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If you peer into the heart of a Bad Girl, you'll often find a Sad Story. So it is with "Sonia Rodriguez," the pseudonym of the woman who became Lady Q: the Queen of the Chicago Latin Kings in the 1980s. Reymundo Sanchez (author of "My Bloody Life," a memoir of his own life in the Kings) has transcribed Sonia's story with sensitivity and a gritty, unflinching eye.
It would be very difficult to make Lady Q's life into a movie, because it doesn't fit the hopeful Hollywood formula. I read this book expecting the formula--expecting that, after enough drug-and-poverty-fueled purgatory, Lady Q would purge herself of the pain of her past, and step into a New Life as a Transformed Woman.
But Lady Q never turns that corner. She has plenty of (what we'd melodramatically dub) wake-up calls, but she never really wakes up. At the close of the book, the Iron Law of Lady Q's life still holds: "Just when she was convinced that the bullshit phase of her life was over," Sanchez writes, "Sonia was pushed back into its core" (page 255).
Even her otherwise patient scribe, Reymundo Sanchez, grows frustrated with his subject: "I scolded her on several occasions about her dependency on others, [but] she failed to understand that people...don't want to be dealing with a forty-year old woman who refuses to get her shit together" (pp. 267-268). Sanchez describes trying, repeatedly, to point out Sonia's damaging patterns of living to her--and the effects these patterns were having on her children. But the result was just word-service: "Sonia agreed and promised, promised and agreed, but did nothing" (p. 268).
And yet, I personally find it impossible to judge Lady Q too harshly. I see a girl who tried, over and over again, to live constructively, only to have her nascent hopes dashed by larger forces. Sonia tried to be a good girl--but abusive parents beat her for every imagined flaw (pp. 15-19). She tried to be an innocent girl--but her uncle and cousin abusively stole that innocence from her (pp. 7-14). She tried to be a talented girl, choreographing for the Richmond Street Dancers--but the gangs chased her off the scene (pp. 29-34). She tried to be a loving woman--but her men left her body battered and her heart abandoned. And on and on it goes. And over and over again, I found myself asking one question: "With all of Sonia's human gifts--her magnetic personality, her sparkling charisma, her honesty, her loyal heart--what could she have become if only Life had dealt her a few fair cards?"
It would be very difficult to make Lady Q's life into a movie, because it doesn't fit the hopeful Hollywood formula. I read this book expecting the formula--expecting that, after enough drug-and-poverty-fueled purgatory, Lady Q would purge herself of the pain of her past, and step into a New Life as a Transformed Woman.
But Lady Q never turns that corner. She has plenty of (what we'd melodramatically dub) wake-up calls, but she never really wakes up. At the close of the book, the Iron Law of Lady Q's life still holds: "Just when she was convinced that the bullshit phase of her life was over," Sanchez writes, "Sonia was pushed back into its core" (page 255).
Even her otherwise patient scribe, Reymundo Sanchez, grows frustrated with his subject: "I scolded her on several occasions about her dependency on others, [but] she failed to understand that people...don't want to be dealing with a forty-year old woman who refuses to get her shit together" (pp. 267-268). Sanchez describes trying, repeatedly, to point out Sonia's damaging patterns of living to her--and the effects these patterns were having on her children. But the result was just word-service: "Sonia agreed and promised, promised and agreed, but did nothing" (p. 268).
And yet, I personally find it impossible to judge Lady Q too harshly. I see a girl who tried, over and over again, to live constructively, only to have her nascent hopes dashed by larger forces. Sonia tried to be a good girl--but abusive parents beat her for every imagined flaw (pp. 15-19). She tried to be an innocent girl--but her uncle and cousin abusively stole that innocence from her (pp. 7-14). She tried to be a talented girl, choreographing for the Richmond Street Dancers--but the gangs chased her off the scene (pp. 29-34). She tried to be a loving woman--but her men left her body battered and her heart abandoned. And on and on it goes. And over and over again, I found myself asking one question: "With all of Sonia's human gifts--her magnetic personality, her sparkling charisma, her honesty, her loyal heart--what could she have become if only Life had dealt her a few fair cards?"
