At the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, a portrait picture of yours truly, our spirit collectively, now greets you as you walk into the entrance lobby hallway.

Until yesterday I had not been in that main building since 2016, when I received the La Raza Distinguished Alumni of the Year Award. I graduated with my Juris Doctor degree from there back in 2004. After that, for a few years, I had taken HOMEY (Homeys of the Mission Empowering Youth) to the school’s Law School Day for high school students. I also made a couple of presentations and attended some of their functions, where I first met Jeff Adachi, RIP, Class of 1985.

In 2010, when my first book Barrio Bushido was published, the law school’s magazine wrote an article about me. They sent a photographer to meet me at City College of San Francisco (where I have now been teaching for 22 years). I suggested we take photos inside of the Diego Rivera Theater in front of Rivera’s Pan American Unity Mural.

It is from this photo shoot that comes the picture that greets you at U.C. Law, S.F.

Underneath it is my name and a quote from that 2010 magazine article. In it I was saying that “we [the locos y locas] represent San Francisco’s values of creativity, genius, tolerance, and sincerity: Puro Amor.”

I had love in my heart, as we all do, but I was also violent and aggressive. Note the fighting stance in the picture. In law school, I learned that the spider symbol arguments were meant to bite and win and poison others and even myself.

Only five days ago did I learn about this picture from a Loved One who served 33 years in La Pinta. He told me he had been in the TL Tenderloin and went into the law school to use the restroom. As he was walking down the hallway, he couldn’t believe it was me maddogging him! He texted me the picture, but I didn’t understand where it was until we spoke a few days later.

As a child, I played in the Tenderloin, one of the grittiest skid rows on planet Earth. For some reason my mother liked to go there and have us play amongst the forgotten. My father’s barber cut hair there. After my Papa died and I had lice, Toby the barber would cut my hair, yet he wouldn’t say anything to make me feel ashamed.

On Leavenworth Street, that’s where Newman’s Boxing Gym used to stand, where I boxed as a teenager. I couldn’t afford the dues, so my coach Johnny Vidal paid them for me because he knew I needed to fight. It’s the same urban Amor and destitution as more than thirty five years earlier.

Inside of one of the other law school’s buildings, they used to have a giant tapestry of the Battle of Hastings greeting you. They took that down, just like they recently took down the name U.C. Hastings.

That name was not about some heroic Battle of Hastings in England.

The University of California, Hastings College of the Law, that pinnacle of power, that first law school in all of California, that first legal institution west of the Mississippi, was founded in 1878 by Serranus Hastings, who amongst other things, had Native Piki Californian Indians murdered, so he could steal their land, and with the spoils, control the land and the people with laws of lies.

I hated law school. I knew something was wrong, but I felt too stupid to argue against anyone. I didn’t want to go there, but my Brother Jeff, RIP, had super-gangster dreams that I wanted to make true for him before he died.

There was no intellectual argument that could help me, but still I tried and kept going because I remembered what the streets taught me: Love, even in our own horror story. With a war-face, you were supposed to accept hell.

I learned the law and am now grateful that I did, because it ultimately proved to me that words are worthless if they do not offer and share the spirit of Amor.

This is our picture on the wall of U.C. Law, San Pancho.