When The Moon Is Up
Written by students from Alain Leroy Locke High School
FOREWORD
Dearest young writers of this book. Scribes and students of greater Los Angeles. I offer you a big and a hearty hug. And my sincerest congratulations. You are now published authors! This work, with its bound pages and its narrow spine, will now occupy a spot on a shelf alongside other great works of literature. Shakespeare, Woolf, Cervantes, Morrison.
Like you, those writers all put their writerly hearts into creating something new. They looked at the beautiful and tragic world around them, and its history, and they told a story of human truth.
In your book, you have tackled one of the biggest events this big city has ever seen. The days in 1992 when the city burned and seethed, and the aftermath of those events. I lived through that “uprising,” that “riot,” or as the Spanish-speakers of the day called it, “los quemazones,” the great burning. I dreamed then of a kinder, more just city—a place where young people believed that words and ideas could be as powerful as rocks, gunfire, and flames. Now that day has arrived. You’ve shown us the Los Angeles that was born from those days of destruction. You’ve told tales of classrooms and family homes, of bedrooms and border crossings, of injustice and ambition. You’ve shown us some of the scary and wonderful things to be found in the places where you’ve grown up. Like any great author, you’ve put a lot of yourself into your work. You’ve written drafts and revised them, and you’ve accepted the wise counsel of editors who’ve helped you find what was there inside you waiting to be born—your voice.
All of us as readers are better off because you believed you had something to say and because you did the work to say it. Thank you for being brave enough to invite us into the worlds you know. Thank you for bringing us along on the journeys you’ve undertaken to get to where you are today. You have made us feel what it is like to be a young person in the first decades of the twenty-first century. One day, in the not-too-distant future, other young people will pick up these bound pages and they will read your words and know what it was like to live in this time. When they read these tales of your lives, they will know what you felt. As if by magic, they will become you. Writers like you who pull off this feat of wizardry are known by a title I am proud to bestow on you. They are called artists.
In closing, dear authors, I’ll ask you the same question I pose to every published writer I meet:
What are you working on next?
—Héctor Tobar