LaDonna Brave Bull Allard was a Standing Rock Sioux elder who spent most of her life educating people about the history of the land and protecting the sacred sites of her people in North Dakota. In 2016, she co-founded the Sacred Stone Camp on Standing Rock Sioux land to resist the building of the Dakota Access pipeline. The resistance to the pipeline, which would put the Missouri River (the water source for the reservation) at risk, attracted thousands from around the world. This week, we learned that LaDonna passed away at the age of 64 from cancer. We leave you with these excerpts of our interview with her last year. We will always remember her courage and undying determination to protect land and water, which she called, “life.”
“When you destroy a water of the community, you destroy a community. When you destroy life, you destroy everything…We cannot do that. We must stand up to protect the water.”
Hector La Fosse at the 2019 21st Annual International Latino Book Awards on September 21, 2019 at the Los Angeles City College. (Courtesy Hector La Fosse)
It all started in New York City, in the 1960’s. La Fosse was born – the youngest of seven siblings to Puerto Rican parents. His father was unemployed, and an alcoholic who used to beat his mother. At only 7, La Fosse was raped by a teenage girl in his neighborhood. Since then, he decided to escape to the streets, looking for a release in drugs, women and gang life. Eventually, that life led to many years in and out of jail.
It took almost four decades, but after much healing – physically and emotionally – he was finally able to get married, and leave drugs and his criminal life for good. For the past two decades, La Fosse has worked as a mentor, counselor, and bounty hunter.
As a teenager, sitting in a jail cell, La Fosse says he was first inspired by a book called, “Down These Mean Streets,” written by Piri Thomas. He says reading this book served as a pivotal moment in his life that planted the dream of becoming a writer someday. It wasn’t until 45 years later that this dream would finally come to fruition.
Today, at 61, La Fosse lives in central Florida with his wife, and two dogs. This is where he wrote his first book, “No Regrets: The Journey” – an award-winning memoir about his troubled life that finally was rerouted on a path towards healing and redemption. On October 13, La Fosse will be returning to his native NYC to read from his book at Festival of Books 2019.
What made you finally ready to write this book?
I wrote this book to release myself. To release my secrets. That was my sole purpose – to share my secrets with the world. At the beginning, it was very painful and frustrating to relive these moments in my life. I just wanted to quit many times. Reliving the pain was more painful than the actual experience. Now as an adult, looking back, I realize I never let go of that little boy and the pain that he experienced. The teenager took the adult hostage dictating to him how to feel. I was an angry little kid.
Why do you think you gravitated towards bad influences when you were little?
I felt hopeless. I was homeless, and the easy was more attractive… I just wanted to run. The corners I ran to were negative places – people out of similar experiences. It became comfortable to me, because I was becoming accepted in another world, and these people accepted me. It became a way of life. I became conditioned to living this lifestyle, because I was running. I was hiding. The using of the drugs was another escape for me not to feel. Throughout this whole process, I was suffering. I became frightened and built this fantasy world. I lived in this illusion that this was the best way.
You mention praying a few times in your book. How has that been instrumental in your life?
I grew up Pentecostal. We went to church at night. I was already rebelling. It’s not what I wanted to be, but I always had some faith. I always believed in God. Many times I was angry with God, because I felt he abandoned me and He let me suffer. But a lot of times, I called on Him because of the fear that I was experiencing at a given moment…I kept telling God, “Help me,” or “I’m hungry.” I always had the belief that there was a God, but I was angry at Him. But He was always there. I always had that feeling that He was watching over me. Mostly because of all of the things that I escaped. I tried understanding the lessons He was trying to tell me. I couldn’t decipher it, I couldn’t make sense of it, but it came very subtly to me. And I didn’t follow my conscious, because I didn’t know how to tap into it, but the message was coming to me. Later in life, it actually hit me.
I had eventually formed a habit of praying, because I saw miracles happen in my life. The biggest thing that happened to me was when I finished building my house [after moving to Florida 16 year ago]…but I was still obsessed with building more. I was a little kid from the ghetto, from poverty, and I promised myself I would never to be poor again. Now I am for the very first time in my very own house. It became a fortress. I put so much time and money into it. Thirteen years later, I look at my house and thank God. I said while crying, “Wow, look at what you have done for this little boy.” I start to meditate, and in my conscious, I felt something big and clear speak to me, “Now it’s time for you to leave everything. There’s something more for you to do.” I get emotional, and I get frightened. It was clear to me. I go back to make sense of it. I go into prayer again, and ask Him again. I caught a vision of that teeneager in the prison cell that read that book for the very first time – “Down Those Mean Streets” – that was the first book I ever read that made sense to me. And I realized, “Wow, one day I’m going to tell my story.” That was the very first moment I had a goal. It was clear what my purpose was.
Shortly after that, we moved to a one-bedroom apartment… We closed down the house – following the instructions. I had been making a lot of money as a self-employed bounty hunter, but I closed my business and I started writing for 12 to 13 hours a day. I would sleep two to three hours a night, because I kept being woken up by thoughts and experiences…After I published my book, I moved back to my house, but I still let everything go. My mission was no longer money…I had been writing for three years. I had to leave the house, because it was a distraction. I was also a community leader, so I had to go somewhere where I knew no one.
Do you remember the exact turning point for you when you truly turned your life around? Where were you, and what made you finally do it?
The main turning point was when I realized I kept reliving the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I didn’t have any money…but one day, I saw an infomercial at 2 or 3 in the morning, and it kept saying detox in 24 hours with a new treatment for only $3,000. That stuck in my head. I asked God to help me. A couple of days later, I get a credit card that I never applied for in the mail with a max limit of $3,000. Right away, I knew what this money would be for. I called, and they accepted me. They put me to sleep and they flushed me with a treatment…but I started to get a seizure, and I went into a coma and almost died…I was so weak that I could not leave the house for months. That’s where the transformation occurred. I detoxed while I was comatose.I said I could never, ever go through that again, and I turned more to God. I started going to NA meetings, and that saved my life.
What do you think made you go from woman to woman throughout your life?
I got sexually abused. That experience never left me. I thought that sex was a weapon. I thought it was normal to not show feelings, or emotions, and just do this kind of stuff. I think that was the beginning of that behavior where I just used women for instant gratification. I disregarded other people’s feelings. It was about me and the pleasure. The goal was always self-seeking. With women, I was always seeking my mother’s love… I was seeking the love that my mom started giving me as a baby, but it stopped [since the abuse], because I wasn’t present anymore. So I was looking for women to pick up that gap. I was always seeking that love and attention, but no one could be that equal, so it never felt right. So I kept running and seeking. No woman was able to fill that gap. When I learned that, it shattered me. I began to work on it. Things started to transform. I began to notice the patterns in my behavior and changing those things. My wife was the first woman I met when I started doing the things to heal in that area. Now, I can catch myself. It’s an ongoing process. I’ve addressed it, and can see it most times. This is the longest relationship I’ve been in – 20 years. I still want to run sometimes…It’s a struggle that hasn’t ended. I’m still that little kid. I have to be diligent recognizing these thoughts to leave. It becomes an internal fight – [like a part of me] always looking for an easier way. But it becomes just a thought and I have to decide not act out on it.
What do you wish you could tell your deceased parents now with all the knowledge you’ve gained now?
I’m looking at their picture on my desk, and they are both looking at me in the eye when I look at them. I’m so hurt by the pain I caused them. I failed to recognize that they truly loved me. Everytime I go to NY, I visit the cemetery – they were buried together. I never know how I am going to react. The pain still lives inside me. I still have those regrets…I’ve been on rainy days crying in the mud asking for forgiveness. I’m always asking for their forgiveness. It’s as if it was yesterday. What I tell them is, “I’m so sorry. I know what you gave me is the only thing you knew. This is what you knew to show me. You knew no better. You gave me what you had. What you learned from your parents.”
My mom is the biggest pain for me, because I saw it in her eyes – her pain and feeling powerless. She didn’t know what to do [about my father beating her and me, running away]. Everytime I went to see her, I saw she was suffering so much for me. I changed the softness in her. That’s the pain I live with…She never knew I was molested. So no one knew why I was changing. She was the one that loved me the most.
What do you wish you could tell your sons?
I’m sorry I didn’t meet up to their expectations of me. I’m sorry that my experiences in life blinded me to their needs. I’m really sorry and will have to live with that. A lot of their behaviors stemmed from that. With my oldest son, I was present, but I didn’t know how to be a parent. I thought buying things was a way to please him. I made a mistake. I became more his friend than his dad.
What is the most important piece of life advice that you would tell your younger self now at 61 years old?
Hector La Fosse in Kindergarten (Courtesy Hector La Fosse)
What I would tell that little boy inside that suffered so much is that you don’t have to suffer anymore. I, the adult, will take care of you even when you keep reliving those memories. I will be there to comfort and protect you from here on end, and that I love you. I love that little boy. I have his Kindergarten picture on my wall. It’s the only picture I have as a child. That’s the picture that has inspired me. That little boy is my lifelong mission – to bring him love and bring healing to his spirit. My mother didn’t have money to pay for that picture, and the teacher helped her…I found the picture as an adult, long after my parents died, and had it restored. He looks at me all the time.
What are your goals for the future?
I am now obsessed with sharing my message and sharing my hope. I just want to share my story with the world. I’m going to keep writing. I have ideas for my second book. It’s about some of the things I left out about illusions and fantasies, and where I go in my mind. The illusion [our mind creates as a defense mechanism to deal with pain] feels real, and how does one decipher that from reality? Like a self-help guide. I’m currently speaking at different venues, and book signing. This is what I’m meant to do. [This week] I’m going to speak to clinical social workers about behavioral changes of troubled teens.
I realize now that God was preparing me all along. He was always carrying me. He was preparing me for this moment. I went to school got licensed as an addiction counselor, because I was hungry to know more – to understand and figure myself out. I became an HIV and health counselor…and helped people approaching death to prepare them for end of life. While counseling, I grew attachments to the patients, mothers, wives, husbands – that burned me out and that’s when I moved to Florida.
You have to believe that there is a purpose in the good, and bad – in everything. Now I know my purpose. You have to be still to hear it. I meditate to do this. I only wish I could’ve got my purpose earlier, but that wasn’t the plan. I gotta do what I can with the time I have left to make a difference.
Luz Rodriguez was born to Puerto Rican parents who migrated to NYC in the 1950’s. When she was a young girl growing up in the Lower East Side of New York City, she remembers being taken aback while watching the movie, “Oliver,” and learning that there were children in the world without a home. It became ever present on her mind that once she grew up, she’d take care of all the orphans who were discarded or abandoned by their parents.
Rodriguez, now 63, didn’t become an owner of an orphanage as she once imagined. Instead, she uses her compassionate heart in another way. After decades of managing different aspects of a variety of non-profits, she earned an M.S. in non-profit leadership from Fordham University and began her own consulting company based in Sussex, NJ. Visionary Allies LLC helps founders of non-profits in all aspects of fundraising and grant writing. She is now a leadership coach and mentor to many social change agents around the world.
In addition to leading her own company, and grant writing for artists, Rodriguez is a regular faculty member and course developer at the Artist as Entrepreneur Institute in Broward County, and an adjunct professor at Alfred University, where she teaches a graduate course on program development and grantsmanship. She says she also is currently immersed in editing an anthology on “Birth Justice: Funding Equity in Maternal and Infant Health,” explaining the disparities of maternal and infant health among women in marginalized communities.
Today, Rodriguez will be honored for her many years of community service at the 2019 Latina 50 Plus Luncheon, (founded by Maria Aponte) which honors Latina elders who are pioneers in their respective fields. Here is a Q & A we recently had with her:
Who were your most influential role models growing up?
My role models were youth counselors who looked after kids on the streets and gave them (and me) a haven from our rough neighborhoods, by providing avenues to make art, learn about our culture, do community service and other fun stuff. By the time I was a teen, youth counselors were yet another example of how I could look after abandoned youth.
Out of all the non-profits you’ve played a role in developing, is there one that is closest to your heart?
As a parent of two biological sons, a stepson, two foster daughters, and eight grandchildren, it’s impossible to choose a favorite, among your children. The same goes for the several non-profits that I helped “birth,” sort of like a midwife. Likewise, there are non-profits that played a pivotal role in my own personal and professional development. So it’s impossible to choose one. I would be remiss however if I failed to acknowledge the non-profits that were key to my development in my youth, and beyond, namely CHARAS/El Bohio, Henry Street Settlement and Outward Bound.
What is a typical day for you like these days?
Well, for the past few days, I’ve been leading all-day workshops, facilitating “courageous conversations” on race equity for a prominently white environmental organization, where the 10 percent of people of color on staff have expressed experiences of being de-valued, invalidated, mistreated and more…I typically am coaching leaders of non-profits through challenging organizational management, strategic planning, or emerging founders of new non-profit start-ups helping them create sound strategies to achieve their visionary missions. I started my private consulting practice in 2017, Visionary Allies LLC, to serve social justice organizations and individuals with strategic supports, mentoring and coaching.
In my personal life, I am a wife of a husband who is living with Alzheimer’s and a co-parenting guardian of my young grandson with autism, after several years of caring for both of them full-time.
What gave you the idea to start Visionary Allies LLC, and what is the goal you want to achieve with it?
During the past 15 years or so, fundraising and capacity building as a non-profit specialist at the Foundation Center where I mentored hundreds of non-profit professionals and emerging social change agents with their visions of social change, I considered myself an “ally” to visionaries and they often referred to me as a “visionary” for the manner in which I helped them learn skills and gain knowledge of how to build their organizations. When caretaking for my family members took its toll, and I could no longer manage working 9 to 5 with Alzheimer’s and autism under one roof, I decided to take a leap of faith and work from home as a non-profit consultant. Thus Visionary Allies was born.
My goal for Visionary Allies is to build a network of collaborating, visionary consultants who would join forces and help leaders on the front lines of devastating inequities in marginalized communities of color, as well as help indigenous people who are still struggling to secure their universal human rights.
If you had one most important piece of life advice that you could tell your 20-year-old self with the wisdom you have now, what would it be?
I suppose it would be to value yourself more, and have faith in yourself to go it alone if those around you don’t see your brilliance and light. Too many precious years wasted looking for love and validation in all the wrong places and people, while all along I possessed within myself all I needed and longed for to live a fulfilled life.
“What advice would you give a writer starting out?” is the question I am always asked at the end of one of my talks to high school students. I have thought about this question long and hard trying to come up with an answer that will be truly helpful. There are so many possibilities. Do I talk about developing skills or do I talk about attitude, about the mind-frame needed to write something that matters, something capable of touching hearts? In the end, I tell the young person about the one thing that helped me the most: writing every day in my journal.
I started writing in my journal when I was a sophomore in high school and have been doing it almost every day since then. I am now 65 years old. I’m too scared to do the math and count how many entries this makes. In a closet in the basement of my house there is a stack of notebooks that goes almost to the ceiling. If I were to search for the first entry, I would probably find something very melodramatic about the unbearable sadness of unrequited love . . .and a few pages later, something with a lot of restless adjectives about a new possible love. These days the entries are more like silent prayer.
I became a writer in those journals. At some point in my mid-forties there came a facility, an ease of vocabulary and imagination that allowed me to create characters that were part of me, yet were not me, and stories that were connected to yet separate from my own life story. Looking back, I see the journal as the equivalent of the scales that the pianist plays or the free-throws that the athlete repeats, alone in his back yard, one after another. My journal is where the habit needed for every skill was formed. The journal is where thought turned into instinct. The words that drip out slowly at first eventually start to flow as if they needed time and attention to feel fully welcomed.
My journal gave me the gift of unconsciousness and of consciousness. Unconsciousness, because what I really want to say to that young person asking for advice is to forget about all those things she thinks writing will bring: fame, security, lots of people admiring you and loving you. Forget about the results, which more than anything else will paralyze you, or push you to write words that will not last, and instead focus on the effort. Love the trying, if you can. Offer your work to God, or life, and let them take care of whatever happens to your work after you finish. This is what I would like to say, but instead, I talk about writing in a journal every day because the practice of writing with the knowledge that no one will read what you write will, if you keep at it, eventually give you the freedom of knowing that what you write matters even if you are never famous, even if no one ever reads your words. This is the gift of unconsciousness that journal writing gives. The journal’s gift of consciousness is the awareness that develops inside of you. The awareness of feelings and thoughts and of the universal humanity that is reflected in you and of which you are a part. You explore sadness and joy and ugly things too, like envy and anger, and when it comes time to invent the characters in your novels, you can create their souls from the first-hand experience of your own soul.
This is what I want to say to the young person that wants to be a writer. But I can tell that she won’t like an answer that involves day after day of dedicated purpose. Start now, and maybe in 10 years, or 20, or 40, you will have something that the world finally recognizes as valuable. My dear young person doesn’t want an answer that requires years of working without anyone knowing he is working. She wants something that will happen before the junior-senior prom. Still, I go ahead and tell him about writing in a journal, about writing day after day to save my soul, sometimes my life. I tell him. Write in a journal every day. Write as if your soul and your life depended on it. The rest will take care of itself.
Francisco X. Stork is a former attorney and an award-winning author of seven teen fiction novels. He often uses themes of his own life as inspiration for his writing. “The Memory of Light” is inspired by Stork’s own experience with depression, and “Marcelo in the Real World” is about a teen boy labeled as having a developmental disorder. Read more about his personal journey here.
Francisco Stork’s youth was so compelling that it makes for a great novel.
He was born in Monterrey, Mexico in 1953 to a single mother from a middle class family in Tampico (a city on the Gulf of Mexico). She was sent to live in a convent in Monterrey, because her father did not want anyone to know that she was going to have a child out of wedlock.
Six years later, his mother married a retired man more twenty years her senior, named Charles Stork, and he adopted Francisco and gave him his last name. After some time, Charles decided to bring the family to the United States for more opportunities. The three of them moved to El Paso, Texas when Francisco was nine. When Francisco was 13, Charles died in an automobile accident, and Francisco and his mom moved to the public housing projects of El Paso. Because of Francisco’s phenomenal grades, he was able to obtain scholarships to attend prestigious schools such as, Harvard and later Columbia Law School, which would change the direction of his life.
It was not until his late 40’s, while working full-time as an attorney, that Stork wrote his first fiction novel for adults. By the time he was working on his second book, his two children were teenagers, so he started reaching back into the riveting memories of his youth and wrote them down. Today, he’s a young adult fiction author of seven novels. His last book, “Disappeared,” hit shelves this fall.
“I like writing about young people,” says the author, now 64, who lives in a town outside Wellesley, Mass. There are a lot of important decisions that are made at that age.”
For his first young adult book, “Behind the Eyes” (2006), he wanted to share his experiences growing up in El Paso and living in the projects.
“My kids had a very comfortable life,” says Stork. “I told the story of a young man in El Paso who gets in trouble with gangs. He was smart just like I was but was afraid to show he was smart.”
This plot parallels his own life.
“When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a writer, because I loved to read,” says Stork. “In high school, I started keeping a journal. I started enjoying being alone and writing things.”
He says writing about personal situations became a habit for him that continued with him through graduate school and has lasted his entire life.
“I was always guided by things to help me become a writer,” says Stork, adding that writing also provided a sense of self-acceptance for him. “You feel like your self-worth is validated.”
Although, Stork’s first love and passion has always been writing, when he was studying Latin American literature at Harvard, he later decided to pursue a career in real estate law.
“I didn’t see any relevance to some of the topics I was asked to write about it,” says Stork about his time at Harvard. “I thought maybe if I did something more practical to make a living, I could write on the side.”
However, little did he know how time consuming the law profession would be. It was 25 years later that he was finally able to write.
“Eventually, I found my way to the public sector, and the last 15 years I worked in affordable housing,” says Stork. “It was a job that was 9 to 5, and I had some time to write. It was challenging, but it was doing that job that I was able to write most of my books – almost all, except the last, were written when I was a lawyer.”
He say a lot of the stories were in him for a long time like little seeds, and then somehow they eventually blossomed.
“Usually the character comes first, and then I imagine a person growing inside of me,” explains Stork.
In his book, “The Memory of Light” (2016), he wrote about a teenage girl recovering from depression after a suicide attempt. This is also a topic close to the author’s heart.
“Depression started when I was a teenager, and it continued through my life,” says Stork. “Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder…In this book, I wanted to focus on the recovery aspect – that hasn’t been covered too much – the day to day to getting better. I poured into that book all of my experiences – it took me four years. It had to be hopeful so that if it fell into the hands of a young person with depression, it would turn them in the right direction.”
What helped him recover?
“I had my family, my wife and my kids – I really didn’t have an option to be out of commission – they depended on me,” says Stork. “A lot of what helped me was trying to understand that it was an illness. When you have thoughts of not being worthy – [I now understand] that’s from the illness.”
For Stork, representation is also very important.
“All my characters are Mexican-American – first or second generation,” he says. “Some are poor, some are smart, some have struggles – it’s really all over the spectrum. Hopefully I’m showing that these are human beings that happen to be Mexican – the race is not the focus, but an integral part…My hope is that the book becomes a space where young people see themselves reflected.”
His latest novel, “Disappeared,” came right after the one about the girl with depression. The idea for it came during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign.
“There were stories of Mexicans raping and killing young women, and I was sort of amazed at the number of people who kind of rallied behind this opposition to the undocumented immigrant, and the picture that was being painted of Mexicans,” says Stork. “I felt angry and wanted to do something with that anger… I wanted to show how complex the Mexican society was.”
So Stork decided to write about a fictional brother and sister in Juarez, and the factual topic of femicide happening all over Mexico and Latin America –thousands of women and girls have gone missing, or been killed, for more than two decades.
“As a writer, the most important thing is that you enable the reader to go into the world of the novel and become a part of it,” says Stork. “What would be great is that if the novel brings a greater understanding of the people that are sometimes hated. We don’t understand the world they come from. We don’t realize how technologically advanced Mexico is, for example…The disrespect of women that led to all these killings of women – these feelings are also in the U.S. – which we are seeing now.”
He’s already thinking that his next book is going to talk about the same brother and sister, and their life now in the U.S.
What would be the most important piece of life advice he’d like to give his younger self?
“I would tell my younger self to concentrate on the enjoyment of the work itself. Don’t worry about the rewards – which may come or not come – just do your best. Do something that you enjoy, and something that is useful for others. Whatever happens after that is up to God and is in His hands…”
