Politics, Resistance, and Activism Theme Analysis

In addition to being a touching coming-of-age story and a fascinating insider’s look at gang culture, Always Running examines the many different forms that political action can take. In Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, there are a great number of worthy political causes, both domestically and abroad. At various points, Luis describes participating in the resistance to the war in Vietnam, police brutality, racism, and other injustices. In doing so, he poses one of the book’s central questions: what is the best, most effective way to fight injustice?

One form of political activism that Luis discusses at great length is violent resistance. Throughout his memoir, he describes instances in which the most powerful people in the city—police officers, politicians, etc.—behave unjustly. In the face of this injustice, the best response is sometimes physical force to match that of the aggressor. For example, Luis witnesses two police officers using excessive force to arrest a woman, at one point punching the woman in the face. Almost without thinking, Luis chooses to intervene, attacking the two officers and ultimately going to jail as a result. Speaking more generally, Luis suggests that large-scale violent uprisings—such as the Watts Rebellion in 1965 and the Los Angeles riots in 1992 over Rodney King—were at least partly justified. In the case of the Watts Rebellion, Luis praises the “spirit of resistance” that emerged from Watts, a neighborhood that saw some of the worst racism and police brutality in the country, seeming to imply that violent resistance is a justified response to the violence of the LAPD.

Luis does not, however, claim that the Watts and Rodney King uprisings were unqualified successes. Although violence may have been justified in both cases, it’s also true that the uprisings resulted in innocent people getting hurt and millions of dollars in property damage. Plenty of violence was done, but not always to the guilty parties—and this, Luis argues throughout his memoir, is one of the problems with violent political resistance. Luis demonstrates this by describing a riot that flares up after a high school football game when police officers harass Luis’s friends and start choking one of them. In retaliation, Luis and his friends attack the officers, then some white bystanders, and then a group of Asian students watching the game. With every minute that passes, their violence becomes more indiscriminate and less justifiable as a result, until finally they’re hitting people just because they feel like it.

It is because violent behavior can easily become unbridled that Luis advocates a second, more personal kind of political resistance: one rooted in education. It’s a well-known adage that the political is personal and the personal is political. While these words have been interpreted in many different ways, to Luis they suggest that he has an obligation to educate himself and understand his racial and cultural heritage. With this in mind, Luis studies the writings of political luminaries like Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, who argued for many different forms of resistance to racially unjust American society. Luis comes to see himself as part of a vast, exploited proletariat, meaning that he has a shared heritage with working-class people of many different races. Furthermore, because he sees his own education as having been integral to his political awakening, Luis also becomes more invested in education reform. At his high school, he leads protests and walk-outs designed to pressure the principal to introduce Chicano classes and dismiss teachers who disrespect Chicano culture. In short, Luis’s studies lead him to adopt a more personal, individualistic style of political resistance rather than a violent one. Put differently, Luis realizes it’s not enough to agitate or rebel in order to get what you want—you must also concentrate on understanding injustice—and this means reading, learning, and passing on your learning to other people.