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chapter 3: we were cholos once, and young
Photos/Images:
Chapter 3 (Page 161): "I would model my physique after 'the YMCA Mestizo' for life. On the left is me at sixteen with a fake tattoo a girl drew on my arm in class ('tattoo' and photo by Danielle Chacon).On the right is me twenty-three years later (PSA: Abs are highly overrated and not recommended year-round!)."
Videos/Clips (Memories and Messages in Memes)
Chapter 3 (Page 170): "In daytime novella fashion, it was revealed (oh, for shame!) that before A.C. was born, his dad changed their family’s surname from Sanchez to Slater so that he could get into 'The Military Academy' aka 'West Point' (cue the pipe organs), thus erasing their 'Chicano heritage' for more than 25 years 'dah dah daaah!'"
Preparing for the Storm (for L.A. in the '90s)
Chapter 3 (Page 175): "Pioneer High School did not play in the notorious nineties—because they were ready! President Ronald Reagan, while in office, once visited the school and gave it the most laudatory remarks I’ve ever heard a head of state bestow upon a single learning institution..." [specifically @ 3:20]
If it Looks Like a Duck...It's Open Season!
Ch 3 (Page 176): "Their only goal was to harass me and show me who’s boss. The cops hated having to let me go, given my obvious affiliations. For an excellent and real-life audiovisual example [search for] LiL Mikey pressed by LAPD."
Robin Hood of the West
Ch 3 (Page 199): "We were now desperados on a mission of vigilante justice. I was the Cisco Kid, and he was Pancho (The Cisco Kid, 1950-1956). Watch the first whole minute of the classic intro to really set the scene and mood for this quixotic quest."
My First Combat Deployment (Viewer Discretion)
Ch 3 (Page 181): "The first year and a half of the Green Light would serve as my first real combat tour. I’d see more violence and death during that period than two combat deployments combined...hence the title of this chapter ('We Were Cholos Once, and Young')."
School: My Safe Place...to Sleep
Ch 3 (Page 190): "That incident officially marked over one year of braving the Green Light alongside my peers. I had grown exhausted physically
and emotionally. I felt like my soul was dying. I would take long,
deep naps at my desk at school—the kind where you wake up in
a buddle of drool (like that scene in Ferri s Bueller’s Day Off, 1986)."
There's Not a Damn Thing You're Gonna Do About It
Chapter 3 (Page 201): "He bragged about being a boxer back in the day, so I knew he was expecting me to punch or tackle him, so I did neither. Instead, I Billy Jacked his ass..."
Guiding Others on the Path of True North (Parenting)
Ch 3 (Page 206): "Discussion with one of my high schoolers (USC alum) on consequences, discipline, stress and conflict management, goal setting, and goal attainment [during a rough patch his freshman year of high school]."
*** RECOMMEND watching on YouTube's platform so you can read the "Description" for my reflections upon reexamination of this conversation/approach (click Watch on YouTube on the thumbnail).
EXTRA BONUS: "Dream School" Acceptance
Ch 1 (Page 32): "[My dad's] trips to UCLA, therefore, were like salt in the wound over the years, taking away his plausible deniability of what else was out there; they left him with an uncomfortable awareness of what he’d missed out on and how this loss would always impact his stations in life. Little did he know that by sharing those “peeks behind the curtain” with me so fully, he’d one day have a grandson graduate from a university even better than UCLA i.e., USC [Fight On]!"
Songs
Chapter 3 (Page 164): "Before the audio equipment was repossessed, my favorite music to blast on it was 'Chicano' old school, like Santana...
Malo...
and War, and I used to listen to Big Boy in the Morning [back when he was on Power 106!] on the way to school because I liked to stay well informed."
Chapter 3 (Page 172): "Rebels were another popular tribe back in the day—the Mexican 'Outsiders' (like the 1983 movie): greasers with tight(er) jeans, huge, solid steel belt buckles, black boots, leather jackets, and sometimes huge pompadours.
Ch 3 (Page 172): "...rebels or party crews would have been far less deadly tribes to choose, but...none of them were angry or violent enough to satisfy me. Plus...those expensive hairdos took way too long...I didn’t want to pluck my eyebrows [and] I had no desire to learn how to swing dance or vogue to house music and The Smiths."
Chapter 3 (Page 173): "As a cholo, it would only cost me ninety-nine cents for a pack of razors and ten minutes to shave my head once a week, and I’d only have to learn one dance move: the elbows up, side-to-side (shout out to Down AKA Kilo for 'Lean Like a Cholo,' 2007)."
Chapter 3 (Page173-174): "....I was able to expand my collection of oldies exponentially. The genre and artists provided a perfect melody and song for every occasion, expressing the romance, love, sadness, and machismo that permeated both my culture and headspace at the time. Examples included Brenton Wood (“Gimmie Little Sign” for macking over the phone)...
The Stylistics ('Break Up to Make Up' for breakups and makeups, of course)...
Zapp & Roger (“So Ruff, So Tuff” for cruising Whittier Boulevard,
especially because the song [seems to say] West Side Whittier [00:48] and South Side Whittier [00:54]...
Santana ('Samba Pa Ti' for funeral processions)...
and War ('Slipping into Darkness' for getting pumped up before a
mission; just listen to the intro alone)."
Chapter 3 (Page 185): "The morning we heard about the murders, a
group of friends and I ditched school to inspect the crime scene...That same exact morning...'The Crossroads,' by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, premiered...[we were] in disbelief of each lyric’s timeliness and uncanniness [1:33]...A few months later, another friend and member of the gang was shot and killed after I’d spent a whole day at his house watching movies while it rained outside."
Chapter 3 (Page 186): "Needless to say, there was literally a “Shoot first, ask questions later” policy in effect. The song 'Heathens,' by Twenty One Pilots, does a perfect job describing what we had become and how we operated, from the song’s first lyrics to its last (it even mentions hand grenades…). How a couple of millennial white boy suburbanites fromOhio got it so right confounds me to this day."
Chapter 3 (Page 200): "Around this time in the mid ’90s, War’s 'The Cisco Kid' (1972) was my favorite and personal theme song...I instructed my friend to show him the gun...culmination criteria had been achieved...I drove us back to the neighborhood—still a kid, but no longer a boy."
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