Grillo's Change In Always Running By Luis J. Rodriguez

In the story Always Running by Luis J. Rodriguez, the main character Grillo started off as a spanish speaker that had just immigrated from Mexico, but then started to get influenced by the gangsters that lived in his neighborhood. Then his life started to dramatically change. Three main changes that Grillo goes through are racial discrimination, joining a gang, and his drive for education. One of the reasons why Grillo changed was because he faced racial discrimination as a kid, when he had barely immigrated from Mexico. One day Grillo and his mother were at park and they were being racially discriminated and that took affect on him because his mother was helpless since they didn't know the correct way to react to the situation. Once he started school he didn't know much english. Due to the fact that he couldn't speak english his teachers would push him to the side and payed not attention to him. For example, “ Ok why don't you sit here in the back of the class...play with some blocks until we figure out how to get you more involved...in those days there was no way to interrogate the non english speaking children. So they just made it a crime to speak anything but english. If a spanish …show more content…
He left his past gang life behind him and started a new chapter in his life. He joined a folklorico group in school and won first place. Grillo went back into college. He was really focused on a book he was writing. He didn't want anything to take that focus from him because it was something he really wanted to do and accomplish, “Here I was on the verge of changing my life, in college, with a book about to happen, working on my spare time and possibly getting more mural painting jobs” (pg 223) . He finally felt like he was doing something better with his life. After many girlfriends he finally found his wife and settled down to start his