Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz

Just finished reading Mona Ruiz’s autobiography, Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz.  Imagine growing up in an immigrant family in California, coming from Mexico and growing up in the inner city with not a great deal of means and certainly being challenged to focus on good and instead being pulled into gangs, drugs, violence, and sex.  This is the story of Mona Ruiz, whose father dreams of his daughter being a cop, yet Mona gets brought into a local gang (F-Troop).  Mona never falls into the drug side of the gang, but is present for the booze, the sex, and the violence.  In high school, she never did the work, but is given an opportunity to work part-time at the police station doing clerical work.  She learns that she is 3 credits shy of graduation and isn’t able to receive her high school diploma.  Over the next few years she is advised by a few of the long time cops who take her under her wing.  They advise her of taking the GED, which she never knew about.  She completes it and is interested in moving up the ladder at the police station, unfortunately she falls in love with a young man who is in a gang and a drug user, Frank Ruiz.  She decides to tattoo his name in her arm, which will serve as a constant reminder throughout her career of the two lives that Mona bridges.  Frank Ruiz gets Mona pregnant and also abuses her over the next five years.  His violent temper shows marks on her body and breaks her spirit.  Mona hits the final breaking point when she is beaten in public at a family reunion and she decides to finally enter the woman’s shelter program.  Mona faces more challenges throughout her life, but has a few breaks when the two officers who tried to mentor her serve in the role again when she escapes from Frank’s brutality.  Mona’s story sees her finally escape the drugs and abusive lifestyle and join in the academy to finally become a police officer.  She succeeds but is always pulled when she is assigned to do undercover work.  She is also able to balance being a mother of three, Frank’s children, and also live the life of a dedicated officer.  What a nice story written by a woman who should have never made it, but yet she did.  Maybe Pressfield’s book about resistance can be applied here.  A very nice uplifting story that captures those who live without academic role models and challenged to join their “peers.”  Learn a great deal about gang life in the 1970s/80s and how it evolved to what it is today.  A quick read and nice to see the author succeed with a book of this nature.