An American Family: Living on the Verge

As is often true with couples, Luis and Francis tend to worry about different things. According to Francis, Luis’ main bugaboo is money. “Like when the doctor tells him he needs Claritin for his allergies, he won’t buy it because it’s $6 for five capsules,” she says. And when his construction crew is given days off for Christmas, he’s freaked at the work stoppage, sure it’s somehow a precursor of financial disaster. “Luis was so poor for so long,” she says. “He’s always afraid we’re going to lose everything and it’ll be like that again.” Francis also grew up poor. “But not like Luis,” she says.

Luis was born on February 7, 1972, and named for his father, Luis Aguilar Sr., whom he never met (although he’s tried recently to track him down through the Internet). His mother, Maria del Refugio, was a farm girl from Zacatecas, Mexico, who came north without papers at age 20, found work in a bakery, then became pregnant by one of the bakers who turned out to have a wife and family back in Guadalajara. After Luis and his twin brother were born, his mother moved to a since-demolished West L.A. motel named Cozy Courts that rented rooms by the week, and tried to make ends meet by doing housecleaning, making up the gap with public assistance.

As a child, Luis was a quiet, studious boy who wore oversized glasses and got straight A’s, in part because he was very bright but also because he liked the order of school. Then, at age 9, his world tilted in an ill-fated direction when his mother hooked up with a new man who turned out to be both a hard drinker and a woman beater. After the stepfather, whose name was Pedro Lopez, killed a local gang member in the course of a feud, then fled to Mexico ahead of a murder warrant, Luis’ mother packed up the twins and followed a week later.

For most of the next two years, the family lived in small towns in the state of Durango, Mexico, where his mother and stepfather earned subsistence wages picking chiles and apples. Although the Mexican constitution forbids children under the age of 14 to work, enforcement is practically nonexistent, and at the time when Luis was there in the early ’80s, somewhere between 8 million and 11 million kids were employed illegally. Soon Luis and Carlos were among them working as pickers alongside the adults. When the apple season ended, Pedro took the boys to pick wild oregano in the mountains and to scrounge extra money by killing rattlesnakes to sell to the curanderos. School was a thing of the past.

Being poor in L.A. is soul-grinding, but being poor in Mexico is worse, so in 1983, the family returned to California despite the legal risks. Luis and his brother, now 11, re-entered 24th Street Elementary School in fifth grade. By that time they were so behind academically that Carlos lost all interest. But several teachers recognized Luis’ intelligence and urged him to try to catch up. Yet while Luis’ grades improved, his formerly shy persona acquired a new patina of anger. He hated feeling helpless when Pedro hit his mother, hated having thrift-shop shoes while other kids wore Nikes, hated being teased and called a TJ wetback by boys whose parents were no less Mexican than his, hated being beaten up on his way home, hated that he had no friends, hated everything about school — except the actual classwork, which, for the furious, lonely boy, again provided an island of calm and pleasure.

Midway through middle school, Luis started hanging with a tagger crew called the Tiny Boys, after he noticed that, while he walked with them, the teasing stopped cold. When the Tiny Boys turned from taggers to full-fledged gangsters, Luis drifted into a double life: smart student and swim-team member by day, street hoodlum by night. The split became most extreme during his senior year at Manual Arts High, where Luis was on the honor roll, the football team and the academic decathlon team (after he personally persuaded a teacher to start one). Then one night in the spring of 1990, some enemy homeboys shouted insults and waved a gun at him. When Luis failed to back down, one homeboy fired a single bullet into Luis’ chest, collapsing his lung and nearly killing him. When he got out of the hospital, Luis the good student was replaced by Luis the full-time gangster bent on revenge. He soon gained a reputation as a hard ass who would walk straight into, not away from, gunfire, which quickly moved him up the gang hierarchy to the position of shot caller. “It’s like I forgot about everything else and had this death wish,” he says. His career as a dangerous urban street legend was finally halted in 1994 when he was arrested and sentenced on the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge.

Luis says that the shock of prison was what he needed. “I’d be dead if I hadn’t gone,” he says. “Prison woke me up. I saw how violent and crazy I’d been, and that it was up to me to better myself and change.” During his years on the inside, he got his high school diploma and began to read everything he could lay his hands on. “They used to have college classes at the prison where I was, and a lot of those textbooks were still roaming around,” he says. “I read so much, I couldn’t sleep at night, just thinking, about my life, about everything.”