I first met Mario Lundes in 2017, when his daughter, Alexa, was 4 months old. As we talked in Alexa’s room, surrounded by pink decorations and baby gear, Lundes reflected on his childhood home.
“It was not like this, quiet and peaceful,” he said. “There were always people coming in and out. There would always be alcohol, fights.”
Lundes was about 7 when his dad was sent to prison, and his mom was left to raise him and his siblings in a cold garage in South Los Angeles.
“I can say we both missed out,” he said of his father. “Like, he missed out on us, and we missed out on him.”
Looking back on his youth, Lundes said, “My parents didn’t give me that attention, or that love, you know what I mean? All that, I found in the streets, by my older homeboys.”
He was about 13, he remembers, when he was jumped into his gang, and the older guys took him under their wing, giving him clothes and shoes. “They showed me that love, that respect, I needed.” When he was hanging out with them, he felt happy. He’d finally found his family.
Lundes told me all that eight years ago. We reconnected this spring and Lundes reflected again on his difficult past and remarkable transformation.
He was gangbanging in junior high and “thought I was somebody big because my friends would protect me,” he said. Sometimes the older gang members would “use the young homies to do their work.” It was clear what was expected of him. “You run into the enemy, and you fight,” he said.
With the fighting, the weapons and the robberies came incarceration. Lundes went from juvenile camp to juvenile camp and then to the California Youth Authority, the ineffective and poorly run state system that has since been shut down.
The juvenile prisons only worsened his situation and reinforced his loyalty to gang life.
Lundes spent years in correctional facilities, released only to be picked up on the streets again. “Back then I knew I was probably going to do life in prison, or I was not going to make it to this age,” he told me recently.
With each release from prison Lundes would find out that more of his friends had been killed or sent back to prison. Feeling helpless and lonely, he started drinking heavily.
One day, he woke up in a hospital bed with a tube shoved down his throat. He had consumed so much alcohol that it had put him in a coma for days. He felt as though everyone had given up on him and imagined what the few people who visited him were thinking: “If you want to die, go ahead. You know, we’re tired of you. You know, you don’t change. You’re never going to change.”
Lundes was scared and had some time to think about his life. He decided to get help. He went to Homeboy Industries, the famous program founded by Father Gregory Boyle to help former gang members turn their lives around. Something clicked in the group therapy sessions. When he heard the older people emotionally retelling their stories, sometimes in tears, about how they had wasted their lives, he knew he had to change. And so began his long journey of recovery and self-love.
“I had to figure life out. It was hard. All the trauma, all the drama, all the violence, all the negativity, and then all the years being incarcerated.” Lundes stressed the importance of therapy and mental health. “It doesn’t mean you’re crazy. It just connects your thoughts, from childhood to now.”
Then a beautiful gift was given to him and suddenly he had a real sense of purpose.
As he told me in 2017, “I had my little girl, and I got married. All that trust, I built it, little by little with my family members,” he said. “I’m grateful to be alive. I made some really bad decisions in my past. But it’s never too late. I do regret a lot of the stuff I did. I have to live with that.”
As Alexa grew, his life as a gangster slipped further into the past. I chatted with him again in 2023, and he seemed to have some clarity about his journey through life, the love he lacked as a child and the importance of being a good father.
“I’m grateful to feel this kind of love, the unconditional father love for my daughter,” he said then. “Being sober and being an active father, a protector to my princess, I’m so glad and blessed. Alexa Sky Lundes is 6 years old now and I enjoy every minute that I spend with her. It changed my whole life around. I didn’t have my dad around because of the bad choices that he made in his life, and I didn’t want that for my daughter.”
I recently visited Lundes, his wife, Mirna, and Alexa in their home in South Los Angeles. In the early morning before school, he ironed Alexa’s school clothes on an L.A. Dodgers towel spread on the floor in her bedroom, surrounded by pink toys and a poster of Selena.
Alexa, now almost 8, was bubbling with energy as she bounced from room to room, her braids swinging through the air. She had a giant smile, a contagious laugh and an attitude like she could get away with anything.
On the drive to school, Lundes blasted her favorite musician, Kendrick Lamar, as Alexa sang every word by memory. When we arrived at the school, he walked her to the entrance, kissed her, and then watched until she entered the classroom.
Lundes later went over to his parent’s house, also in South Los Angeles, where Alexa stayed in the hours between the end of school and the end of Lundes’ day at Homeboy Industries, where he is an intake coordinator and performs other duties.
Her grandma cooked spaghetti and brought Alexa a cup of arroz con leche. Her grandpa, a friendly old man who was paroled decades ago, reached out to greet me, his whole body shaking from Parkinson’s. Lundes still has bitter memories of his childhood, but he’s also found a kind of peace with his folks, and has forgiven them for not being there for him when he was a boy.
They sat on the sofa watching an old Mexican movie as Alexa pounced on her father’s shoulders, showed him her schoolwork, and dragged him out into the yard to play tag. When she asked to walk around the block with him, Lundes froze. He knew it wasn’t safe to walk all around the neighborhood with his tattoos. They walked a bit in a secluded alley, then went inside.
“She doesn’t see all this,” he said, pointing to his face covered in tattoos. “She sees Mario, the dad that I am to her.”
I asked him what being a father meant to him. Lundes, now 46, had two other kids before Alexa. He said that he loved them so much, but concedes he was never there for them. He was too busy or in jail. He deeply regrets that. He resolved that things would be different with Alexa.
“It’s such an amazing feeling, being a dad, to show her what’s right from wrong. You know, taking her to school, going to her parent conferences. You know, when she’s having a bad day, I talk to her.” He hoped that in the future, she will say, “My dad was a really good person. I mean, no matter that he had tattoos, he had a good heart.”
Then he continued, “I just want her to be a good mom later on. And whatever I gave for her, to give to her kids. And that way, the chain could go on and on.”
Kashinsky is a special correspondent.
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