Luis J. Rodriguez

Luis Javier Rodriguez (born 1954) is an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist. He was the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate.

Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, and has received numerous awards for his work. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. It has been the subject of controversy when it was included in school reading lists in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas, due to its frank depictions of gang life.

Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tía Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tía Chucha's Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth.

Rodriguez was the 2012 vice-presidential nominee of the Justice Party.

In 2014, Rodriguez ran as the Green Party of California's candidate for Governor of California and received 66,872 votes (1.5 percent of the vote) in the June primary.

Rodriguez was born in the United States-Mexico border city of El Paso, Texas. His parents, natives of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, had their children on the U.S. side of the border to ease the transition into the United States, where they had intentions of relocating. In Ciudad Juarez, his father was a high school principal, but in Los Angeles he worked in a dog food factory, a paint factory, in construction, and selling pots & pans and Bibles. He retired as a laboratory custodian at Pierce Community College in Woodland Hills, CA. Luis's mother, who is descended from the Raramuri, a people indigenous to Chihuahua, was a school secretary, but in L.A. worked cleaning homes and in the garment industry when she wasn't taking care of the children. The elder Rodriguez, who refused to be dominated by local politicians from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, relocated the family to South Los Angeles when Rodriguez was two. There he spent the first part of his childhood but moved out just before the 1965 Watts Riots. The family later moved to the San Gabriel Valley, and he joined his first street gang at the age of eleven. He had joined the Lomas gang (which translates to "Hills") during their early wars with the Sangra 13 gang (Chicano slang for "San Gabriel").

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