Always Running: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Luis remembers fighting with his older brother Rano. Once, when Luis was nine years old, he was sitting in the backseat fighting with Rano. His sisters, Ana and Gloria were sitting beside him. At the same time, his parents were arguing: his mother, María, wanted to move back to Mexico, but his father, Alfonso, was reluctant.

Luis’s family is from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, but his parents make sure that he and his siblings are born in Texas so that they’ll be American citizens. His father, Alfonso, is an educated man who later marries María, his secretary. Alfonso is a high school principal, a powerful position in Mexico. Because he’s an outspoken critic of the local government, his enemies conspire to defeat him. He’s arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement and sent to jail. He’s eventually released, at which point he decides to move his family to America. María agrees to move to America with Alfonso, but she’s reluctant to do so. María is descended from the Tarahumara Indians of Chihuahua. Her mother married a railroad worker during the Mexican Revolution. Later, when her husband was killed in an explosion, María’s mother married Luis’s grandfather, a trumpeter notorious for his affairs with women.

María is thirteen years younger than Alfonso. She’s never been in a relationship with another man, but Alfonso already has multiple children from earlier relationships. María is fiery and intense, while Alfonso is a “stoic intellectual.” María has three of Alfonso’s children (and later, after the family relocates to Los Angeles, a fourth).

The family moves to La Colonia, a Mexican neighborhood in Watts, a predominately black area of Los Angeles. Watts is impoverished, and many cheap laborers live there. Seni, Alfonso’s daughter from a previous marriage, suggests that Alfonso move to Watts, since she lives there, too. Luis has many half-brothers and half-sisters, including Lisa, who died while she was still an infant.

Luis’s earliest memories of Los Angeles are unpleasant. Life is hard, and Alfonso is almost always out of work. Luis sees billboards depicting happy white families and famous Hollywood actors—but these images contain “none of our names, none of our faces.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, Luis plays with Rano, his brother. Rano plays the part of Tarzan while Luis plays a monkey—meaning that Luis usually loses the game, and Rano sometimes hits Luis. When this happens, María whips Rano. Other kids in the neighborhood attack Rano, and sometimes he comes home bleeding. In school, Rano attends a remedial class because he speaks little English, and he’s held back another year. Rano takes out his anger on Luis.

Luis remembers Christmas in Los Angeles when he was a child. One year, he receives toys, which he breaks immediately, for reasons he can’t explain. He writes, “In my mind it didn’t seem right to have things that were in working order.”

María works as a maid, meaning that she gets to see “nice, American, white-people homes.” She’s often sick, since she suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure. Sometimes, her leg veins become so swollen that she’s forced to cut them to relieve the pain.

One day, Rano and Luis go to the grocery store to buy food for their mother. While they’re there, two older boys call them “Spics” and beat up Rano. Weeping and covered in his own blood, Rano makes Luis swear never to tell anybody that he cried. Luis swears.

Luis begins school at the age of six. One of the first things he remembers about school is his teacher’s complaint that many of the students speak no English (at the time, Luis can understand English but can’t speak it well). Another teacher sends Luis to a remedial class and tells him, “Play with some blocks until we figure out how to get you more involved.” For most of the rest of the year, Luis sits in the back of the class and plays with blocks.

School is challenging for Luis because he doesn’t speak English well. At the time, most schools in Los Angeles offer no extra help for Spanish-speakers, and often Latino students are punished for speaking Spanish in school. However, Luis makes some friends at school, including Jaime, a boy who lost his arm in a nasty accident as a toddler. Another of his friends is Earl. Luis befriends Earl after Luis is punished for Earl’s misbehavior in the classroom. Earl comes by Luis’s house and thanks him for “taking the rap” by offering him his prized marble collection. Jaime, Earl, and Luis explore their neighborhood together.

Luis and his family change houses many times because they’re evicted. Alfonso has trained as a teacher in Mexico, but he’s unable to find work in America. Eventually he gets a job as a substitute teacher, teaching Spanish to “rich white kids.” With the money, Alfonso moves his family to Reseda, a slightly wealthier part of the city.

In Reseda, Rano becomes the toughest kid in school, meaning that bullies no longer pick on him or Luis. But María is unsatisfied with her new neighborhood, partly because the other women tend to be healthier and better looking than she. Still, she knows that she’ll have to follow Alfonso wherever he goes.

Alfonso is dismissed from his job after students complain that they can’t understand his accent, and after he writes letters to the school board proposing new methods of teaching Spanish. Next, Alfonso and his family move in with Seni, who lives with her husband and two daughters. Because the house is crowded, Rano and Luis spend most of their time outside.

One night, Luis and Rano come home to find the house surrounded by police. It turns out that Seni had an argument with her husband, during which she stabbed him in the arm with a nail file. Soon afterwards, the landlord evicts Luis’s family. At this point, María and Alfonso decide to separate.

Luis returns to the scene from the beginning of the chapter: that day, while he and his brother were fighting in the car, his parents had separated, and Alfonso was driving María and the children to the station so that they could return to Mexico. At the station, Alfonso says a quiet goodbye to his children and then turns away, without even looking Luis in the face. Suddenly, María embraces Alfonso and cries out that she doesn’t want to take the children to Mexico, since she won’t be able to find any work. Alfonso and María announce that they’re not leaving after all—they’re going to stay together, here in Los Angeles. Luis feels like a ball bouncing from one place to another.