On top of this, Luis has spent some twenty five years conducting workshops, readings, and talks in prisons, juvenile facilities, homeless shelters, migrant camps, universities, public and private schools, conferences, Native American reservations, and men’s retreats throughout the United States. He has also traveled to Canada, Europe, Mexico, Central America, and Puerto Rico doing similar work among disaffected populations. In addition, he’s editor of the new Chicano online magazine, Xispas.com.

Luis has been part of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation’s Men’s Conferences since 1994 with Mosaic founder Michael Meade, healer Orland Bishop, West African teacher-elder Malidoma Somé and American Buddhist Jack Kornfield. At these conferences, the complex but vital issues of race, class, gender, and personal rage are addressed with dialogue, ritual, story, poetry, and art involving men of all walks of life, including those in urban street gangs. He also created a CD of original music and his poems called My Name’s Not Rodriguez for Dos Manos Records, released in Summer 2002.

Luis’ work has also been widely anthologized, including in Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters (1997 Broadway Books/Kodansha American), and most recently in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999 Thunder’s Mouth Press) and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (2001 Three Rivers Press). His poems and articles have appeared in college and high school textbooks throughout the United States and Europe. He has done radio productions and writing for LA’s KPFK-FM, California Public Radio as well as Chicago’s WMAQ-AM’s All-News radio and WBEZ-FM. And his writings have appeared over the last twenty-five years in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, LA Weekly, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, American Poetry Review, San Jose Mercury News, Grand Street, Utne Reader, Prison Life, Progressive Magazine, and Rock & Rap Confidential, among others. In 2005, he was asked to become a contributing writer to the LA Times' West magazine.

For those people not in the loop, recap for us the recent changes that you and Tia Chucha Cultural Center have faced?

In February, we were forced to move out of our space in Sylmar, CA (in the Northeast San Fernando Valley — the second largest Mexican community in Los Angeles) when the landlords almost tripled our rent — they wanted to bring in a multi-million dollar laundry services. This was a terrible setback — we had been in that space for over five years and had amazing events there. We were also the only bookstore and cultural space for the 500,000 people who live in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. However, we did not give up. Our last event in the old space became a major fundraiser — we raised $10,000 and around 600 people showed up that day.