by Jon Kalish

Guzman as Ramon Gaviota, maintenance man at the Snug Harbor Motel, in “John from Cincinnati” Do you Guzman NY?

ack in 1993, Luis Guzman portrayed an East Harlem gangster named Pachanga in Brian De Palma’s film "Carlito’s Way." It was his breakthrough performance. But in real life it is way downtown that the veteran character actor spent his formative years. As visitors to the 51 year-old movie star’s MySpace page are informed, Loisaida is his hometown. And for those of you with a limited background in Nuyorican history, the term Loisaida is a Latino pronunciation of the Lower East Side. It was coined in the early 1970s by two Puerto Rican activists Chino Garcia and Bimbo Rivas, and refers to the area between the East Village and the Manhattan Bridge.

Garcia and Rivas, it turns out, played an important role in Guzman’s life.

"Chino Garcia and Bimbo Rivas were two people I looked up to," Guzman says during an interview in his modestly furnished Seward Park Co-op apartment. "They were two of my biggest mentors and in this neighborhood I’ve had many a mentor."

Garcia was a founder of the community organization Charas, which ran a community center in the East Village called El Bohio. Rivas, who died in 1992, was a poet and actor who started El Teatro Ambulante, a street theater group. Guzman got involved.

Guzman remembers growing up on the Lower East Side as a "pretty rebellious" and politically active young man. He grew up in Masaryk Towers, a Mitchell Lama housing project on Columbia Street, and attended Seward Park High School, where he performed in the musical "Bye, Bye, Birdie." He has fond memories of playing handball in local parks and hanging out at the Pitt Street Pool.

But Guzman also remembers when Alphabet City streets were swarming with drug dealers and junkies in the 1970’s and 80’s.

"We had a huge heroin and cocaine problem here back in the day. It was not a good place to be," he says. "We battled the drug dealers, the drug lords down here, the city, the bureaucracy."

Guzman found himself dodging bullets on a couple of occasions.

"It was unavoidable," he says of the gunfire. "You [would be] walking down the street, you walk into a corner and you hear bop-ba and you come around the corner and there’s someone there with a bullet hole in their head. Somebody got blown away."

"When I was a teenager growing up, there were certain parts of the neighborhood that looked like they was bombed out, man. There were landlords that were burning their buildings at that time so they could collect the insurance on them and that was while there were families living in [the buildings]. We’d go in and try and organize the people. We tried to get the city to fix up the buildings."

One man who remembers Guzman as a young man in his early 20’s is Dan Chodorkoff, a retired professor at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. In the mid-1970’s Chodorkoff was dividing his time between the Lower East Side and the Green Mountain State. He played a role in bringing Puerto Rican activists from Loisaida up to Goddard College in Vermont, where the institute was housed. Chodorkoff says he first brought Guzman up to Vermont in 1975 or ‘76.

"He always had an incredible spirit of optimism and energy," recalls Chordorkoff, who is now retired. "We used to joke that Luis should have his own talk show because he had such an expansive personality."

That introduction to Vermont 30 years ago apparently made an impression on Guzman, who now divides his time between his apartment in the Grand Street Co-ops, where he has lived for 15 years, and his home in Vermont.

"It was a struggle to get in here but it was worth the wait," he told the Grand Street News. "I dig livin’ here because it keeps me in the neighborhood and it’s a good place to live, you know."

Asked how much time he spends down in the city, Guzman responds: "I’m not going to tell you that because then someone’s gonna come and raid my apartment!"

Since his big break in 1993, he has starred in close to 100 productions, including Sidney Lumet’s "Guilty as Sin", "Family Business" and "Q & A," Brian De Palma’s "Snake Eyes" and "Carlito’s Way," Paul Thomas Anderson’s "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights," and Steven Soderbergh’s "Traffic," "The Limey" (for which he received and Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor), and "Out of Sight." His numerous TV appearances included the shows "NYPD Blue," "Law and Order," "Oz," and, most recently, HBO’s "John from Cincinnati."

Guzman has actually had three previous homes in Vermont before landing in an area of the state known as the Northeast Kingdom. On each move he relocated closer to the Canadian border. "I’m not moving no further north, man. This is it."

Initially, this city slicker wouldn’t go out at night in Vermont because he was afraid a mosquito would "suck out" all his blood. But he has since adjusted to rural living. He lives with his wife, their five kids and a couple of horses on a huge spread. When asked how much land he has in Vermont, Guzman replies: "I’m not going to tell you how much, but let’s just say it’s a lot."