Always Running By Luis Rodriguez Sparknotes

518 Words2 Pages

Many aspects of a person's life affect their identity. Whether it is their self, their family or friends, or their community, it all affects a person’s identity. Luis Rodriguez’s memoir Always Running, tells of his life in East LA, growing up with gangs and drugs, and how he is affected by everyone that is around him. It’s all about his “Vida Loca” and how it affected him. There are three aspects of Luis's identity that most affected him throughout the book: his family, friends, and community. From the beginning, his family has always had an impact on his identity as they wanted the best for him. The author states, “My dad's solution was to keep me home after school.”(48) This demonstrates their love for him, as well as their hope to help him improve. His parents' methods of keeping him out of trouble show they cared about him. They wanted him not to continue on the path they saw him in. It shows that they loved him and wanted to shape him into a better person. His family as a whole had a deep impact on his identity and how he identified himself. …show more content…

Still, his friends had a great impact on his identity as his friends were the people he was usually around. In Chapter 5, Luis Rodriguez states, “ I was a Lomas Loco now.”(110) This both shows how Luis saw himself as well as the impact of his friends on him. Luis saw himself as part of the Lomas Gang that he had joined because of his friends. It further shows the bad impact of his friends, making him part of a gang, part of gang activity and violence. Although they made Luis join a gang, it further strengthened the friendship between him and his friends, and not everything they did was bad, which showed it both affected Luis’s identity in a good and a bad

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