When Danny Trejo Negotiated Between Hollywood and Mexican Prison Gangs

Below is an excerpt from Danny Trejo’s upcoming memoir: Trejo: My Life of Crime, Hollywood, and Redemption, published by Atria Books. You can also read it in Spanish. He and his co-writer Donal Logue will host a virtual book signing event on June 29, which you can check out here.

In 1991, two Chicano scripts rolled through Hollywood that both centered on the formation and growth of La Eme, the biggest Mexican gang in the California prison system. Since I was a high-profile Chicano who'd done time, both movies reached out to me. They knew my involvement would give them credibility. One was called American Me, directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. The other was Blood In, Blood Out.

When I sat down to read American Me, I was excited. Olmos was just coming off an Oscar-nominated performance in Stand and Deliver, and now he was making a movie about a world I knew intimately. But my initial excitement quickly changed to dismay. Ten pages in, I knew there were going to be problems. In the opening scene, the mother of Montoyo Santana, the character Edward James Olmos plays in the film, is raped by sailors the night of the Zoot Suit Riots, leaving her unsure of who Montoya’s real father is. That was straight-up untrue. I knew it was untrue because Olmos’s character was based on a real guy in the Mexican Mafia named Rodolfo Cadena (aka Cheyenne).

That wasn’t the only problem. About twenty pages later came a shocking scene in which something violent happens to Santana in juvenile hall. Because of what happened later, I won’t mention what it was. The whole thing was a fire started in falsehoods I don’t want to add fuel to. [Ed. note: the character Montoya Santana is sexually assaulted in prison.] The truth is Cheyenne had never been abused in that way and the fact that (in the script) he immediately got revenge on his attacker didn’t matter. I know this sounds harsh, but no person who'd ever been violated in that way could ever rise to the top of a prison gang. They could be killers and bad motherfuckers, but they'd never run a gang. It wouldn’t happen. More importantly, it didn’t happen.

Another big concern I had was that any movie about the Mexican Mafia would have to be okayed by the OGs in prison. Before I signed on to either project, I was definitely going to have to find out what the shot-callers thought about it.

And, finally, somewhere before page thirty in the American Me script, I saw that the writers called the gang La Eme. This is the actual name of the Mexican Mafia, and I had a feeling using it would be a big no-no for Joe Morgan and some of the La Eme bigwigs I'd known since my days in juvie and San Quentin.

I knew just how serious and deadly La Eme was. I'd come up with the

guys, but my uncle Gilbert was the one who really knew the older shot-callers. I was lucky; because Gilbert was so respected in the pen, I got that level of respect passed on to me. When I got to prison, Gilbert cautioned me about joining the Mafia. He said that was a contract for life and we shouldn't have any part of it, so I stayed away, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t friends

with the guys. Gilbert was good friends with all of them, especially Joe “Peg Leg” Morgan, the current head of the Mexican Mafia.