t’s fascinating to read Luis J. Rodriguez’s memoir nearly three decades after it was published. In the first place, there are all the ways Los Angeles has changed since 1993, and all the ways it hasn’t, particularly around questions of identity and race. In the second, appeared was 38 and living in Chicago, where he had moved in 1985. To return to the book in 2022, then, is like gazing backward through a looking glass, at a personal history that has now become a social history, in a future that now exists for us in present tense.
