Joe Loya

So I got to there through my childhood, which even though in many ways, I was very fortunate in that I had a lot of love early on.

I was raised in some private schools.

My mom and dad got married when they were 16.

They were, my dad was an ex-gang member, now a Christian, Protestant Christian in East LA, which was all a sea of brown Catholics.

It's very odd to be those people.

But we lived in the East LA Montevideo housing projects.

We were very poor, but ambitious.

My dad was very ambitious.

My dad becomes a Christian, and he discovers that he loves the language.

He wants to study Greek.

He wants to study Hebrew.

So he becomes this little brown, academic, little nerdy guy who wants to learn the languages of the Bible so he can read in the original language.

So I'm raised in that environment.

My mother and him have been doing this since they were 12.

They love each other.

They're like these little brown mascots in the church, like the very predominantly middle class white church.

And my parents, they were young marrieds at 16 and 17.

They had kids.

Wow.

So when they would go to the young married department, it was all these middle class women and men who graduated from college.