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Always Running Playlist

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Includes songs by artists Luis Rodriguez references in Always Running. Created by Librarians at Cal State LA for everyone to enjoy.

More Books by Luis Rodriguez

From Our Land to Our Land: Imaginings and musings of a native xicanx writer. by Luis J Rodriguez
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: https://csulaprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/1cb36fk/01CALS_ALMA991011998209702911
Publication Date: 2019
Preface: Another World is Possible -- The End of Belonging -- The Four Key Connections -- Nemachtilli: The Spirit of Learning, The Spirit of Teaching -- Constant State of Pregnancy -- Poet Laureate? Poet Illiterate? What? -- I Still Love H.E.R. -- "Low & Slow" in Tokyo -- Prickly Pear Cactus: Experiencing Los Angeles with Other Eyes -- Monsters of Our Own Making -- Men's Tears -- Dancing the Race and Identity Mambo -- The Story of Our Day.
Trochemoche by Luis J. Rodríguez
Call Number: PS3568.O34879 T76 1998
Publication Date: 1998-06-01
TROCHEMOCHE means helter-skelter in Spanish, and this book expresses the turmoil of the barrio and the various themes that drive Luis J. Rodríguez's poetry. Drawing on more than ten years of poems, Rodríguez writes powerfully and passionately about urban youth, family, and the plight of neglected communities, while exploring the rich cultural roots of his Chicano ancestry.
The Republic of East L. A. by Luis J. Rodriguez
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0066212634
Publication Date: 2002-04-02
From the award-winning author of Always Running comes a brilliant collection of short stories about life in East Los Angeles. It is a life brimming with hope and vitality, the depiction of which reaffirms Luis J. Rodriguez as not only one of America's keenest urbanists but as a writer with a perfect blend of humanist empathy and poetic soul.
Borrowed Bones by Luis J. Rodriguez; Martín Espada (Foreword by)
Call Number: PS3568.O34879 B67 2016
ISBN: 9780810133648
Publication Date: 2016-04-15
Foreword by Martín Espada This chapbook collection offers new poems from the prolific career of a community leader, activist, and healer. Luis J. Rodríguez's work asks profound questions of us as readers and fellow humans, such as, "If society cooperates, can we nurture the full / and healthy development of everyone?" In his introductory remarks, Martín Espada describes the poet as a man engaged in people and places: "Luis Rodríguez is a poet of many tongues, befitting a city of many tongues. He speaks English, Spanish, 'Hip Hop,' 'the Blues,' and 'cool jazz.' He speaks in 'mad solos.' He speaks in 'People's Sonnets.' He speaks in the language of protest. He speaks in the language of praise."
America Is Her Name by Luis J. Rodríguez; Carlos Vazquez (Illustrator)
Call Number: Level 3 North 813 R6185a
ISBN: 1880684403
Publication Date: 1998-04-01
Set in the Pilsen barrio of Chicago, this children's picture book gives a heartwarming message of hope. The heroine, Am rica, is a primary school student who is unhappy in school until a poet visits the class and inspires the students to express themselves creatively-in Spanish or English. Am rica Is Her Name emphasizes the power of individual creativity in overcoming a difficult environment and establishing self-worth and identity through the young girl Am rica's desire and determination to be a writer. This story deals realistically with the problems in urban neighborhoods and has an upbeat theme: you can succeed in spite of the odds against you. Carlos V zquez's inspired four-color illustrations give a vivid sense of the barrio, as well as the beauty and strength of the young girl Am rica.
My Nature Is Hunger by Luis J. Rodríguez
Call Number: PS3568.O34879 M9 2005
ISBN: 1931896240
Publication Date: 2005-09-01
Award-winning Latino author Luis J. Rodríguez stuns with My Nature is Hunger. The collection features 26 new poems that reflect Rodríguez's increasingly global view, his hard-won spirituality, and his movement toward reconciliation with his family and his past, as well as selections from his previous books, Poems Across the Pavement, The Concrete River, and Trochemoche.
Poems Across the Pavement by Luis J. Rodríguez
Call Number: PS3568.O34879 P64 2014
ISBN: 1882688481
Publication Date: 2014-04-15
Tia Chucha Press started twenty-five years ago in Chicago with the publication of Luis J. Rodriguez's first book, Poems Across the Pavement. As founder/editor of the Press, Rodriguez has sincepublished more than fifty poetry collections of quality crosscultural U.S. poets, as well as anthologies, chapbooks, and a CD. Tia Chucha Press is now a project of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, which Rodriguez helped create in 2001 with his wife Trini. We are honored to announce the 25th Anniversary Edition of Poems Across the Pavement--close to twenty poems of an emerging poet that began a prolific writing career.
Trochemoche by Luis J. Rodríguez
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781453259115
Publication Date: 2012-06-12
Poems of the barrio and of the Americas beyond Spanish for "helter-skelter," Trochemoche begins by conjuring life in the barrio, whether in a slum in a Texas border town or in L.A., the vast, hectic, desperate California metropolis where Luis J. Rodríguez grew up. For Rodríguez, only art offered deliverance from the despair of gang violence and poverty, and these poems stand as prayers for transcendence, recorded long after Rodríguez escaped his violent past and began to explore the wider world. Here Rodríguez offers not only songs of the American dream, but a dream of the Americas, a place that invites a pell-mell, sometimes violent, collision of cultures, human impulses, and natural forces. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author's personal collection.
My Nature Is Hunger by Luis J. Rodríguez
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781453259108
Publication Date: 2012-06-12
The collected poems of one of America's foremost balladeers of urban struggle and immigrant dreams Over his three-decade career as a poet, novelist, and memoirist, Luis J. Rodríguez has earned acclaim for his remarkable ear for the voices of the city. My Nature Is Hunger represents the best of his lyrical work during his most prolific period as a poet, a time when he carefully documented the rarely heard voices of immigrants and the poor living on society's margins. For Rodríguez's subjects, the city is all-consuming, devouring lives, hopes, and the dreams of its citizens even as it flourishes with possibility. "Out of my severed body / the world has bloomed," and out of Rodríguez's stirring vision, so has beauty. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author's personal collection.

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More works available at the Cal State LA Library
Complete Bibliography
Complete Bibliography of Published Works by Luis J. Rodriguez.

Luis' Recommendations

During the November 17th, 2020 Author Talk at Cal State LA, Luis J. Rodriguez discussed several authors whose work is important to him, and several publishers publishing books by Chicana(o) authors and on social justice topics. Below is a list.

For easy access where books are available as eBooks at Cal State LA they are linked here, otherwise links are for the Los Angeles Public Library.

Writers

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
ISBN: 9781101967805
Publication Date: 2015-08-25
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
U. S. Latino Issues, 2nd Edition by Rodolfo F. Acuña
ISBN: 9781440853234
Publication Date: 2017-01-26
A revision of the popular previous edition published more than a decade earlier, this work examines today's U.S. Latino population--now arguably the most important "minority group" in the country, with numbers well over 50 million strong in an increasingly diverse and integrated America. * Uses the latest census data to document the demographic growth of this group and its importance in immigration, the U.S. workforce, and voting in America * Examines the misconception that the growth of the U.S. Latino population is solely based on immigration when in reality more babies are birthed by native mothers than by newly arrived immigrants * Provides an insightful discussion of minority status in the United States--Latino or otherwise--that challenges readers to reconsider their attitudes about immigration, the value of immigrants in American society, and ethnocentrism
Borderlands / la Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa; Norma Cantu (Introduction by); Aída Hurtado (Introduction by)
Call Number: at the Los Angeles Public Library
ISBN: 9781879960855
Publication Date: 2012-06-12
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde; Cheryl Clarke (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781580911863
Publication Date: 2007-08-01
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
ISBN: 9780807083697
Publication Date: 2004-02-01
The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us--along with her Black female hero--through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
Unforgetting by Roberto Lovato
Call Number: From the Los Angeles Public Library
ISBN: 9780062938480
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
With the artistry of a poet and the intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States. The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history. Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma.

Poets

Five Decades, 1925-1970 by Pablo Neruda; Ben Belitt (Translator)
Call Number: From the Los Angeles Public Library
ISBN: 9780802130358
Publication Date: 1994-01-12
This bilingual volume is the definitive collection of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel Prize winner and one of the most profoundly influential poets of the twentieth century. His love poems are earthy and transcendent, and his political poems are the work of a man as incisive, impassioned, and ferociously intelligent as he was sensual. Ben Belitt has drawn the 138 selections inFive Decades from all of Neruda's major works, including the early volumes Residence on Earth, General Song, Elemental Odes, Voyages and Homecomings, Book of Vagaries, A Hundred Love Sonnets, Black Island Memorial, and the later The Hands of Day, World's End, and Skystones.
Tomorrow Triumphant by Castillo, Otto René, 1936-1967
ISBN: 9780941842020
Publication Date: 1984
Clandestine Poems--Poemas Clandestinos by Roque Dalton
Call Number: From the Los Angeles Public Library
ISBN: 9780942638073
Publication Date: 1984-08-01
Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora
Call Number: From the Los Angeles Public Library
ISBN: 9781619321779
Publication Date: 2017

Publishing Houses

Tia Chucha Press
Tia Chucha’s began as a café, bookstore and cultural space owned and run by Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, his wife Trini, and their brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez. In 2003 Luis, along with singer/musicologist Angelica Loa Perez and Xicano Rap artist Victor Mendoza established a next-door sister nonprofit to incorporate a full range of arts workshops. When in 2007 the cultural café and bookstore disbanded as an LLC, it donated its assets, including inventory, shelves, equipment, and more to the nonprofit to carry its mission forward. Tia Chucha’s cultural center now provides year-round on-site and off-site free or low-cost arts and literacy bilingual intergenerational programming in mural painting, music, dance, writing, visual arts, healing arts sessions (such as reiki healing) and healing/talking circles. Workshops and activities also include Mexica ("Aztec") dance, indigenous cosmology/philosophy, and two weekly open mic nights (one in Spanish, the other in English). We host author readings, film screenings, and art exhibits as well.
Floricanto Press
Floricanto Press, a premier publisher of Hispanic Latino Books, focuses on Latino/Hispanic people and trends. Its publishing programs examine a broad spectrum of social, cultural, political, and economic issues impinging upon our pluralistic communities as well as the societal structures at large affecting them. Our press publishes Latino books and specifically seeks writings articulating an analytical discourse on issues which include a Latino perspective. Floricanto Press publishes Latino books and e-books of Fiction, Latino Non-Fiction, Latino Poetry and Literature, Latino Hispanic History and Social sciences, Latino Women--by and about--Latino LGBT, Sephardic literature and history, Psychology, Linguistics, and Latino Biographies, both individual and collective; and Latino children's books.
Writ Large Press
Writ Large Press is an independent literary press in Los Angeles dedicated to making publishing accessible, amplifying diverse voices, and creating public literary events that call for participation by and the preservation of communities, such as DTLAB, a pop-up bookstore and performance space project; PUBLISH!, a continuing underground publishing project; Grand Park Downtown BookFest, a festival for LA writers and publishers; and #90X90LA, a summer long festival of 90 events in 90 consecutive days.
Red Hen Press
Red Hen Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to publishing works of literary excellence, supporting diversity, and promoting literacy in our local schools. We seek a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature.
Seven Stories Press
Whether publishing the zeitgeist-changing fiction of American masters Kate Braverman, Octavia E. Butler, Rick DeMarinis, Barry Gifford, Peter Plate and Chavisa Woods, newsbreaking investigative reporting by Greg Palast or Loretta Napoleoni, the bestselling late writings of Kurt Vonnegut (including New York Times hardcover bestseller A Man without a Country), National Book Award-winning Poems Seven by Alan Dugan, Greed by Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, the 2016 Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Book Award-winning middle-grade novel Adam & Thomas by Aharon Appelfeld, the 2016 Stonewall Book Award-winning Sex Is a Funny Word, or Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, currently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Seven Stories earns its reputation for bringing books that might otherwise have been marginalized thunderously into the mainstream conversation.

Podcast by Trini and Luis

Hummingbird Cricket Hour
Trini and Luis Rodriguez, co-founders of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural, embark on an ongoing dialogue. They discuss current events, new ideas, and old wisdom.