Yeah.
You mentioned you [INAUDIBLE].
Right.
Well, the thing, to me, is kind of like-- let
me back up a little bit.
The thing to me is we have the greatest social energy
for change in youth.
The revolutionary potential in youth is tremendous.
And instead of it being unleashed, allowed to develop,
it's being crushed, corralled, dissuaded.
When kids start-- become creative and nobody likes it,
they throw them out of schools.
Their jails that they're building,
at the rate they're building them, they're for our kids.
And I saw the politics in the same--
and I'm glad I did because I was prepared
to die and kill for my barrio like everybody else.
My thing was, my enemy was the other person just like me.
It wasn't white people.
It wasn't Asians.
It was the other person that looked like me, acted like me.
The Chicano movement gave me a purpose, a bigger purpose,
gave me a sense of what was happening,
that the problems were systematic.
That you had to look at economics, politics, social,
culture, all these things.
And I began to see then what role I was in.
Either I was going to fall right into it,
I was going to be part of the plan, or set up my own plan.
And in that period of time, East LA
has the longest continuous street gangs
in the United States.
Been around since the turn of the century.
The time in which there was hardly any gang warfare
was during the Chicano movement.
Because there was something to fight for.
There was something to believe in.
And we had [? Downton ?] homeboys into the struggle,
in the movimiento.
It wasn't just about certain people.
It was everybody got involved.
And that movement was crushed.
They brought in agents like they killed the Black Panthers,
just like they killed the Young Lords, just like they
killed off the AIM movement, just
like they did all these things.
They infiltrated the groups.
They killed off people.
I knew two political people who were killed off.
One of them was an ex-tecato who became political.
You know how they killed him?
Shot him up full of heroin.
They found him in a car, super overdose.
It was the more than any he could have done.
Others were found with bullet holes in the head.
Nobody ever figured out who did it.
And then, there used to be community centers and teen
posts in all the barrios, where people
could go to and do things.
They all began to fall apart.
The early '70s, the cutbacks, the Nixon cuts, Proposition 13,
all these things began to cut all these things.
And then, in the '80s, they had no more programs.
In the '80s, you had the industry leave,
the industry that saved a lot of people, that kept me out
of a long prison sentence was that I could work in factories.
I worked in factories for seven years, steel mills.
Those are all gone.
The options that people had to try to get their life together,
completely gone.
So in the '80s you had the worst number of gang violence
in the history of this country.
You had the Reagan years and the loss of industry.
And you need to see these things.
Because people keep thinking it's us.
People think we're the ones that did all this.
They don't see the big picture.
In Chicago, for example, there is a community
in South Chicago, a Mexican community, one of the most
stable communities ever.
They came in several generations to work the steel mills.
They had bought their own homes.
They had cars in garages.
They had clean lawns.
There was no gangs.
There was no drugs.
When the steel mills went down, now go to South Chicago.
Boarded up buildings, gangs on all the corners,
drugs everywhere.
Drugs is the only economic life going on in some
of these communities.
Families are broken up.
These are important things to look
at because I think society is trying to say it's all on us.
Well, we have a responsibility.
But part of our responsibility is to fight all that stuff.
That's part of our responsibility.
Not to just accept it and just say,
you know what, it's the way it is, it's the way it's always
going to be.
Part of it is to say, it doesn't have to be this way.
And the youth are the key.
I just wanted to say that when I was in the [INAUDIBLE]
I had a lot of friends that were [INAUDIBLE]..
And all of them [INAUDIBLE].
And I saw a lot of my friends do that, and jumped
in [INAUDIBLE].
And I see a lot of my friends [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm not sure if that's [INAUDIBLE]..
No, you know, the interesting thing about it
is I never wanted to get out.
I never wanted to get out.
This is my barrio, man.
And I loved my homeboys.
And I never betrayed them, and I never went against them.
And I never said I'm trying to get out.
What I wanted to do is I wanted us to stop dying.
I wanted us to stop killing each other.
And there was a lot of people in my neighborhood
that was with it.
But it's like anything else.
First of all, there's a lot of pressure from society
not to stop the killings.
And I will tell you this right now.
If you don't know this is true, it's
true, and anybody that's been in LA.
The police have instigated a lot of the gang wars.
[AUDIO OUT]
And we had treaties and we were talking.
It wasn't easy.
The day that we sat down and signed a little treaty
kind of like, a little like a pact, that weekend,
two of my homeboys were sitting in their front lawn somewhere.
Car came by.
Didn't say anything, going 30 miles per hour,
nobody knew who it was.
Shot them both straight through the heart and killed them.
And I knew it was the police.
The people said it was Sangra.
And the war started up again.
Some people, not everybody, and I challenged those people.
What happened with me is that, one night, because I took them
on, one night they set me up and had me shot at.
And I never wanted to leave my barrio.
I never wanted to do that.
And it was a choice.
And I was prepared to die for this.
I was prepared.
There was people in the movement that said, you know what?
Maybe you should think about leaving.
And maybe you should think about getting out for now
and coming back when you can do some good.
And I never knew what that meant.
I just knew I had to do that.
And that's when they took me into this housing project.
It's two months, get off the--
stay clean, get into the [INAUDIBLE],, get into--
I moved into East LA, moved into Boyle Heights,
did work with gang kids.
I never left the barrio.
I never left my people.
Kept doing things.
It took me 20 years to go back to Lomas.
But then I came back with the book.
And I came back to do something.
And then it made sense, what they
were saying to come back for.
But I never left.
I never left my 'hood.
In fact, for that generation of people,
I'm probably one of the few people that still keep
the name, still keep it going.