The Re-education of a Xicanindio: Raúl Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation

Prison was not a place for defeat, it was a place for study, for preparation. Fidel Castro wrote while in prison: 'What a tremendous school this prison is! Here I have rounded out my view of the world and determined 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 struggle has been reaffirmed. --Assata Shakur, Hauling up the Morning, 5 ... un proceso de transformacion mental; see it occurring, feel it surging within, it's at once amazing, extremely difficult to grasp, painful and frightening!!! --Raul Salinas, Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions, 9 When art becomes more than a 'secure' prison pastime. When it becomes a threat to the lie [that the U.S. has no political prisoners], it will be suppressed. --Tim Blunk, Hauling up the Morning, xxi Introduction In the second edition of his groundbreaking study of prison literature, H. Bruce Franklin states that Jack Abbott's release and reimprisonment following the publication of his collection of letters to Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast, effectively captured readers' fascination regarding the penitentiary's impact on convicts. Franklin summarizes Abbott's thesis by asserting that "our penal institutions force each prisoner to become either a broken, cringing animal, fawning before all authority, or a resister, clinging to human dignity through defiance and rebellion" (xiii). The physical, psychological, emotional, racial, and sexual violence and degradation that prisoners suffer and which is promoted by the prison authorities as a means of control is central to much prison literature and offers us gruesome insight into the manipulation and machinations of power. When we consider the brutal and racist nature of a criminal justice system that systematically creates a prison population in which nonwhites are disproportionately represented, we need go no further in arguing for the importance of critiquing, delegitimating, and dismantling this system. This is no easy task, however, given the enormous amount of economic and political capital invested in the world's largest prison industrial complex. Prisoner rights activists within and outside the walls confront a conservative popular discourse that pathologizes prisoners and emphasizes the punitive dimensions of imprisonment over its reformative potential. In contrast to this denigrating and often dehumanizing discourse, in leftist studies of prison literature it is common 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 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 the university ivory tower from society, where the primary function of education is to reproduce the elite managerial class that will preserve 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 social forces and prejudices are intensified. This process of conscientizacion that many prisoners undergo, a process that precipitates a new way of seeing and acting in the world, is the focus of this essay. I will pay particular attention to one convict's transformation from "social criminal" to political activist, a transformation that eventually led to his punitive transfer to the control unit (aka "H-Unit") of Marion, Illinois federal prison along with other prison activist leaders from minority communities in the US as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. According to an informational pamphlet produced by the national committee to support the Marion Brothers, Marion became the primary political prison in the US after the closing of Alcatraz. …