In 1998 he received the Hispanic Heritage Award for literature, presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. In his poetry and his prose Rodríguez is dedicated to making Americans aware of youth gang problems and their possible solutions.
Luis Javier Rodríguez was born in El Paso, Texas, on 9 July 1954, but lived in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for two years until his family settled in the Watts community of Los Angeles in 1956. His mother, Maria Estela Jimerez, worked as a seamstress; his father, Alfonso Rodríguez, held various jobs, retiring as a laboratory custodian. Rodríguez has three siblings, Jose Rene, Ana Virginia, and Gloria Estela, and three half-siblings, Seni, Mario, and Alberto. The family moved to San Gabriel Valley in East Los Angeles in 1962, and his teenage years were spent in the streets of the barrios. In an unpublished interview in February 1996 Rodríguez said that being the son of Mexican immigrants made him a target of harassment by Anglo children and the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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