The Beauty Way: Toward a National Neighborhood Arts Policy

 Luis J. Rodriguez

I understand that among Indigenous peoples there is no word for art. This is because art is everywhere, in everything. Nature is a work of wondrous creation—the essence of living things is a majestically artful and complex shaping. To paraphrase a Diné ****(Navajo) prayer: Beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty above me, beauty around me.

How I came to the “beauty way”

As a child, I was mostly in my imagination. The real world was harsh. Born poor on the U.S./Mexico border, at age two my family moved to the Black-and-Brown Watts community of Los Angeles. Instability, economic and otherwise, was the main dynamic of our lives. Both my parents worked. Dad in construction, factories, selling pots & pans and Bibles. Mama in the garment industry, including “piece work” where a massive sewing machine took up immense space in our one-bedroom home (of six people), laboring through the night to make quotas. All for little money. There were external stressors, and at home, fights, yelling, and detachment.

Living in my head made sense. Even though I didn’t speak English when first entering school, when I was around nine I learned to read. Books and comics never knocked me around, called me names, or rejected me. Reading was a “safe space.”

At age eight, our family moved to a dirt-road Mexican migrant community in the San Gabriel Valley. A tough barrio, it wasn’t “cool” to be sensitive, especially as a male. I got beaten down, bullied. I had to “toughen” up. I became highly troubled in my prepubescent and teen years. I joined a gang at 11; began using drugs, including heroin, at 12. At 13 I first got arrested for stealing. I had other arrests for fighting, disturbing the peace. Then at 16 I was placed on murderer’s row (deputies claimed I’d be liable for people *they* killed in the East Los Angeles riots that followed the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War). I was arrested for attempted murder at 17. And at 18 for allegedly fighting with police officers.

School administrators kicked me out of school at 14. At 15, my parents had enough and pushed me into the street (I don’t blame them). After several weeks, against my parents’ wishes, I took over a small room next to the garage with no heat or running water. It became mostly a stash pad for stolen items and a drug den. In effect I was homeless for three years, including sleeping in abandoned cars and buildings, in makeshift encampments alongside the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers, and in that room.

“Cared straight,” not “scared straight”

While homeless I spent hours in the Central downtown library. I eventually met a youth organizer who noticed the intricate gang graffiti I’d been doing and got me to paint murals; I did ten murals including eight with other gang youth. This mentor helped me return to high school and become active in social justice causes. I even did my first attempts at writing on a pocket-size notepad I carried around and an old Remington typewriter my father had stowed away in the garage. My imaginative powers and sensitivities were slowly allowed to grow.

With this level of care, I received my high school diploma. At 18 I walked out of jail for the last time. By 19 I stopped heroin and other drug abuse. And by 20, I got married, began work in a Los Angeles steel mill, and held my first baby in my arms. I became more socially engaged and active in urban peace. Although I gave up painting, I learned to “paint” with words.

By 25, I stopped all my industrial and construction work and embarked on a writer’s life—as a journalist, radio reporter, fiction writer, poet. I moved to the Bay Area, San Bernardino, and lived 15 years in Chicago. I traveled the world. Writing became my destiny from the seed of “language” implanted in my soul since birth.

Now, I’m an author of 16 books in all genres, a playwright and screenwriter, as well as a renowned poet. In 2014, I served as Los Angeles’ official Poet Laureate.

The “proof in the pudding”

After returning to L.A. from Chicago in the year 2000, my current wife Trini and I initiated the creation of a cultural space and café with bookstore, art gallery, performance stage, all-arts workshops, and digital media. We called it Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore. Tia Chucha’s is in a mostly Chicano/Mexican/Central American community in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, an area with half-a-million people that had no neighborhood arts or movie houses, in the so-called Entertainment Capital of the World. We opened our doors in 2001 in a strip mall. Due to rising rents, we’ve moved into three other strip malls since then.

Now Tia Chucha’s is a much-beloved community institution. We hold hundreds of events a year. We have our own poetry press; a thriving community bookstore; Open Mics; Indigenous knowledge classes and Mexica (Aztec) dance; workshops in music, dance, theater, writing, and more; community festivals, including an annual outdoor arts & literacy festival called “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.” We even have a Trauma to Transformation Program that sends artists, poets, and theater workers into prisons, juvenile lockups, and parolee housing, including the largest juvenile detention center in North America just five minutes from our location.

Today the arts are concentrated in museum rows, tourist traps, beach areas, and downtowns. You can make a living in the arts, but mostly by working for a corporation or the entertainment industry. In most major cities, there are miles and miles of poor and working-class communities with no bookstores, no movie houses, no art galleries, no cultural cafes, no arts education.

I advocate for a national neighborhood arts policy—to expand the arts to every urban core area, reservation, migrant camp, trailer park, and rural community. ****The arts are powerful transformers of trauma, whether historical, social, familial, or personal. They should be integral to any healing and restorative vision for a healthy and sustainable world. We must substitute poor and resource-empty areas with ecosystems of compassion that have the arts at their center. 

The arts can save lives. It saved mine.