Hearts and Hands

November 5, 2001
Rodriguez (Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.) here takes a long, hard look at the endemic violence and the "cultural malaise of isolation and meaninglessness" that he sees as defining swaths of U.S. culture. Combining personal memoir, perceptive sociological analysis and astute advice about political organizing, Rodriguez, whose youth included "drugs, jail, and gang warfare," writes movingly of how he turned his life around and dedicated himself to working with teens at risk. While attacking the image of teenage males as the primary instigators of violent behavior, Rodriguez focuses on the specific problems of young males "trying to negotiate their lives" in the face of enormous problems, with little in the way of adult models. (The group dynamics of gangs give members "the empowerment that other institutions—including schools and families—fail to provide.) Rodriguez urges the conscious creation of a "holy space" as a "temporary sustainable community" from which to fight violence. Always conscious of the role of poverty and behavior learned in prisons, Rodriguez warns of the persistent problem of adults overreacting to child violence, as when a five-year-old girl was arrested and fingerprinted "for allegedly 'assaulting' a fifty-one-year-old school counselor." Never sentimentalizing or sensationalizing his materials, Rodriguez writes honestly and incisively from experience, knowledge and compassion.