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Part I: Diary 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Freedom Writers Diary, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Ethnicity, and Tolerance
Education and Healing
Family and Home
Violence, War, and Death
Summary
Analysis
This student has also just recently attended a friend’s funeral. This event makes her/him realize that s/he needs to recruit more “soldiers” into the gang. A good recruit, s/he explains, should be willing to sacrifice their life to defend the barrio. S/he calls this kind of life a wild, crazy life in which all gang members are bound to kill or get killed, since leaving the gang is not an option.
Once again, this student uses the metaphor of war to describe life in a gang. People are not seen as individuals but as soldiers fighting for their side in a larger, ill-defined conflict.
Themes
The student compares “jumping” (i.e., gang recruitment) to baptism: the act of giving one’s life to receive a new one. All new members, regardless of gender, receive a violent beating to prove that they are not weak and can be part of the gang. The student recalls being “jumped” and ending up in the hospital for three weeks. S/he concludes that this pain, along with all the life-or-death risks that one takes as part of a gang, is undoubtedly worth it.
Gang members must learn not only to inflict harm, but also to tolerate harm upon themselves. This inevitably normalizes violence, making it an ordinary part of life and of growing up. Pain and violence are seen as a means to an end, but this end remains vague and undefined—suggesting that perhaps there is no real goal besides the propagation of violence itself.
Themes
