An Interview with Luis Rodríguez by Frederick Luis Aldama
- An Interview with Luis Rodríguez by Frederick Luis Aldama
Luis Rodríguez needs no introduction, of course. His life and work have touched and actively shaped all aspects of our Latinx culture — our world. El Paso-born and East LA grown, Luis found his way to poetry and then literally wrote his way out of la vida loca of gang life and addiction.
Luis is a journalist, critic, publisher, and award-winning memoirist, children’s book author, and poet. Some of his published works include: Poems Across the Pavement (1989), The Concrete River (1991), Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (1993), Trochemoche (1998), América Is Her Name (1998), It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (2011), and From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer (2020). In 2014, Luis was appointed the poet laureate of Los Angeles.
I had the great pleasure of conversing with and learning from Luis Rodriguez.
Luis, how do you see From Our Land to Our Land and your work generally intellectually, creatively, spiritually intervening in the world today?
I seek to intervene on all these levels, especially through my writing and speaking. It’s these language arts that have been developing all these years as my way of impacting the world.
You’ve also created Tía Chucha Press and the Tía Chucha Cultural Center.
I wanted to form an extensive base of operations for community across all the arts. Tía Chucha’s presently serves around twenty thousand people in the community, and much more nationally and internationally. It’s this community in the northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles that allows me to connect with many other communities and indigenous spaces.
You ran for governor of California?
It was another way to impact the world. I traveled up and down the state connecting with people everywhere, meeting a lot of people hungry for a new voice, vision, and plan to end poverty and mass incarceration — the broken system as we know it — and to bring a message of peace at home and the world.
You began with journalism in the 1980s, moved into poetry, fiction, then memoir. Today, you turn again to nonfiction writing with the publication of the essays that make up From Our Land to Our Land?
In a way, I’ve come full circle. There is a lot of fact checking in the essays. But there’s also my perspective, opinion, and the stories of others. I wanted to publish my experiences teaching in prisons, as poet laureate, running for governor, schooling, and living as a Chicano in those parts of LA most people don’t talk about. I hope that coming full circle will open more doors for me to write and speak in new ways about other experiences.
With so much division and uncertainty for our Latinx brothers and sisters today, do you feel more pulled to writing nonfiction today?
I actually want to get back into poetry and short story writing, including speculative fiction. But the chaos and social unrest of our world today pulls me strongly into nonfiction as a way to be anchored in the reality we are living.
In From Our Land to Our Land, you write: “Latinx heritage is US heritage.” What do you mean by this?
In the process of making the US there was the push to homogenize and force us to have one identity. It doesn’t work this way. We are powerful as a nation because of our many cultures, languages, histories, and identities. As Chicano/x and Latino/x we are part and parcel of all of this — and histories of discrimination, deportations, and racial barriers set up against us. “Latinx heritage is US heritage” is a way to declare that we should not be seen as marginalized, but integral to what this country is and should be.
You also dash to the ground how machista ways of thinking and behaving plague our Latinx...
