Always Running: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Luis, Wilo, Clavo, and Chicharrón spend more time together after they join The Tribe. They spray-paint their names on walls. One afternoon, they sit together, drinking and cooking in a roasting pit. All around them are the ruins of houses that burned down in fires. Suddenly, the gang notices a car driving by. Clavo shouts out that he and his friends are affiliated with The Tribe. In response, somebody rolls down the window of the car and fires a gun at the gang, yelling, “Sangra Diablos!” As the car drives away, Luis sees that Clavo’s face is “shot full of pellets.” The gang takes Clavo to the hospital. Later, they talk about starting a war with the Sangra.

As the years go by, more and more of Luis’s family ends up in Los Angeles. Many of his cousins stay with him, and he becomes fascinated by his aunt Chucha. Luis respects Chucha for singing and telling good stories. Other family members hate her, but Luis respects her free-spiritedness. Another important influence on Luis is his cousin, Pancho. When Luis is ten, Pancho moves in. In his late teens, Pancho is very cool. He introduces Luis and Rano to soul music and weightlifting.

One day, after weightlifting, Luis feels a pain in his abdomen. It turns out that Luis has ruptured his intestine while exercising, and must go to the hospital. While he’s there, Luis’s parents decide to have him circumcised. But the doctors make a clumsy mistake, and Luis has to get painful stitches on his penis.

Luis returns to the incident he described at the beginning of the chapter. Clavo survives his shooting, but loses an eye. To celebrate Clavo’s survival, the gang decides to make a trip out to the “white people’s beaches,” where Latinos traditionally aren’t welcome. At the beach, they play football, get high, and flirt with the young women with whom they arrived. At one point, a few gang members grope a pretty young woman named Hermie, throw her in the water, and laugh.

In the afternoon, a group of white surfers arrives and starts harassing Luis’s friends, saying, “Fuck you, beaners!” Luis’s friends prepare for a fight, smashing bottles. Just then, the surfers pull out guns and badges—they’re cops. They arrest everyone, continuing to call them “beaners.”

The cops take Luis and his friends to the police station, since they’ve committed a felony by drinking on the beach. After a couple hours, Luis and his friends are freed. However, one gang member, Black Dog, is sent to prison, since he has a few prior arrests.

At the age of nine, Luis’s parents tell him that he needs to start earning money. Rano is working as a newspaper boy, and when Luis turns twelve, he begins doing the same. To his own surprise, Luis becomes a great paperboy. He’s so quick that his name is published in the local paper. Luis is less successful at selling newspaper subscriptions, however—at least in the rich neighborhoods, where people are unmoved by the free gifts that come with signing up. One day Luis tries selling subscriptions in a very poor neighborhood, though, and lots of people sign up. He knows they’re just signing up for the free gifts, and won’t pay when the time comes, but Luis is still praised for selling a record number of subscriptions.

At the age of the thirteen, Luis starts working at a carwash. This job gives Luis a foot fungus, because he often has to work in wet sneakers. Luis’s sores become so bad that his mother and his uncle Kiko slice open the sores and treat them with herbs. It’s the most pain Luis has ever experienced up to this point in his life.

The chapter skips ahead: Luis is standing in a jail cell. A guard brags to him that the cops detain every Latino teenager in the neighborhood in order to keep track of their names. In his neighborhood, Luis thinks, the police are “just another gang.” He and his friends give different cops their own nicknames—Cowboy, Maddog, etc.

Shortly after Clavo’s accident, Clavo disappears. Nobody is sure if he’s gone home or to jail. A new boy, Yuk Yuk (real name Claudio Ponce), joins the gang. Yuk Yuk has spent years in a juvenile detention center, and he encourages his friends to steal. At the age of thirteen, Luis steals records, food, and liquor from various stores. At times he gets away with it, but at other times a guard catches him and calls his mother.

Yuk Yuk also introduces Luis to two big-time robbers, Jandro Mares and Shed Cowager. Both men are in their thirties and specialize in buying up stolen cars. Luis and his gang scope out nice houses and then break in, stealing everything valuable they find.

Yuk Yuk plans armed robberies, too. One night, Yuk Yuk asks Luis and his friends to join him in a robbery. The gang holds up a concession stand near a drive-in movie theater, and Luis carries a gun. Yuk Yuk yells at the concession stand worker and orders him to open the safe, but the man pleads that he doesn’t have the combination. While they’re arguing, a gunshot rings out. With his friends’ encouragement, Luis fires back in the direction of the shot. The gang runs away from the stand and into the night, away from the sound of the gunshots.