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Bert:
You've been working with Michael Meade at
multi-cultural events with gang youth. How did you first
get involved in Men's Work?
Luis: I've been doing
this work on youth and violence for a while. When my autobiography
came out, apparently Michael Meade got wind of it. He contacted
me in Seattle while I was at the annual Bumbershoot Festival.
I was doing some work with El Centro de la Raza. I was
doing poetry and performance with about 25 inner-city kids. He
invited me to be one of the teacher-elders at a multicultural
event he was having in the Los Angeles area in January, 1984.
I said I'd do it, because I was intrigued. I had almost no idea
what "Men's Work" was, to be honest with you. You might
have read in my article in Muy Macho, I had preconceptions
about it.
But once I was there, and I saw that what Michael
and the other people were trying to do was to bring a multicultural
perspective into it-that it was not just going to be white people
with money-I saw it was the kind of people I was already working
with. Inner-city kids, kids who were violent, men who had been
in the Viet Nam war, ex-prisoners-people like that. It turned
out that the first gathering was very transformative for me.
Bert: Let's take a step
back, to talk about your own path, before you met Michael Meade.
You had written your autobiography, Always Running. In
a nutshell, what were the kinds of things you were brave enough
to share with the public about your own, personal life?
Luis: I wanted to do
an honest look at what it meant to be in a gang in LA, especially
in a period when violence was becoming more predominant. There
have always been gangs, and different levels of violence, but
by the early '70s the level of violence that we see today was
beginning to happen. I was part of that. I saw the change when
gangs went into guns and drugs in a more organized manner. I wanted
to go back to that time and talk about what I went through, the
violence that I saw and participated in. But I also wanted to
talk about how I transcended it. How did I get out of this? How
did I change?
My son, who is now 21, had joined a gang in Chicago.
I wrote the book for him, as a father-son thing. "I'm your
father. I've been through some things. I don't want you to die.
I don't want you to end up where I barely survived. I don't want
you to end up in prison or a morgue."
I have been shot at three times. I've OD'd with various
drugs: I used drugs, on up to heroin, from age 15 until I was
19 or 20 years old. I had been in and out of jails. I shot people.
I firebombed people's homes. I had stabbed people. These are things
that people don't normally admit to, but I knew if I was going
to get close to that reality, I had to own up to a lot of the
things I had done.
Bert: Was this what everybody
you knew was into?
Luis: No, not everybody.
It was a small group of people. Being in a gang is not for everybody.
We distinguished ourselves by how we dressed, how we talked, and
how we tattooed ourselves. People could tell we were gang members;
we weren't like everybody else. We wanted to distinguish
ourselves. We had a whole style.
What is happening now, of course, is that more and
more kids aren't making it economically, are not culturally involved,
and are being abandoned. More and more kids are leading this gang
kind of lifestyle. Gang membership, which as a special thing for
a small group of people, is becoming more and more prevalent.
Now the white and Asian kids are into gangs, it's not just the
African-Americans and Latinos.
Bert: What happened in
your own life that gave you pause and encouraged you to see that
you had to share your own story and publicly confess, as it were?
Luis: I did it because
of my kids. I've been in Chicago for eleven years, and moved into
a neighborhood with a lot of poverty and a lot of youth in gangs.
I realized my son was getting pulled into it. A lot of it is not
a bad thing. I don't want to be anti-gang. I know that white kids
join gangs, and gangs offer a lot of important stuff-fellowship,
respect, family. These kids are looking for something. That's
something I've learned in working with these youth. They are on
a spiritual quest that the culture cannot attend to, cannot meet.
Unfortunately, they can't do it for themselves. As peers you cannot
find the initiative or the initiation. You cannot find the proper
ways to go through the stages of life, unless you're guided through
it. That's not what's happening to them.
But I saw my son getting pulled in. It was for very
good reasons, natural reasons, but I was afraid that he didn't
know what was possible. He might come to a most destructive end.
He was going the way of Death if he continued to be involved.
I wrote the book for him, but it turned out to be
for all the "homies," all the kids in the neighborhood
whom I started to work with. I wrote itbook to show them what
I've gone through. I've been a writer for over 16 years. I've
done books of poetry. I knew that I could get the language, find
the words. It's very difficult…
Bert: To find the images.
That's what strikes me as what's important about poetry. It's
the images that are more important than the words, isn't it?
Luis: Yes. Unfortunately
a lot of people have gone through worse than anything I've gone
through. But they haven't been able to find the images-the poetry-to
express what they've gone through. I had the fortune to become
a writer and to find those images. It was a healing process for
me, a process that I hope will be healing for other people.
Bert: So then you found
yourself enmeshed in this circle of your son and his "homies."
What did you find that it was important for you to do with them?
Luis: Several things.
I went back to what saved me. That included having a purposeful
life, a conscious life activity, directed from the inside out.
That's what needed to be taught. It was a road of knowledge, of
achievement-a road of art. I find that art is the most viable
means to talk about violence. This is something that Michael Meade
talks about, that allowed me to gravitate towards what he was
doing. His storytelling, poetry and ritual were what the kids
have been hinting at. Art can take many forms, but the idea is,
how can you transcend the violence and the trauma in your life?
How can you go through the stages of your life, when there is
no community that invites you and welcomes you?
Art begins to help you open up to things that you
otherwise wouldn't have opened up to. It's called having a metaphorical
life. People all need to have that, where they actually go through
the life and death rituals in stages where they grow up, but they
don't actually have to die in the process. For example, these
young people need to be initiated into the adult world. Something
has to die so that something else can be born. Unfortunately,
they interpret this metaphor literally.
What I was trying to do in my book was to give these
young people a different path to help them to get that purpose
in their life that will allow them to keep going. I believe that
every young person has a calling in life, and that has to be tapped
into. They need an environment that will really bring that out.
Bert: I wrote an article
for our June issue, that I called "Blessing." I talked
about a king, a mentor, or an older person giving blessing to
younger men, to allow them to express their creativity. That sounds
similar to what you're talking about. So what were the kinds of
things that you could give blessing to, to bring out in gang members
who had never been in touch with their artistic or creative side?
Luis: Poetry ended up
to be a good way to get into writing. A lot of these kids had
not been exposed to the written word. But they were doing rap.
They were already doing a language-based art. They were doing
what all people do. I heard a saying once that when people confront
obstacles they create music. That's what these youths were doing,
creating music. They were using a language-based music. So from
there I took them to other areas of language expression.
They do a lot of skits. They do extemporaneous theatrics.
These have a general framework, but they create the dialog as
they go along. It's very beautiful!
They've done artwork, images. Some of these kids
are graffiti writers. They call themselves aerosol artists. It's
so beautiful and so expressive that I thought, "This is the
way to go. They're doing it anyway." I wasn't giving them
anything they weren't already doing, but they were being outlawed
for it. They were getting beaten up. They were getting put away.
They were getting chased down the streets for creating art. I
thought there had to be a place where they could do this, where
it can be valued or, as you say, blessed. They need more craft
knowledge. They need the mentoring that will give them the knowledge
they need to get more into it.
That's the direction I decided to go. They needed
activities that were meaningful, activities that could take them
away from what was happening in the streets, end the destruction
and have something that was very beautiful, very heroic. You need
the elders, for example, to hold the ground so the youth can make
their glorious mistakes. That means allowing room for them to
open up and express.
Bert: The image that
came to my mind as you said that was, "Hey, look at me!"
In effect, the only way we "see" these young kids in
the barrios and the ghettos is in order to send them away, to
condemn them for what they're doing or who they are. "Hey,
look at me! I'm a real person and I've got valuable expression
and I have something to add." You're providing these kids
a medium for saying that…
Luis: Without being judged,
without being put down. That has to do with something that's at
the heart of the culture. The culture gives people social value.
These kids aren't going to work. They're not going to be "productive."
They're not going to be "great citizens." So these kids,
literally, don't have any "value" in society. They're
not being mirrored in their lives, their images, their innate
worth. So they work real hard to say "Hey, look at me!"
They have to have a value that's not dependent on a job or going
to school. They're not getting those things.
When you see their art, see its value, and say it's
beautiful, it hits at their innate value. They know they have
that, no matter what's going on. The art is a value that has no
monetary value, no "socially productive" value. It's
just beautiful in itself. When you see these youths this way and
honor them this way, it changes their whole view of themselves.
Bert: I was once an "emergency"
substitute teacher in the Philadelphia ghettos. My kids had lots
of free periods. In one, a girl was illustrating a comic-book
romantic story she had written. A boy had taken some colored paper
from the art room and was making an alphabet book so he could
help his younger brother read better. The principal came in and
I showed off my prize students. The principal grabbed the girl's
story and ripped it in two, saying, "we don't allow comic
books in school." The boy showed off the book. "'A'
is for apple. 'B' is for ball…" "'B' is for boy,"
the principal shot back. "Go pick up that scrap paper on
the floor over there, boy."
Luis: That same experience,
in many forms, is happening every day in so many communities.
These kids are being ignored, or wiped out, condemned or put down.
Then you see them respond in ways that are very destructive, because
there's no other way to go. If you don't have a means to be more
constructive, if you can't live a full life, you can't help but
be destructive.
Bert: So this work took
you from trying to help the "home boys," to the national
level, where you're working with El Centro de la Raza at
Seattle's Bumbershoot festival, already doing your soul work and
mentoring work in your own Latino community.
Luis: I'm doing this
work all around the country, from Hartford to Dallas to Seattle.
I do a lot of this stuff. What Men's Work offered was a place
to take this stuff, so I could take it to a new level that I otherwise
might not be able to reach.
Bert: But before Michael
Meade reached you, you had some reservations about this "middle-aged,
middle-class white male Men's Movement."
Luis: I didn't think
that they were going to go deep enough. I was afraid they would
just sit around and talk to each other. They could not really
deal with their own issues unless they could look at the very
kids that were outcasts of the communities of this country.
Bert: There's no soul
work without community work, as Aaron Kipnis and Harris Breiman
say.
Luis: That's right. And
the community has to be extended. It can't just be the white,
middle-class community, either. That seems to be the big issue
right now. People are saying to go into your own community and
just work with your kids. I agree with that. I think that's fine.
But obviously that means you can't also be available for the work
that's going on in other communities that you have connection
with. A lot of the people that are in middle-class communities
are the ones behind the laws that clamp down so heavily on these
kids I'm working with. So if you want to work only in your community,
just remember that we're all tied up together in this. You demand
more prisons, longer prison terms, and trying kids as adults in
the inner city, because that community doesn't mean anything to
you. But we are all one community. We all have to start looking
at each other.
There's no way these white, middle-class guys can
resolve it by just looking at each other. In the same way, I don't
think that these ghetto kids can resolve it just by looking at
each other. I value the importance of going to men's conferences
in which the mixture is very rich-kids from the urban communities,
where violence is very real, and guys who don't know anything
about this. That's part of the dynamic interaction, where you
have to look at each other and look at your own soul and look
at the soul of the whole culture, and begin to figure out ways
to work together. To me, that's very important.
Bert: With these reservations
about men's gatherings, what was it that Michael said and did
that enticed you into participating in a multicultural event with
him?
Luis: For one thing,
Michael is one of those "white people" who don't consider
themselves white people. That's an important step! "White
people" have no value to me. There's no such thing as a "white
person." In culture and history there have been white people
only in relation to somebody else being black, or darker. To me
it is a historical issue that has been created in order to distinguish
people, but in reality the best thing to do is to get people not
to relate that way at all. Instead we can relate to your background,
where you came from and who you are. Michael was a kid from New
York. A kid with an Irish background. A learned man. He has worked
as a truck driver as well as in corporations. He has done things
that, to me, are what make him into a real person, not just "I'm
a white guy and I feel bad for you," or "I'm a white
guy and I hate your guts."
That seems to be a way that people relate, they respond
to "white people." Michael seems to say, "don't
respond to white people, respond to me the way I am. Respond to
a human being the way I respond to you. You haven't
been "dissed" or put down or beaten up. I respond to
you as a human being. I don't want a cop to be beating up on you
just because of the way you look at him." Or to have your
kid beaten up like that. That happened to my son, and there's
nothing you can do about it. "I don't want to have to go
through this, so I have to respond to you the way I want you to
respond to me."
I think Michael Meade is good at doing that, using
stories and poems. He has a highly developed sense of what is
spirit and what is lacking I spirit in the culture. I also wanted
to work with Michael because he's worked with Malidoma Somé,
whom I have a lot of respect for. He's brought in a lot of people
like that, people from other cultures with a lot of knowledge.
These are people who don't want to make doctrine or dogma out
of it, but are trying to make it real. These guys are trying to
do the genuine work that I'm interested in, not just superficial
or New Age stuff. This is genuine, really scary, dangerous work.
To me, because of that it's more revolutionary than anything else
people are talking about when they say "This is the radical
movement," or "No, this is the radical movement."
The work these guys are doing is dealing with radical, primal
stuff so we can transcend it, and transcend not just ourselves,
but the whole culture.
We're not just talking about personal change. That's
where I think a lot of the psychotherapeutic work seems to be.
It's all about personalities and individuals changing. I'm saying
that that has to happen, but after that happens the whole culture
has to change.
Bert: You described your
first multicultural event as a transformative experience. What
was the energy like when these gang kids met up with a bunch of
middle-age, middle-class "men's movement" guys? I would
imagine there was a lot of tension in the air.
Luis: That's always going
to be the case at an event like this. They feel their lives are
threatened. They feel they're going to die. This was true at both
ends. A lot of the Black and Latino kids felt the white guys were
going to kill them. They didn't like having them around. They
didn't like the way they felt, the way they thought.
Bert: I guess my own
preconceptions and stereotypes come up. If I were thrust into
the middle of a group of gang kids wearing their colors and tattoos,
I'd be nervous about my own life.
Luis: Right. And that's
the way some of the white guys responded. But some of the men
of color responded like their lives were being threatened. When
you confront that kind of tension, you're talking about opening
up whole new possibilities for some real interaction. The inner
hate and rage levels begin to be brought out. It's very beautiful
because what they do with ritual and poetry and stories relates
to these common threads that everybody has. What comes out is
a kind of emerging ritual, rather than fixed ritual.
Bert: What kind of opening
ritual would you do, then, to acknowledge and work with this kid
of tension?
Luis: The most basic
stuff is poetry and drumming. This allows people to connect without
words. Then something interesting happened. The young people were
getting very exasperated with the older people fighting with each
other about racial issues. Remember, these were white youths as
well as youths of color. "You haven't even seen us. We're
here. You should be helping us, not hating each other." So
we ended up turning it over to the youths.
At the end of the last retreat, the youth put together
a closing ritual for everybody. One part of it was a kind of litany
for the dead, where they would pour their fear into the fire and
name people in their lives who had been killed. It was so beautiful
to hear all these young men talk about all the death and pain
they've gone through in their lives. We wanted the older men to
hear this.
Then they started this beautiful rap session, extemporaneously
going on for hours with drumming in the background. It was a way
of showing how the young men could rap about the changes going
on in them.
Bert: I imagine hearing
the kids rap for three hours was a lot more effective to the older
men, than the books and articles they may have read about life
in the ghettos.
Luis: That's the heart
of the ritual. You really can't know until you're right there
getting shot at. The ritual opens it up and lets you express it,
so that others can feel the experience, so it can be their experience
as well.
Bert: I wonder if there
was a phase two for the older guys. "I've been doing this
Men's Work stuff for quite a while. I'm a liberal, and don't have
a prejudiced bone in my body. My heart goes out to these kids."
Then, two or three days into the event, there's a confrontation,
that my assumptions, my speech, my very mindset is riddled with
prejudices and stereotypes that I'm not even aware of.
Luis: A lot of guys
thought it was OK just because they cared enough. They then had
to realize that this prejudice was deeper, ingrained in their
very being. They needed to recognize that.
This is where a lot of their pain, grief and anger
came out. I've had guys stand up and say, "You know what?
To be honest with you, I'm really scared that you're going to
kill my boy." Everything comes out. They may be liberals,
and full of compassion, but they really are scared of these kids.
"You're going to come to my house or try to kill my kid,
so I'm going to have to kill you."
It comes out because there's fear underlying all
this, and nobody's looking at that fear. Fear is the basis of
much of the violence that we're responding to. I think that the
people who don't want to respond to it are still scared of it,
to the point that that's how they would respond if they had to.
Then they hate the fact that there's this grouping of outcast
people knocking at the door. I think ultimately they need to feel,
not so much guilt that they're responsible for the kids' plight,
but that they're directly involved in setting that up. We're talking
about white liberals who, over the years, have kept themselves
from being part of this. They live in gated communities, or nice,
gentrified areas where there are security guards and they don't
have to worry about homeless people walking down the streets.
They have done everything to secure themselves, and then become
liberals. That's very safe. If you're safe, you can be anything.
But can you be a liberal and a real person if you have to be in
this, every day?
Bert: I saw a similar
thing when we were using federal anti-crime funds for community-based
programs in New York City. We would fund a project and the Project
Director would move out into the suburbs. Who could blame him?
Luis: It's like anything
else. We have a society that lives on different tiers. Unfortunately,
this has destroyed whatever democracy we had left in this country.
If you have a tiered society eventually, when everything goes
bad, everything is going to go to the lowest level. For example,
if the worst schools are in the inner city, you think this doesn't
affect your kids. But when the economy gets tight, the middle
class neighborhoods will also go towards having worse schools.
Because they ran away from those areas and didn't fight for the
city schools, didn't say that every kid should have a decent education,
they're paying for it now. Our best survival is to make sure that
every kid gets a good education. Instead, it's "kill or be
killed," and "I've got to take care of my own."
Unfortunately, the inner-city kids understand this.
They know that everybody's leaving them in a garbage dump. So
they incorporate the same conflict, kill or be killed. They literally
do it, instead of understanding that the survival of all is dependent
on the survival of each.
Bert: So by mid-week
the participants at the multicultural community were into their
fear. How did you then turn this into a bonded community?
Luis: We did this through
ritual. Again, it's an emerging ritual-it emerges from the dynamic
of what the men get into at the conference. This is where the
men start coming together. I'll give you an example. There was
a white guy. He wasn't a liberal. Actually, he was a pretty racist
guy. From the beginning of the event, he'd get up and say, "You
know, I hate all you Blacks and Mexicans. I don't know why, but
I do." Apparently as a kid he had been beaten and stabbed
by minority kids. He really had hate. He went through all this
struggle, struggle, struggle. When he got up he yelled at people.
He couldn't believe what people were saying. The struggle continued.
Then, finally, when the ritual pulled it all together, I guess
he had done some transforming, to the point where he offered to
wipe the feet of all the men who were coming in barefoot from
the muddy fire area. It was a very beautiful and humbling thing
for him to do.
Ritual allows certain things to happen that wouldn't
have happened if you just talked about it. Sometimes just talking
it out is not going to be enough, even though words are important.
It's got to go to the level of art, to the level of transcendence,
to finding the beauty. Here a guy offered to wash the feet of
all the men-black, white, Latino. It was very humbling. You can
tell he had gone through something.
Those are the kinds of things that happen with ritual,
and why eventually the ritual becomes the way the men start bonding
and working together. It doesn't always work, and it doesn't work
for everyone, but it definitely becomes a way that you can show
people that when all else fails, go back to spirit. Go back to
yourself. Go back to your art. Go back to that ritual space, so
you can open up to these things.
It's a very difficult thing we're trying to do. That's
probably why it's worth doing. It's like the old saying, "The
only causes worth fighting for are lost causes." There's
always the chance of people not making it, or people becoming
worse off, but when you do have victories there is that bonding
that can carry you a very long way.
Bert: Michael Meade likes
that Rilke line, that my role in life is to be decisively defeated
by greater and greater beings.
Luis: And if people
don't risk doing that hard, dangerous work, they're not really
living. That's where the liberal thing gets exposed. People are
willing to do nice, comfortable, compassionate things, and no
boats are being rocked. But that's not good enough. You've got
to get to that place where perhaps you're not going to win and
not going to come out entirely unscathed.
Bert: What happens to
these kids after a multicultural conference?
Luis: We try to do some
follow-up, especially with the young men. Some of the men have
gone through three or four conferences now, and are something
of a "teaching core." They're taking a much stronger
leadership role. There has to be some follow-up. You can't just
open up all this stuff, then drop it. Some of the young men follow
up by being helpful at other events, or being involved with other
men in doing stuff for their community. We have had beautiful
things happen. For example, one of the young men who had been
in prison for many years got word at one of our conferences that
his brother-in-law had been killed. The men got together and contributed
money so he could go back for the funeral. They did it out of
a sense of community-"You're part of us, and we're part of
you. What hurts you hurts us."
We've also had opportunities open up for people for
whom it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I was facing the same
thing. They were trying to give my son 30 years in prison. The
men at the conference my son was at got together and wrote a letter
to the judge on his behalf. They actually moved the judge, who
had a reputation as a "hanging judge." He as so moved
he gave my son a much lesser sentence, an opportunity to do a
"boot camp," house arrest and three years of parole.
He wouldn't have to do any hard prison time if he complied with
the program. It was an opportunity most kids would never see.
Bert: Where do you see
all this going?
Luis: It's got a long
ways to go, because we're talking about working with only a few
men at a time. It's a big country, a vast world. The only work
worth doing is work you do one step at a time, where you can dedicate
a lot of intense effort on one or two things. But I think the
seed of something bigger is in this. I can't say what this bigger
thing is going to look like, or what form it's going to take,
but I do think that something has got to change at the very heart
of society. It's got to be a radical change, and it's got to be
as revolutionary as it can be. What all this work is leading towards
is that kind of confrontation at a very basic level in this country.
I'm not talking about it taking the form of uprisings. That's
already going on. Talking about a radical transformation in this
country to go into the future. But the way to get there is by
going back-going back to some traditional things that we've forgotten.
Going back to some basic threads that have made this country what
it is, that are still valid. We've let privilege, power and self-interest
take over to the point where everybody suffers. The whole idea
about racism is that it's a chain around the necks of the racists
as well as the victims of racism. If we believe that, we realize
that if we break the racist chain, we free ourselves. It's a conflict
that has to be understood by more people. This is going to be
the transformative power that happens. I can't name it and I can't
shape it, but I know that whatever we're doing now has to move
towards being at the center of the whole culture.
Bert: What would you
say to encourage people doing Men's Work to take this work out
more broadly into the community?
Luis: We need to look
at those who are the outcasts of our society and culture. Whenever
a society goes through the kind of transition we're going through
now, it always needs to be where the key to the future is being
held. This is not the elite, the people with all the power and
wealth. That seems to be where everyone is looking, but you have
to look at the bottom. At the bottom you'll see not just the ugliness,
but the beauty of it. Not a society that is completely caved in,
but a society that begins to flourish out. I'd say to anybody
doing Men's Work that they should look elsewhere, whatever that
may mean. Don't just look at what you think you're looking at.
People think they're looking at themselves, going inside themselves.
That's a very important part of it. But the closer you get to
yourself, the closer you get to the places that are the scariest.
What I'm saying is that in order for it to be vital work, it has
to be scary. With the art and the ritual work that's being done,
I can see some very important transformations going on, that we
need to have in this culture.
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