<P> In addition to prison inmates and staff and artist Hernandez, screenwriter and barrio poet Jimmy Santiago Baca cameos as a prison inmate and member of the La Onda council . </P> <P> The film was initially entitled Blood in Blood Out but was retitled Bound by Honor before the film's release . Blood in blood out refers to the initiation ritual of having to kill someone to enter a gang and, on the reverse end, not being able to leave the gang unless killed . This is a common initiation in many gangs, including prison gangs, and is also the motto of La Onda in the film . Hollywood Pictures insisted on the name change as the studio felt that it would incite violence in East Los Angeles . In addition, executives at Hollywood Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney, were cautious about the potential effect the film would have following the 1992 LA Riots and the attribution given to Boyz N the Hood as a partial cause / inspiration of the riots . Director Taylor Hackford has stated that he was very unhappy with this decision as the film's message was the exact opposite of the one that the studio feared would be transmitted . </P> <P> The film received mixed reviews from critics . It holds a 55% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 11 reviews . On IMDb it holds an 8 / 10 . The TV Guide review stated "similarity to Edward James Olmos' American Me, in which a tormented drug dealer travels the same route through prison society as Miklo . The principal difference between the two films is that Bound By Honor is by far the glossier effort, relentlessly picturesque in the seamlessly anesthetized manner of mainstream Hollywood films ." Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum for the Chicago Reader wrote that this "ugly three - hour snoozefest is apparently supposed to do for East Los Angeles Chicanos what the Godfather movies did for New York mafiosi ..." Roger Ebert wrote "The East Los Angeles milieu and some of the characters seem familiar, because some of the same ground was covered by American Me...Bound by Honor covers similar material in a less passionate and finally less meaningful way ." Roger Ebert gave the film 2 stars out of 4 . A critic from Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman gave Bound By Honor a B -, falling on the high end of the movie spectrum . He states "Bound By Honor comes fully alive when it moves behind bars . There's an exploitative thrill built into the genre ..." This film critic was definitely more interested in the second half of the movie once Miklo was in jail running La Onda . Vincent Canby from the New York Times wrote "The film is big and long, passionate and flat . It's full of heroic and tragic incident, but skimpy about the details of quotidian lives ." Giving a very detailed review on the plot of the story he later exalts some of the characters in the movie one in particular, Enrique Castillo . Although Vincent Canby does not give an official rating for the film, he concludes "Though it's not the epic it means to be, it is not a failure ." </P>

Is american me and blood in blood out the same