First the marching band performed a few rousing numbers. Then writer Luis J. Rodriguez took the stage in Pomona’s Garey High quad Friday morning, Oct. 22, to tell 600 students about marching to the beat of a different drummer.
Rodriguez, who ran with L.A. gangs in his teen years, told students he used to think being tough was about intimidating others. Eventually he figured out that toughness is setting goals and seeing them through despite opposition.
“Toughness is about believing in yourself, having that dream and doing everything you can to make that dream happen,” said Rodriguez. “You have to learn to be really tough inside.”
I was among those on folding chairs in the quad, and delighted to be there.
Garey High teacher Ion Puschila — Mr. P, as they call him on campus — mentioned to me a few weeks ago that the school would be hosting Rodriguez, a former Los Angeles poet laureate and author of the memoir “Always Running.”
As Rodriguez may be the most famous writer to speak in Pomona since Ray Bradbury in 2010, I asked if I could attend. I might even have begged.
And I picked up and read “Always Running.” Published in 1993, the book begins with Rodriguez living in Chicago and trying to talk his own son out of the gang life. Rodriguez then recounts his impoverished childhood in Watts and San Gabriel in the 1960s and early 1970s and how he got enmeshed in the gang life.
At age 9, he was beaten so badly in the schoolyard that his jaw was fractured. He got the nickname Chin because his jaw was permanently displaced.
At 11, he said in his talk Friday, he wanted to join a gang to ensure something like that would never happen again. It didn’t help that his best friend had died a year earlier. Rodriguez said he had no one to talk to about it. He didn’t know how to cry or express his emotions, and his parents were emotionally detached.
“I didn’t do well in school. I was kicked out of school at 11,” he recalled. He was on drugs at 12, arrested for the first time at 13. By age 18, he’d lost 25 friends to drug abuse or violence.
Rebellious, he didn’t fit in at school, especially in an era when Latino students would be punished for speaking Spanish. “I used to be told by teachers I would never amount to anything. I hope none of you ever hear that,” he told the Pomona students.
“I wish they could see me now,” he said of his old teachers. “You never know where people will end up.”
A mentor got him thinking about wider goals in life and gave him the tools to save himself. He discovered Mexican American and Black writers who spoke to his experience. Holding his newborn son, Ramiro, at age 20 was a turning point.
He’s published 16 books: poetry, nonfiction, fiction. When students heard that, they applauded. He co-founded a cultural center, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, now in Sylmar. “Books have been my life,” he said. “I didn’t start that way.”
Speaking of books, Garey’s history and English departments collaborated to get students to voluntarily choose a book from a short list of Latino fiction and nonfiction to read this semester, above and beyond their coursework.
Principal Roddy Layton told me that 1,100 of the school’s 1,500 students participated, each getting a loteria card, which was stamped for each goal completed. The reward for completing the card was to attend Friday’s assembly.
“You’d find naturally occurring book clubs around campus when students would see a book and say, ‘Oh, you’re reading it too?’ and start a conversation,” Layton said.
Extra points to the principal, by the way, for being a former Pomona Progress-Bulletin paperboy. And minus one point from the student who introduced Rodriguez by saying his book was about “life in a Chicago gang” — do your homework, people.
While many students at the assembly had read one of the other books, some had chosen “Always Running.” It’s a perennial favorite.
“It’s hard to get kids to finish a book,” school librarian Kara Montgomery-Roa told me, “but this is one book they want to finish. It’s a different story they’re not used to hearing. From ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to this. They’re really moved by it.”
“It reminded me of my own childhood,” junior Aurora Galindo told me. “I’m not from Pomona; I grew up in Watts” — just like Rodriguez. “There was a lot of violence. It’s inspiring how he made it out.”
Axeo Hernandez, a senior, told me he couldn’t relate deeply to the details, yet he understood the feeling of being an outsider, of not being integrated into society.
“Everything can be done if you put your mind to it,” Hernandez concluded. “You have to keep fighting for it.”
Galindo chimed in: “There are no barriers.”
Rodriguez took questions, then posed for photos with students and signed a few books, and even signed cell phone cases.
We spoke indoors after the event wrapped up. He’s 67 and lives in San Fernando. His son, Ramiro, was by his side.
I mentioned that in “Always Running” he says he had boxed in Pomona, had been in jail in Pomona and had even attended high school — probably Pomona High — for one day. It was part of a tour he and his buddies did on a lark to meet girls they wouldn’t have met otherwise.
“The whole San Gabriel Valley was my playground,” Rodriguez recalled. “I came here to mess around with the girls. It was the first day of school,” he said. When officials said they had no record of him, he assured them his parents would be signing him up the next day. But he never returned.
That is, until the 1990s. When “Always Running” was published, he said, he spoke in Pomona High’s gym to 2,000 or more people.
Life is better these days for Latino students, he said, but they still have questions about who they are or who they want to be. And they don’t always get the emotional help they need.
“When I was growing up, nobody talked about trauma, healing, pain. There’s not enough being done,” he said, “but now the language is out there.”
We talked about his days as a crime reporter at The Sun in San Bernardino, which may become a future topic here, and he signed my book. I’m grateful that the man who wrote “Always Running” took a few minutes to sit with me.
David “Always Reading” Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.