"Payback: The Cost Of Being a Gangster," by Erik Soto with Williams Wallis, was about a boy who was a gangster who was raised in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. This book talks about his life from when he was younger to the present where his life is now as he is disabled. Erik is the child of immigrants; both his mother and father came from El Salvador as they fled from the terror in their homeland. His parents immigrated to the United States so that he can have a better life for their child than they had when they were younger. Like his parents, Erik is a proud Latino. Although Erik had so many great opportunities to be someone important in life, the way his parents had hoped, he had actually made it harder for them. Erik wrote this book to honor his parents, but most importantly he wrote it to help young people realize that it better to stay out of the violence and troubles that the gang life would bring them. Instead he wants the kids to stay in school, study hard, and stay away from crimes. Sooner in Erik’s life his father passes away. He was He knew as a young kid it was easier for him to get involved in the gang life as that life brought easy money and personal power. According to Erik, “Boyle Heights was the prison of my youth and the battlefield of my adolescence.” Now he refers to Boyle Heights as a “gang wasteland”. The neighborhood Erik lived at the time was just a gang- infested neighborhood, as the average citizen is a prisoner at night. There were no Boy Scout troops, sports teams, camping grounds, or parents that spend time with their children, just pure gangsters that looked for trouble. Boyle Heights was a place for immigrants, a place where poverty was at every corner. Erik’s parents didn’t spend as much quality time with him, as they never attended a football game or go to any of his school events such as other kids parent would go. Erik’s father was a workaholic who always had two jobs and the only time Erik would be able to spend time with his father was when they were doing chores such as cutting the grass or stomping on recycled cans in the driveway beside their house. His parents felt that education was more important than religion. According to Erik “ The gang life lingers, omnipresent, outside the schoolroom- seeming to offer gratifying excitement, a sense of power and control, and easy money- it’s hard for kids who have little or nothing to resist.” Erik was always surrounded by death, either hearing about it at school or seeing it in the streets. He even describes the one time him and his father went to take his mother to the airport, and as they were pulling away from their house and on Dacotah a guy comes out of the projects running fast, beside him came another guy shooting at him with a nine millimeter handgun. As his father tried to get them to safety he put the car in reverse and backed up the hill as fast as he