The Struggle

About the Book

I once found myself lying on my bunk inside my cell, waking up with a desperation that made me feel how insignificant my existence was. I went over the memories of my life, and at that time, I felt I had lived through so much, and that gave me the delusion of having had a hard life. That day in a California youth authority in Ventura County, the urge for this book was born. At the time, I didn’t know it, but whatever misfortunes I felt I had had up to that point were only a minor part of the life that awaited me. The lie that I was ready to cope with a society that I hardly knew anything of was soon to become a rude awakening with a lifelong learning experience. I feel fortunate that in the midst of my ignorance, I have been able to learn certain lessons that have helped me pull forward and rebuild my life along with a wonderful wife and amazing kids. The struggle has been real, from being born in a country that was, at the time, fighting a war against communism to coming to a country at twelve years old and, by fourteen, being homeless in the streets and getting sentenced to twenty-five years to life for a crime that I didn’t commit. Yet the hardest part was getting out and really learning what life was about, and through that learning, I find myself today writing about this brief memory of my life.

About the Author

I was born in El Salvador in 1977 and lived through the eighties during a civil war that was destroying thousands of families and that led to the migration of thousands of other Salvadorians around the world. I migrated to the United States in 1990. In 1992, I found myself living in the streets, indulging in a gang lifestyle, which put me in June of that year in juvenile hall, fighting a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence for a crime I didn’t commit, but which was also my ticket to an education and understanding of life. By the age of twenty-one, I was back out on the streets and again starting from scratch, trying to survive, hardly having any type of job skills or people skills. I somehow breezed through life, messing up along the way, making more enemies and losing many friends, learning firsthand experiences of the effects and destruction of drugs and also fighting to survive in that world. Through hard and laborious work, I have started to rebuild my life to the point that I somehow have already traveled through way more than half of the United States, making a living as a trucker, meeting new people, and enjoying the beauty of life, which is family.