family in the northeast San Fernando Valley, so in
2000, we decided to go back to Los Angeles.
POETRy AND THE CITy OF ANGELS
Over the years, I published more poetry books at other presses, as well as
children’s books, a short story collection, a novel, and a nonfiction book
on creating community in violent times. I had paying gigs all over and a
few fellowships and awards. It was time for me to give back on another
level.
For years, the Northeast Valley was known as the “Mexican” side of the
valley. When we arrived, it had a population of some 450,000—about the