The form varies. The decision is always the same.
## The Specific Texture of Pacoima
The neighborhood that produced Danny Trejo has a specific history that runs through multiple decades of Southern California development and demographic change. Pacoima — a neighborhood in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, within the incorporated boundaries of the City of Los Angeles — was one of the communities that received Black and Mexican-American families who were excluded from the postwar suburban expansion in the wider Valley and in the more affluent areas of the greater metropolitan area.
By the time Trejo was growing up there in the 1950s, the neighborhood had the character of a working-class Mexican-American community, with the institutions that such communities develop: Catholic churches, neighborhood schools, community organizations, the extended family networks that provided economic and social support in the absence of institutional resources. His uncle Gilbert, the Golden Gloves boxer who taught him to fight and also introduced him to drugs, was a figure who embodied the specific ambivalence of the neighborhood — someone whose skills and discipline had produced genuine athletic achievement, and whose connection to the drug and alcohol culture of the neighborhood had produced a different kind of consequence.
The boxing culture that Gilbert represented was real. The San Fernando Valley, like many working-class urban areas in postwar America, had a legitimate boxing infrastructure: gyms, trainers, community programs, and a pathway for young men with physical gifts and discipline to develop skills that were respected in the neighborhood and potentially valuable outside it. This was the context in which Trejo learned to fight, and the context in which the boxing ability that eventually got him cast in Runaway Train was developed.