In My Bloody Life, Reymundo Sanchez tells a chillingly sad tale, from his birth in the back of a pickup truck in Puerto Rico to the day he quit the Latin Kings gang, 21 years later. From the first page, his narrative is unpretentious, disarmingly honest, and horrifyingly riveting. His early years were so full of pain and abuse that by the time he opts, at age 11, to hang out with the local gang, the Latin Kings, it seems a perfectly logical choice. In his shoes, any one of us--smacked nightly by a mother and beaten ragged whenever the stepfather got the chance--would likely have chosen the same path. The gang was the family that accepted him as well as the peer group that offered girls who didn't say "no." Any violence that went with the territory couldn't match the atmosphere of brutality that permeated his own home.

Sanchez was a Latin King for six years and participated in innumerable bloody gang battles--years rife with sex, drugs, booze, and acts of gang revenge. He finally got up his pluck to leave (and the only way was to be "violated" out through a gang beating), but admits in his conclusion that life since then has, in some ways, been even harder. He's had to quit drugs, lose the only community he's known, support himself, and deal with the nightmares of all the horrors he's seen and done. Though Sanchez still hasn't accomplished his dream of completing college, he has managed to leave the Kings, leave Chicago, leave behind his mother's legacy of violence, and write an impressive first book. --Stephanie Gold


From Publishers Weekly
Chicago in the 1980s provides the setting for this extremely disturbing and raw account of a Puerto Rican teenager who lost himself to violent gang activity. Now repentant, Sanchez (a pseudonym) writes in a voluble voice, replete with operatic asides declaiming the immorality of his actions. But he offers a forceful and unusual perspective on ChicagoAin Sanchez's telling, it's a place of territorial graffiti and racist cops, in which a slow-motion riot of drugs, sex and gunplay constantly unfolds. Sanchez recounts his family's arrival in Chicago's Northwest Side in the late 1970s, when he was a small boy; he describes the beatings his grifter stepfather regularly doled out; and he portrays the allure of the mysterious and ritual-bound lives of tough, teenaged gangsters. When his family returned to Puerto Rico, he stayed behind. Soon, he joined the fearsome Latin Kings, and his given street name "Lil Loco" attested to his youth and ferocity. While graphically describing what he witnessed as a gang memberAsenseless killings, inter-ethnic hatreds and sexual abuse of gang-affiliated womenASanchez also pursues harder truths, arguing that it is a minority of promiscuous drug-users accompanied by community-wide silence that keeps the gangs in business. In the end, he condemns his former gang for masquerading as a Latino "public service" organization while high-ranking members become rich from their youthful recruits' drug dealing. And he scoffs at their reliance on conformist rituals and violence (violations of the rituals were punished with full body beatings). Offering very little hope, this book captures the dark, self-destructive lot of countless urban teens. Like other gangland memoirs (such as Monster and Always Running), it is significant because it takes the reader deep inside a secretive and brutal ethnic gang subculture. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Sanchez, who had been raped at age five by a cousin, left Puerto Rico for Chicago when he was seven, and reveled in his new home, excelling in school and at baseball. But his unloving mother married a monster, and by the time Sanchez was ten, he was taking to the streets to avoid their vicious beatings. Frightened by the bloodshed, he resisted joining the Latin Kings, the largest and most violent gang in the city, but by the time he was 13, Sanchez was drinking and getting high and training himself to suppress his compassion and embrace the very brutality he had suffered. Initiated into sex by a woman nearly three times his age, he became a sexual predator and soon felt no compunction about shooting his rivals. A survivor who turned his life around, Sanchez writes plainly and powerfully, and what is shocking about his tragic tale is not the barbaric actions of young gangbangers but the appalling collusion of adults, from criminally abusive parents to mercenary gun dealers and immoral cops. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Publishers Weekly
"A slow-motion riot of drugs, sex and gunplay."


Booklist
"Sanchez writes plainly and powerfully."


Chicago magazine
"A viciously candid, self-deprecating memoir."


Ralphmag.org
"Tells us perhaps more than we might want to know about gang life."


Book Description
Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and then sex, and was left to fend for himself before age 14. The Latin Kings, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, became his refuge and his world, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, self-respect, and nearly his life. This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs are members of your own gang, who in one breath will say they'll die for you and in the next will order your assassination.


About the Author
Reymundo Sanchez is the pseudonym of a former Latin King who no longer lives in Chicago.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and then sex, and was left to fend for himself before age 14. The Latin Kings, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, became his refuge and his world, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, self-respect, and nearly his life. This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs are members of your own gang, who in one breath will say they'll die for you and in the next will order your assassination.

Author Biography: Reymundo Sanchez is the pseudonym of a former Latin King who no longer lives in Chicago.

SYNOPSIS

This is the autobiography of a young man initiated into Chicago's Latin Kings gang at the age of 14. Lil Loco, as he became known, quickly earned a reputation for crazy violence. For 10 years a 30- block area of Chicago defined his reality as he rode the highs and lows of gang life in a world where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs were members of his own gang. Lacks a subject index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

ralphmag.org

Tells us perhaps more than we might want to know about gang life.

The Washington Post

The courageously honest Once a King, Always a King: The Unmaking of a Latin King resumes his 2000 memoir of gang wars, My Bloody Life. — Stephen J. Lyons

Chicago

A viciously candid, self-deprecating memoir.

Jesse White

A brutal, chilling firsthand account of how a young person who is raised without positive family values will reach out to a gang to find a support system and a substitute family. This book offers new insights into what lures kids into gangs and how difficult it can be for them to get out alive. It shockingly explains how difficult life can be for disadvantaged youngsters and demands that we make a greater effort at improving their lives.

Chicago Magazine

A viciously candid, self-deprecating memoir. Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

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