Always Running Gang Days in L.A

Always Running is a chilling portrait of L.A. gang life in the late sixties and early seventies. It is the testimony of the poet Luis J. Rodriguez whose teenage years were ones of shootings, beatings, killings, fights and arrests. His unblinking account of 'The Crazy Life' - 'La Vida Loca', as the barrio gang experience is called - reveals a lifestyle that originated with the Mexican gangs of the thirties and forties, who first witnessed the privations and prejudice that accompany the souring of the American dream. It was these young Mexican American pachucos who initiated the emblematic tattoos, the hand signals, and the graffiti that have become the hallmarks of gang life today. Rodriguez, the son of a school principal whose quiet dignity quickly becomes eroded once he tries to settle in America where his qualifications are considered worthless, gives a full and frightening account of life in the barrio. Gang life, for him, starts with the discovery that the education system has nothing to say to him because it can't or won't accept his culture, and that the only work society has to offer him is degrading, deadening or disgusting.