Danny Trejo between being a prisoner and a star: a history of rebirth

When you’re a human being it’s easy to make a mistake. Sometimes our mistakes are bigger than others and, when it happens, we must learn from them. It could be seen as a punishment but it’s just the point from where we should start again and rebuild our life.

Here we have the story of Danny Trejo, that shows us how to put the broken pieces of our life together again.

Who is he?

Danny Trejo was born in 1944 in a really poor family, from the lower districts. Since he was 10 years old, he started with many criminal affairs: drugs, theft, violence. So, he knew the prison very soon, like the one of San Quentin, in California. In the prison, he was distinguished by his ability of fighting against the other prisoners, because no one could stay on his way. By the time, it became a strong and pivotal point, because he started to take part to many box challenges. He became a star of light weight, soon.

A central point was the one regarding his detoxification from every addiction he used to have, being sober since 1969. When he went out of prison, he started to work as cleaner man and addiction counsellor. One day one of his friends called him for meeting and chatting on a film set, taking the occasion to ask him to play the role of a boxer. The film director also asked him to play the role of the villain, since he had the suitable face for that part.

That’s how his cinematographic career started, going to Hollywood and playing in films like Machete, Heat, Con Air, and Breaking Bad.

His desire to restart takes him to manage his own restaurants in Los Angeles, like Trejo’s Tacos and Trejo’s Coffee and Donuts. But the most important thing he could do is the one to be next to the prisoners, going where they are still for chatting, and doing the same in the lower districts where he’s from.

At the end, Danny Trejo has never forgotten his origins and he demonstrates how to be a phoenix: to reborn from the ashes. And we should remember one of his most famous quotes: “You can go out of the hell, but you must be to crawl to do it.”

References:

• https://www.imdb.com/es-es/name/nm0001803/

• https://dannytrejo.com/