The Re-Education of a Xicanindio: Raul Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation

The Re-education ofaXicanindio:Raul 'Salinas and the Poeticsof Pinto Transforrriation

Louis MendozaThe University of Texas at San Antonio

Prison was nota place for defeat, itwas a place for study, for preparation. Fidel Castro wrote while in prison: 'What a tremendous schoolthis prison is! Here I have rounded out my view of the world anddetermined the meaning of my life. I don't know if it will be long or

.short, fruitful or in vain, but my dedication to sacrifice and strugglehas been reaffirmed.

-.Assata Shakur, Hauling up the Morning, 5

.un proces() de transformaci6n mental; see it occurring, feel itsurging within, it's at once amazing, extremely difficult to grasp,painful and frightening!!!_.Raul Salin:;,rs, Un Trip Through the MindJaily Otras Excursions, 9

When art becomes more than a 'secure' prison pastime. When itbecomes a threat to the lie [that the U.S. has no political prisoners], itwill be suppressed.

-Tim Blunk, Hauling up the Morning, xxi

Introduction

In the second edition of his groundbreaking study ofprison literature, H. Bruce Franklin states that JackAbbott's release and reimprisonment. following the publication of his collection of lettersto Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast" effectively captured

MELUS, Volume 28. Number I (Spring 2003)

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readers' fascination regarding the penitentiary's impact on convicts. Franklin summarizes Abbott's thesis by asserting that "ourpenal institutions .f()rce each prisoner to become either a broken,cringing animal, fawning before all authority, or a resister, clingingto human dignity through defiance and rebellion" (xiii).. Thephysical, psychological, emotional, racial, and sexual violence anddegradation that prisoners suffer and which is. promoted by theprison authorities as a means of control is central to much prisonliterature and offers us gruesome insight into the manipulation andmachinations of power. When we consider the brutal and racistnature of a criminal justice system that systematically creates aprison population in which nonwhites are disproportionatelyrepresented, we need go no further in arguing for the importance ofcritiquing, delegitimating, and dismantling this system. This is noeasy task, however, given the enormouS amount of economic andpolitical capital invested in the world's largest prison industrial.complex.

Prisoner rights activists within and outside the walls confront aconservative popular discourse that pathologizes prisoners andemphasizes the punitive dimensions of imprisonment over itsreformative potential. In contrast to this denigrating and oftendehumanizing discourse, in leftist studies of prison literature it iscommon parlance to refer to the prison experience as an educational one, as is evidenced by the epigraph from Assata Shakur.The analogy made between incarceration and education hinges I

upon the notion that, in isolation from the larger social world, ,many prisoners develop, discover, or refine their political consciousness. In contrast to the perceived disconnection of theuniversity ivory tower from society, where the primary function ofeducation is to reproduce the elite managerial class that willpreserve the status quo, the politics of knowledge in prisons often·functions to produce counter-hegemonic intellectuals. Ironically,this re-education about the social conditions that lead to incarceration is learned under brutal conditions in which the worst socialforces and prejudices are intensified. This process of conscientizacion that many prisoners undergo, a process that precipitates anew way of seeing and acting in the world, is the focus of thisessay.

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I will pay particular attention to one convict's transformationfrom "social criminal" to political activist, a transformation thateventually led to his punitive transfer to the control unit (aka"HUnit") of Marion, Illinois federal prison along with other prisonactivist leaders from minority· communities in the US as well asPuerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. According to an informationalpamphlet produced by the. national committee to support· theMarion Brothers, Marion became the primary political prison inthe· US after the closing ofAlcatraz. Speaking of the target population of the prison, the pamphlet notes:

There are two groups of political prisoners at Marion: those who wereactive in freedom struggles on the outside and were sent to prison tostop their work and isolate them from friends and community supporters; and those who have been active in fighting for prisoners'rights and were sent to Marion to be broken by the behavior controlprogram. Their sentences have been lengthened, good time takenaway and paroles illegally denied. ("Stop the Deaths" 3)

Franklin has noted that there are two overlapping groups of prisonauthors: "the political activist thrust into prison, and the commoncrimi~al thrust into political activism. The distinction betweenthese two groups tends to dissolve as the definition of crime, fromboth sides of the law, becomes increasingly political" (242).

Just as the civil rights movement and third world national liberation struggles transformed the political consciousness of manymembers of oppressed groups, the US prison rebellion years I werea particularly salient period for the transformation of prisonerconsciousness. Concurrent with the US civil rights movement andnational liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,theextensive political activity within US prisons produced numerous ideologues, activists, and artists behind the walls. During thistime a sizeable body of artistic and literary production exploringthe social, political, and economic causes of incarceration beganemerging from within the penal system. With the exception of .Franklin's sustained focus on African American prison literature,this work has received scant attention by literary scholars.2

As many activists in the anti-war and civil rights movementsbegan to face the threat of counter-intelligence programs and otherforms of, government repression, convicts involved in prison

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reform work were also labeled as "dangerous" and subsequentlymarked for special repressive measures, including punitive transfers to specially designed behavior modification units. Austin poetand activist Raul- Salinas was a prisoner rights activist whosepolitical and literary development contributed to his eventualrelease. Since 1968 Salinas' work has garnered him internationalrecognition as a spokesperson for a diversity of political causes,ranging from prisoner rights to national liberation struggles. Hefirst received wide recognition for his literary work jn 1969 whenhe was a prisoner in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Since then Salinas has published two collections ofpoetry: Un Trip thru the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions, (1980,1999) and East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi pueblo (1995),and his work has also been widely anthologized. In 1994 Salinas'personal archives (1955- 1994) were obtained by Stanford Univer-sity.3 . '

. From 1957 to 1972 Salinas spent approximately twelve years inprison in Soledad State Prison (California), Huntsville State Prison(Texas), Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary (Kansas), and MarionFederal Penitentiary (Illinois). In the same manner as there is aclear relationship to the conditions of Salinas' pre-prison experience and his eventual incarceration, there is ,also a direct linkbetween his prison experience and his development as a writerresponding to his environment. His transformation led him initiallyto engage his fellow convicts, and eventually prison authorities andpolitical activists in the outside world.

Upon reading Salinas' ouevre it becomes clear that his writingfunctioned as a tool of resistance against psychological and physical containment. More importantly, in describing his prisonexperience, Salinas also often refers to it as an educational one,with each move to another institution being seen as a different andprogressively more difficult degree program. The radical transfor-. .

mation that many prisoners undergo is often lost in popular ac-counts of the prison experience. For instance, contemporaryrepresentations,of prisoners in literature and film are almost alwaysrendered reductively by the Hollywood film industry. In popularfilms of the Chicano prison experience, such as American Me andBound by HonQr, the representation of prison resistance is alwayslocated in continuing forms of criminality (drugs, sex, violence,

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organized crime, etc.) and a search for identity often framed as astruggle for Qr against racial supremacy. Lost in these sensationalized representations are the kinds of consciousness-raising andinter- and intra-group alliances made inside and outside of theprison, particularly. during the period of Salinas' incarceration.Originally a prisoner of social crimes (marijuana vi<;>lations),Salinas' prison experience exemplifies the dialectical relationshipbetween prisoners and the prison industrial complex. His 1972relocation from Leavenworth to Marion clearly marks prisonauthorities' recognition of his transformation from a socialprisonerto a political prisoner; he was marked for "behavior modification"due to his prolific activity on behalf of the legal and human rightsof fellow convicts.4

Both in the context from which it emerged and now, Salinas'writings need to be seen as interventions. Prisons are both a site ofcontainment for social and class antagonisms as well as a cruciblefor identity formation and cultural production, thus efforts todisrupt 'the machinations of control are important for gaininginsight into the exercise of power and the resistance to it. Withinthe conditions of bondage and censorship, prisoners of color, ~avealways found ways to retain culturally specific means of expression, be it in visual, musical, or literary arts.5 More importantly,during the prison rebellion years, prison activists began to forge aradical cultural praxis that linked issues of identity with notions ofpower and justice, and thus cultural practices and "cultural studies,,6 became vehicles for ,education and mobilization. Emerging ina period of heightened social consciousness, Salinas' work must beseen alongside the work of other Chicanos like Ricardo Sanchez,Luis Talamantez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Judy Lucero, as wellas important figures from the black community like EtheridgeKnight, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Eldridge

'. Cleaver, and Assata Shakur among others. In fact, the title poem ofSalinas' first collection, was originally dedicated to EldridgeCleaver, an honor that Salinas withdrew when Cleaver retreatedfrom his political commitments. Salinas' poetry, journalism,letters, and political archives reflect a diligent, protracted yetdeliberate process of conscientizaci6n, a feature that underminesthe framework ofpathology that stamps the popular representationof prisoners.

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From Pachuco to Pinto: The Artist as a YoungMan

Salinas was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1934 and raised inEastAustin, where he attended Catholic primary school and publichigh school through the eleventh grade. In interviews he has notedthat he was a good student; capable of mastering his lessons, hewas also a young rebel who rejected strict rules and behavioralguidelines. His father left his family when he was very young, andhe credits his grandmother and mother with teaching him Spanishand nurturing a love of literature in him. During his childhood thecity of Austin's racial segregationist policies were being codifiedand enforced, assuring that East Austin would be comprisedexclusively of ethnic minorities. The Spanish language names· of.Austin's downtown streets bear testimony to an area that was oncepredominantly Mexican· until residents were forced· to move to aless desirable hilly area east of the central business zone. The'building of Interstate 35 in the 60s, a highway that functions as thebarrier hetweendowntown and the Eastside, only concretized adividing line. that was already in existence.

It is within the barrios of this purposely marginalized community, .comprised of several African American and Mexicanneighborhoods, that Salinas first learned his "place" in society~

Though there were tensions between these two. communities attimes, there was also overlap, cultural exchange, and camaraderiebetween blacks and Chicanos. As an adolescent Salinas was drawnto the many famous night clubs in East Austin's black communitywhere he thrived on the live rhythm and jazz and blues playedthere. This music, along with the Mexican corrido,' conjunto, andorquesta traditions, was an important cultural and artistic influencein his life, on~ that would eventually manifest itself in his music(he played saxophone) and poetry. .

When Salinas quit school at age seventeen, unable to see itsrelevance to his future, he went to northern California and pickedfruit for several years. It is. importarit to note tljlat Salinas "came ofage" in 1952, the same year that John Clellon Holmes published inThe New York Times"This is the Beat Generation," oneofthe first

.articles to identify this nascent literary movement. Though situated. . . .

in the southwest~ Salinas identified with the rejection of cultural

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and social conventions promoted by the young artists associatedwith the Beat movement. Like them, he had headed toward California looking for a way out of the oppressive conventions andexpectations of society and family in the post-war boom period.Unlike the Beat poets, however, he waspeiiher college educatednor middle class, though he could identify with their streetsensibility, their embrace of open literary fonns, and their downand-out stance. As a streetwise young man, he continued to findhimself drawn to non-conventional, non-mainstream music venues,and he, like Malcolm Little,soon developed a hipster lifestyle thatincluded the consumption and selling of drugs. At this stage in hislife, Salinas embraced a culturally specific counter-hegemonicPachuco lifestyle, one that had its variants in other minoritycommunities as well as in the margins of mainstream culture.While not radical, these cultural practices did resist the ideologicaland cultural conformity promoted in the I950s. These' "rebelswithout a cause" searched for individuality and alternatives in theirrejection ofmainstream American values and culture.

Busted through a sting operation in Los Angeles, he was sent toSoledad State Penitentiary in 1957, his first adult home behind thebars, for a three-yearperiod. It was here, a place with few distractions and few options for entertainment, that he began to writeextensively for the first time. In addition to correspondence ~ith

family and friends, he began to experiment with poetry.' In theoriginal introduction to Un Trip through the Mind Jail y OtrasExcursions, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto correctly notes that in theseearly poems Salinas experiments with bringing together two·distinctly American sources: "the music of jazz and the literatureof the Beats" (8). The ten poems from this period that he eventually included in Trip also illustrate his interest in writing in Spanish, English, or bilingually. In "Lamento," an elegy to Charlie"Bird" Parker, whom the dedication identifies as a "musical genius& s~)Other of early societal wounds," Salinas is already consciouslyexperimenting with putting poetry to music as he provides instruc~

tions to the reader: "An experiment in sound to be read contrapuntally with lyrics of Cole Porter's 'Night' and Day' interwoyen"(29).7'. .

These early poems represent Salinas' early efforts to reflect onhis individual life, and they demonstrate his embrace of literature,

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poetry in particular, as a therapeutic vehicle for identif,ying andtranscending· wounds inflicted by individual circumstances. Inaddition to expressing reflection, despair, lamentation, and loneliness, in these poems he also assumes a, defiant attitude toward theprison system, and guards in particular. This is especially true inpoems like "Declaration of a Free Soul: (despues de un shakedown)" and "(IN OTHER WORDS, i'd justas soon)." The formerpoem foreshadows future rebellion when he proclaims to theguards:

0' Heinous Godswho stand for LAW!

to you i shall not bow.i once knelt to my mother's God,

but NEVER, to the Likes of YOU! (30)

As evidenced by these lines, at this point Salinas' resistance isprimarily a matter between him and the functionaries of an authoritarian legal system.

Salinas' early literary influences when he was in prison werethose that he could get his hands on.. Not surprisingly, what wasmost available to him was similar to what he had access to in theeducational system, primarily British and American anthologies. Inthese he was particularly attracted to Emerson, Longfellow,Whitman, Williams,and e.e. cummings. Just as he was drawn tothese poets who explored the dynamic relationship between societyand the individual,he was also profoundly impressed by the poemshe discovered in an unidentified 1958 anthology of Spanishliterature; the work of Federico Garcia Lorca,Pablo Neruda, andOtto Rene Castillo, especially affected him. Thus it is not surprising to see that he has a poem dedicated to Lorca in this period. Hisdeveloping aesthetic was exposed to a wider range of expressionand the social critique of these politically engaged writers was themost explicit he had encountered.8

In 1959 Salinas was released from prison on parole. He was toremain out until November of ]961, when he was again busted on

.drug charges, this time in Austin. He was sent to Huntsville StatePrison,where he stayed until May of 1965.9 In Huntsville hejoined the choir, which was the organiiational unit that broughthim together with otper prison "intellectuals/' men who enjoyed

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reading. books, magazines, and newspapers, keeping up withcurrent affairs, and exchanging ideas. This same group becamepart of the core that· formed the production team of the monthlyprison newspaper, The Echo. The editor of The Echo, Bart Edwards, soon learned of Salinas.' in-depth, first-hand knowledge ofjazz and convinced him to write a jazz column, "The QuarteredNote,"which became a regular feature. for a year and a half, untilhe was paroled. In November of 1964 Salinas wrote an editorial inThe Echo that was reprinted in The Beaumont Enterprise on.Christmas Day 1964. This op-ed piece was titled "So much mystery, so much misunderstanding," and was Salinas' first publishedpiece outside of prison. In it he critically examined Kennedy'sdrug policy.

The six poems from Huntsville that Salinas included in Trip arefurther exploration of style and subject matter: one isa jazz po~m;

two are dedicated to Anglo American writers, Henry Miller and J.Frank Dobie, who faced public ire for their criticism of socialhypocrisy when it came to the "proper" subject matter of literature.In poems like "Justification: A Discourse with Myself: (despues dootro shakedown)," excerpted below, Salinas documents his solitude in and powerlessness over his prison environment.

Remember how you criedwhen your castles in the sand

came tumbling down?

Unkindly,i snickered, and thought it cute

to hurt you.

Years later, i also feel like crying!cannot cry!

(even this, i'm not allowed to do.) ...

Today my "castle" is also being razedby merciless battering ram.

Down goes the palace, harem & King;Gone is the Princess....

Gone Everything!

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When Salinas was released from Huntsville in 1965, he was stilla novice poet, but his identity as a writer .had begun to· crystallizeas a result of his reviews of the jazz scene, his first publishedpoems in The Echo, the op-ed essay in The Beaumont Enterprise,and his numerous letters to fatlljly and friends, which he hasalways considered part of his literary production. But Salinas'literary production at this stage'in his life remains linked to hisconfinement. After his release from both Soledad and Huntsville,his writing ceases; back on the streets, his attention and skills werediverted elsewhere.

The Forging of a Radical Poetics

When Salinas was sent to Leavenworth on a felony drug chargein 1967,he initially continued to be involved in illicit drug trade inthe prison. However, unlike the state penitentiary, Leavenworthhad a core of prisoners whose legal convictions were based upontheir willingness to' act upon their political convictions. This cohortworked together to refine and articulate a critical understanding ofdomestic and third world colonialism. In seizing control of theireducation, Salinas and his comrades underwent a radical transformation that involved reading works by leading intellectuals of thirdworld independence movements, such a~ Amilcar Cabral. As he

. and fellow convicts sought a critical framework for an emergingpolitics of resistance, they began to order political literature fromthe outside, such as The Guardian, Grito del Norte, P 'alante, andThe Militant to further their education and consciousness raising.These journals and newspapers formed the core of their educational texts.

At Leavenworth, Salinas met Ramon Chacon from South Texas,who introduced him to the writings ofErnesto "Che"Guevara andFrantz Fanon. He also met Standing Deer (alias Robert Wilson)and Raphael Cancel Miranda, a Puerto Rican independista whohad been imprisoned for participating in.· an armed takeover of theUS Congress in order to draw attention to the plight of PuertoRico. Through ~is interaction with these men, he began to questionhis involvement in the drug trade and. organized crime. Moreimportantly, he began to see how race and class functioned inprison and the outside world to keep people from discovering

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constructive solutions to individual and group empowerment. Inhis. "extni-literary" endeavors we can see his intellectual development, including the acquisition of language and legal skills. Forinstance, his relationship with Miranda is of particular importance.From him he hones his knowledge of Spanish, learns about· thePuerto Rican independence struggle, and begins developing aninternational perspective that enables him to better comprehend thehistorical ravages of colonialism on his own community.

Moreover, a multiracial cohort ofconvicts interested in· exploring racism, class analysis, and national liberation began crystallizing. These convicts were brought together by the shared experiences of prisoner abuse, such as inadequate health care, guardbrutality, disproportionate sentencing of people of color, unfairparole board reviews, indeterminate sentences, and the illegalblocking of prisoner access to legal materials, such as law booksand documentation regarding their cases, that would enable themto challenge their incarceration. Before working for prison reforms,they understood the necessity ofseizing control of their educationand began to realize that it }Vas imperative that they challenge thedenigrating practices of prison culture. Racism, violence, and theexchange of contraband were destructive elements of this culture,and prison guards actively fostered" these practices for their individual gain as well as a means of prisoner control. A dividedpopulation whose hostilities were directed at one another ratherthan at prison authorities is preferable to a united population whorecognizes its own manipulation and the injustice of the legalsystem. In banding together in a multi-racial alliance that raisedquestions about. social justice, these prisoners became more thanjust teachers to one another; they sought to forge a safe-housewithin the prison, one that rejected prisoner-on-prisoner violence,the domination of the weak by the powerful, andracism.

Such unity did not mean that they failed to recognize the importance of validating and "recovering" group culture and history.Rather, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, and whites·sought to understand the specificity of violence, injustice, classinequality, and white supremacy on each group. In 1968, a groupof Chicano convicts arranged to have a course titled "The CulturalHistory ofthe Southwest" taught by Francisco RuizofPenn"ValleyCommunity College in Kansas City. What had been an informal

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education process became formalized as they seized control oftheir education and turned a structural constraint into an opportunity. This course lasted two years and had a consistent presence of25-30 students. It was from this class that the paper, Aztlim deLeavenworth was produced. Aztlim's first issue was published onCinco de Mayo 1970. In the inaugaral issue, Salinas' famouspoem, "Un Trip Through the Mind Jail" wa.s first published andwidely distributed.

Salinas was elected by his peers in this· emerging cadre of organizers as the editor of Aztlirn de Leavenworth. Chicanos Organizados de Rebeldes de AztIan (CORA) was centrally formed out ofthis group and became the organizing vehicle fOf. prisoner rightsissues. The ideology of CORA and thus ofAztlim was shaped bythird world anti-colonial movements and the cultural nationalismof the Chicano movement. In the first issue, an unsigned editorialexplains the paper's philosophy by referring to the NationalChicano Youth Liberation conference in Denver where El PlanEspiritual de Aztlim was penned10as an effort to provide apoliticaland spiritual focus for the Chicano Youth Movement. The editorialnotes that the conceptualization and the production of the paperwas a group effort, and expresses the paper's goals thusly:

The goals of our newspaper are twofold: to Destroy and Rebuild. Todestroy the myth of the worthless Chicano; the misconception of hisnon-productivity; the prejudice that exists, for lack of understanding,in the minds of many; the inferior feelings which we may, or may not,be possessed by. To rebuild the image of ourselves in the eyes ofothers; the dignity to face the world as Chicanos and Men; the senseof pride in who we are. And finally to establish communicationamong ourselves and with our people, wherever they may be. We canaccomplish these goals because: SOMOS AZTLAN!

The editorial group took this mandate for communication seriously, for not only did they distribute Aztlim widely to otherprisoners and other prisons, but also to universities and politicalaction groups. Aztlim worked in two directions simultaneously.First, it was a vehicle fOf raising political awareness among razaprisoners about the injustice of their own incarceration,andit wasa means of distributing information about the Chicano movement.

.Secondly, in taking their situation as prisoners to activists and

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Chicano movement organizations, Aztfan raised the question ofChicano prisoners' place in fa causa, as they constantly demandedinclusion in discussion of social justice issues; II

Aztlan de Leavenworth inspired other groups to produce similarpublications. In addition to reviving New Era Prison Magazine,CORA also supported Native Americans producing their firstpaper, and included native issues in Aztlan.Likewise they assisted .inthe publication ofSignet, produced by the Jr. Jaycees, an organization comprised of white activists. After five issues, theproductionof Aztlimde Leavenworth was shut down due to content andform violations. Prisoner authorities were upset that the editors hadused a multi-color format (a violation of rules) and with theincreasinglypolitical nature ofthe reports and editorials. 12

Salinas' educational and political development in federal penitentiaries was remarkably different in degree and kind than hisexperience in state prisons. There were two factors behind thisdifference: the heightened degree of political awareness of hisfellow inmates at the federal. penitentiaries versus that of stateprisons, and the intensity of the Chicano movement in the late 60sversus the early 60s. Salinas' interaction with politically-mindedprisoners served as a catalyst for his continuing cons'cientizacion.This experience affected the subject matter and style of his poetrysince he was exposed to a broader range, of writings, including thatof African American writers inside and outside of prison. Moreover, his writing, across forms and genres, became intimatelylinked to l1is political awareness. Salinas' archives provide insightinto his personal· and political development as his writing-poetry,journalism, letters, and legal writing-.demonstrates an increasingcommand of and comfort with language. .

His first poem in Leavenworth documents the profound impacton Salinas of a reading of political poetry by black students fromthe University of·Missouri at Kansas City, and'marks the momentin which he would begin explicitly connecting politics and poetryin his own creative writing.. The first three stanzas of "Epiphany"illustrate how these poets provided Salinas with a model ofvernacular aesthetics that radically and consciously departed from theform, style, and content of traditional literature:

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i heard some black cats blow todaywho· spoke of pigs, of being free, of many things.No Shakespeare / Keats / orShelley, they;no bullshit sonnets of nobi lity & kings.

Oh, No!Theirs was street poetry/turn on poesyof the wake-up kind;with snap-to-it rhythmthe type that blows your mind.

-"

"Tighten up your game" / "Get your head together"they said to me. ."NOW IS THE TIME for all oppressed humans to be setfree."

"Epiphany" is both a moment of insight and a salute to these "BossBitchin' Black Bards."

The final stanza is presented as an "afterthought" and illustratesa move in Salinas' poetic from individual musings and critique to acollective persona.

the MAN'S stepped on our toes his final hourfrom now on he should getsteady bombardment of ourPeople's Power. (emphasis mine, 45)

Ironically, this is one of the few poems in which Salinas uses aconventional rhyme scheme; he thus mimics and mocks traditionalpoetic form even as he utilizes it to write about unconventionalcontent.

Though Salinas continues to write poetry as therapy, as a meansof exploring traumatic childhood experiences with racist institutionsand renewing his respect for Indio-Chicano-Mexicanoculture, he also begins· to foster a politically representative voice.As. the third epigraph preceding this essay ilIustrates,he pondersthe process of change he· is undergoing. In poems such as "Ciego,Sordo, Mudo" and "Los Caudillos," Salinas "responds to thedynamics of the Chicano Movement in its evolution up to thattime" (Ybarra-Frausto 9). Though the title poem of his first collection of poetry, "Un Trip Through the Mind Jail," quickly earned

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Salinas a well-deserved reputation as a prison poet among theChicano community, it is in "News from San Quentin" thatSalinas' evolution as a committed political writer emerges. Writtenon August 21, 1971, the day George Jackson, "[t]he key figureembodying class unity in prison consciousness.... [and] the leadingtheoretician of the prison movement" (Franklin 273}, was killed byprison guards. "News" draws the line between non-politicizedprisoners and politicized prisoners who could appreciate thesignificance of Jackson's murder and the imminent eruption ofprIsons.

News from San Quentin(August 21, 1971)

A Tender Warriorfell todayvictimof the JAIL MACHINE!!And in Leavenworth Prisonrank right-on-ers'ofthe chilly clenched fist set(complete with afro-do)dig soul music, man... Soul Music!

. & dream ofone

moreKadillac!

Those fewwho have been touchedbyMADNESSin silent darkness prayto the spirit of Ho Chi Minhand grow impatient/intolerantof the oppressed...those who wish to stay that way.There's no turningback for us.

A Tender Warriorfell todaya flame that burned for

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revolutionary eonswas doused! .slowly ebbed its glow.We all grew a bit today,

brother george.

Our struggle became more intense!

Leavenworth / 71 / (strange things beginning to a-cur!)

"News from San Quentin" is simultaneously an homage to Jackson, an expres~ion of collective commitment to maintain resistanceto the "jail machine," as well as a scathing critique of those "rank ..right-:on-ers" who had not developed the defiance, discipline, orcritical consciousness to understand the significance of Jackson'sassassination by prison authorities.

The prison rebellions in Attica, Leavenworth, Soledad, NewMexico, and Washington, characterized by their interracial unity,that fallowed soon after Jackson's murder were the culmination ofprisoner ~rganizing and outrage, not only at Jackson's death, but attheir growing awareness of the relationship ~etween capitalism,racism, and the prison industrial.complex. In 1972, as a result ofthe continuing effort by Aztlim de Leavenworth to keep this issueof prison injustice alive, as well as Salinas' high profile involvement in prisoner advocacy, he was transferred· to Marion, IllinQis,along with hundreds· of other prisoners from throughout. thecountry. Prison authorities failed to anticipate the consequences ofuniting these astute and politically committed activists; within 90days of their arrival, the prison was shut down due to a massivestrike by prisoners responding to guard brutality.

In Marion, the organizing against the behaviorm.odificationprogram was so intense, and prisoner activity so tightly controlled,that Salinas'poetry writing diminished in favor of letters regardingthe· inhumane experimental techniques .on human behavior tojournalists, position papers, legal briefs, and supporting documentsthat would eventually be submitted to the U.N. As with his lettersto civil rights activists, lawyers, and academics all over the country,his letters to the mainstream. press (The Kansas City Star andThe" St. Louis Post Dispatch especially) challenge journalists to

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take coverage of prisons seriously, even as they cultivated lastingrelationships, criticized the press's analysis of prison conditions,and encouraged additional media attention.

Salinas' letters fo politicians, activists, family, and "lovers" allinvolve careful negotiations between his former life (self) and hiscurrent self. These relationships are often paradoxical: they aresimultaneously fragile and intense, seeking connection and commitmenteven as they are full of uncertainties and fears; they arepowerful, yet are fraught with restraint. As Salinas extended his·writings outside the walls, over and. over again it becomes· necessary for him to introduce himself to people who had taken aninterest in him, usually after having read a sampling of his poetry.In a 1970 letter to Glauco Cambon, a visiting professor of modernliterature at Brown University, Salinas writes:

Hoping not to conjure up vision of ogres and monsters in yourmind, I'm a 37-year-old,thrice convicted narcotics offender. Thatdoes. sound like some kind of nasty, no? But I'm a human beingabove all. What little learning ihaveacquired has been through selfstudy.... in the solace of my cell, ihave managed to take on someof the tougher scribes, bards, free-thinkers and revolutionary minds.If hasn't been an easy task, and i don't claim to have understoodfully, what they're ALL about, nevertheless, it keeps theboogeyman away. (Jail Machine 7/2/70)

To Teatro Puerto Rico in New York City, who wrote him inquiringabout the connection between Puerto Rican nationalism andChicano nationalism, he writes:

i am a Chicano poet who is concerned about the latino struggle aswell as the struggle ofall the common people of the world. My arthas developed through· years of incarceration to where i have somedefinite idea of what role the artist (poet/painter/musician) must playin any social movement. However, there is much that i need to learnabout. (Jail Machine 8/19/71)

In both of these letters Salinas builds his ethos in an emergingrelationship with outsiders who he would solicit as allies bycrafting a delicate balance between humility and pride in discussing his own intellectual and artistic growth~ By acknowledging·

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limitations he foregrounds his shared humanity with his audienceand he· articulates- both the 'pragmatic ("if keeps the boogey-manaway") and the political dim'ensions ("ihave some definite idea ofwhat role the artist. .. must play in any social movement") of hisintellectual transformation.

Salinas won his release in November of 1972 with the help offaculty and graduate students at the University of Washington atSeattle. In "Crash Landing," the first poem Salinas writes afterbeing released from prison,he documents his difficulty reintegrating into society and his on-going concern for all human freedom.Below is an excerpt from the poem's ending:

Where lessons in LIFEare taught daily

(by Revolutionary Sisters/Dedicated Daughters)...

Whe're 3rd World fuerzasse dnen

& deal with:Nicaraguan disastersIndian genocide (of modem day massacres)Plantation life of campesinosMovimiento EstudiantilBlack Construction slavesPresos politicos (y sociales)Y raza Raza RAZA

in unyielding solidarity.

And this is Seattle...But somewhere beyond

Majestic Mount Rainier.in dungeons built by evil menare brothers/sisters (prisoners)

who are still not freeAs i am still not free...though i walk Seattle's streets.

"Crash Landing" is indicative of the continuing evolution andtrajectory ofSalinas' post-prison poetics in its ability to blend theauthor's personal growth experiences with that of a broadly'

.construed and often fragile civil rights movement, even as. he

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continued to raise. the question about the relationship betweenprisoner rights and human rights.

Conclusion: Breaking Down the Jail Machine

Though I have only provided a briefprofile, a thumbnail sketchof the important moments of Salinas' prison experience, myunderlying thesis has been to illustrate how his political consciousness was shaped in relation to his prison experience as well as thelarger context of anti-colonial struggles and the civil rights movement. His re-education into politicalactivisIl1 shaped his poeticseven as he brought together the cacophony of jazz and beat influences. Unlike the often ideologically inconsistent counter-culturalstance of many of the beat poets, however, Salinas became a "rebelwith a causa" in an era rife with revolutionary potential. The valueofSalinas' literary work lies not only in some traditional notion of"good writing," but in its value as a critical voice from within thedepths of the penal system, a voice that is not so much exceptionalas it is representative. It is representative inasmuch as his preprison life and his incarceration are all too typical of the prisonpopulation, in his experience of social disenfranchisement, undereducation, participation in the lumpen, economy, migrancy, and .other forms of displacement. As Franklin has noted:

The works of today's prisoners, though' predominantly autobiographical, are rarely intended as a display of individual genius.Whereas the literary criteria dominant on campus exalt what is extraordinary or even unique, with 'originality' as the key criterion,most current autobiographical writing froin prison intends to showthe readers that the author's individual experience is not unique oreven extraordinary, but typical and representative. (250)

Consequently, because his post-prison life is marked by thelinkage between his political involvement and his identity as anauthor, it is clear that Salinas' entire corpus of writings need to betaken into account in order to understand the influences anddirection of his writings, for they defy any single generic structure.In this essay I have tried to demonstrate the relationship betweenthe different kinds of writings he undertook and the circumstances'of their production. I believe that, taken as a whole, this mixture of

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genres across time and space testify to the enormous potential fortransformation of all prisoners, given the right circumstances andcommitment. 13

Few woul<1 argue that prison literature is not political, fraught asit is with issues of power. Most prison literature is testimony to theauthor's struggle to retain dignity and sanity in a context thatforces a convict to conform or resist. In this regard, Franklin hasargued that "the artistic achievement of this literature, [must beapproached] with an aesthetic radically different from most aesthetics applied in the university and the university-dominatedcultural media. In truth, it may not be going too far to say that theprison and the university provide the contradictory poles definingthe field of aesthetics" (235). The politics of knowledge, culture,identity, and representation remain crucial to the creation ofa bodypolitic that is invested in creating a more humane society. As Ihope to have illustrated here, it is within the context of a highlypoliticized and racist prison culture that Salinas and others come toterms with their Mexicano-Chicano-Indigenous identity; it is thusthrough a Xicanindio identity that they came to acquire a knowledge of politics, found individual and collective fulfillment, andstruggled to advance human liberation.

Notes

I. Loosely defined as the intense period of advocacy for reform utilizing tacticsboth of diplomacy and rebellion from the late 60s through the mid-70s.2. There are, however, numerous articles on select Latina/o and Native American prison authors, and many book-length studies of the relationship between.race, class, and incarceration. Ben Olguin's forthcoming study, La Pinta:History, Culture, and Ideology in CIJicanalo Convict Discourses, will be awelcome addition.3. The acquisition of this collection was facilitated by Ben Olguin and myself onSalinas' behalf.4. Advocacy within the prison was necessarily placed in a human rights contextb~cause convicted felons have no civil rights in the US.5. Elsewhere I have explored the political and poetic economy ofChicano tattooart in prison. See Olguin's essay in Cultural Critique.6. I realize this is an unconventional refe'rence to an academic mode of inquirythat was not yet a critical force in the United States; however, as I will illustratelater, it is a useful reference because the culture classes in prison became a siteof critical inquiry on the relationships among knowledge, power, public

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institutions, and the social order. Thus, I would argue that cultural studiespractioners have much to learn from prisons as a site of radical.re-education.7. In Salinas's CD, Los Many Mundosofraulrsalinas: un poetic jazz viaje CdlIFiends, the musical elements of his poetry reach their full potential in musicalaccompaniment.8. One of Salinas' prison journals is a notebook containing typed copies of allhis favorite poems.9. Texas Department of Corrections prisoner discharge sheet (7/3/74).10. The prologue was written by Alurista and the remainder of the documentwas a collaboration among conference participants. Alurista's pivotal role asauthor of the prologue was not initially known to prisoners.II. Correspondence from Salinas to La Raza Unida, MALDEF, La RazaMagazine, various prisoner rights groups, lawyers, and state and federalpoliticians demonstrate a consistent effort to draw attention to prisoner abuseand an unj ust legal system.12. During this time, Salinas and many others began earning college credits in .prison via correspondence courses. Eventually, their new-found knowledge -andwriting skills would lead them to directly engage the "justice" system as theyfiled their own appeals, and filed charges against the warden and the federalgovernment for violations of human rights and denial of their rights as prisoners.13. From a post-1990s perspective, one can hardly examine a body of writingsthat are at once autobiographical, politically insurgent, interventionary, andrepresentative, and which taken collectively reveal the experience of conscientizaci6n, without giving serious consideration to the genre of testimonio. Such ananalysis deserves further exploration for the insight it may offer into First Worldnationalist discourses.

Works Cited

"Azthin." Aztlan de Leavenworth. Numero I. Ano I. (I).Blunk, Tim, and Raymond Luc Levasseur. Hauling up the Morning: Writing

and Artby Political Prisol1t;rs ofthe United States. Trenton NJ: Red SeaP,1990.

Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal andArtist. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill, 1978.

Griffin, Eddie. "Breaking Men's Minds: Behavior Control and HumanExperimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois." St. Louis: National Committee to Support the Marion Brothers and the National AllianceAgainst Racist and Political Repression (Pamphlet, 1978).

Gugelberger, Georg, ed. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourses and LatinAmerica. DurhamNC: Duke UP, 1996.

Mendoza, Louis G. "Interview with Raul Salinas." February, 1993.(videographer, Cristina Ybarra).

,-------.-,-.. "Re-Reading the Body: The Cultural Poetics and Politics of PintoArt." Presentation at the 23rd Annlial Popular Culture Conference. NewOrleans, Louisiana. April 9, 1993.

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---. "The Semiotics of the Pinto Visual Vernacular: The Political andSymbolic Economy of the Abjected Body." 1995 National Association forChicano Studies Conference. Spokane, Washington. March 31, 1995. (Jointpresentation with Ben Olguin).

---. Preface: ""SofTie Reflections on Twenty Years of Un Trip Through theMind Jail y Otras Excursions." Raul Salinas. Houston: Arte Publico, 1999.1-5.

Mann, Corame Richey. Unequal Justice: A Question piColor. Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1993.

Olguin, Ben V. "Tattoos, Abjection, and the Political Unconscious: Toward aSemiotics of the Pinto Visual Vernacular." Cultural Critique 37.3 (1997):159-213.

raulrsalinas. Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions. Houston: ArtePublico P, 1999. . .

raulrsalinas. East o/the Freeway: Reflections de mi pueblo. Austin: RedSalmon P, 1995.

raulrsalinas. The Jail Machine: The Unpublished Writings 0/ROlfl Salinas.(1957-1972). Ed. Louis Mendoza. Manuscript 'in progress based on TheSalinas Collection housed at Stanford UniversitySpecial Collections.

raulrsalinas. Los Many Mundos ofralflrsalinas: un poetic jazz viaje confriends. San Diego: Calaca P, 2000.

Shakur, Assata. "Preface:' Hauling up the Morning: Writing and Art byPolitical Prisoners o/the United States. Ed. Blunk and Levasseur. TrentonNJ: Red Sea P, 1990.1-7.

"Stop the Deaths: Close the Marion Control Unit, Free the Political Prisoners:'St. Louis: National Committee to SUPPOl1 the Marion Brothers. (Booklet1978).

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas. "Introduction to the First Edition." Un Tripthrough theMind Jail y Otras Excursions. Houston: Alie Pllblico, 1999. 7-14.

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Documents

The Re-Education of a Xicanindio: Raul Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation