If you grow up on the good side of the tracks, you're going to belong to something over there. If you grow up on the bad side of the tracks, you're going to belong to something over there. It's not rocket science.
When you're in a gang, you go through life like any other individual. You have certain obligations, but you are not forced to do anything.
Nobody succeeds on their own. Someone has to be there to show them the way, and if you give that experience to a person on the street - a gang member, a prisoner - he might succeed. That's how it was for me.
I remember my first thing was 'CSI: Miami.' I played a Cuban gangster. And that was it. I was like, 'Wow, I don't have to clean toilets.' I could actually dress up and get paid equivalent to that. So that was my introduction into the Hollywood industry.
Art saved my life.
I didn't know that I could be an actor until I was 25 years old, and now I continue to go back to the prisons and probation camps and the inner city to say that you don't have to go through the violence, through the trauma like I did.
I was one step away from getting my life taken away, whether it was life in prison or being dead on the streets. But I was saved.
The lifestyle that I grew up in, it was passed on to me. I didn't know there was another world.
My family had been involved in gangs since the 1970s.
I really embrace the person and the life that I came from because that made me who I am today.
In this society, you have to belong to something, I feel, and all we have in the neighborhood is a gang.
My father figures were all gang members.
I grew up in East Los Angeles, which is the biggest population of Mexican-Americans in America. I was born and raised there.
The agricultural fields throughout the Southwest, those jobs needed to be filled, and who were the ones to do it? It was the Mexicans.
I'm definitely not joking around on set.
Through sharing my pain, I can possibly heal your pain. There is no other feeling like it. Money doesn't compare. This is the true meaning of art.
Majority of minds are warped into the belief of the only person worth helping is themself.
I can't point my finger on a 'dream role,' but the days that I'm able to fulfill the stories of the 'hood/barrio on film, those will be great days.
The true meaning of an artist/actor is opening my heart to the audience and, at the same time, opening their heart.
It's nothing like changing or helping a person find themselves, but who would've thought that I would make it to a point in my life where somebody would be naming a damn burrito after me.
