raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen

Section IV. Post-Prison Interviews

S e c t i o n I V Post-PrisonInterviews T he final section of raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine includes two post-prison interviews with Salinas conducted twenty years apart. The first interview, “Resisting Mindfuck,” from the Seattle -based anarchist newspaper the Sunfighter, demonstrates Salinas ’s continued commitment to prisoners’ rights struggles. By exposing in grim detail the brutal brainwashing techniques prison authorities practiced against prisoners to fragment their solidarity with one another, Salinas also makes clear that these group manipulation techniques were merely the first front of an effort to exercise social control of groups outside prison. Occurring simultaneously with the government ’s insidious COINTELPRO initiative designed to undermine the anti-war and Civil Rights movements, the manipulation of prisoners reveals not only the threat these prisoners represented to the social order inside prison, but also the ends to which authorities were willing to go to quell challenges outside of prison. As Salinas explains, the ability of a critical mass of prisoners to see through this pacification program—an ability based on their political insight, resolve, and experience—was unanticipated. Having been targeted for transfer to Marion with other “difficult” prisoners from around the country, many prison intellectuals were cognizant of their solidarity across race and class lines; consequently, the anti-prison, multiracial espirit de corps of some members of this group only further intensified. The Sunfighter interview provides insight into how some prisoners maintained their sanity and their humanity through resistance, and it shows how the prison authorities broke laws in their desperate effort to break the human spirit. The second interview, conducted on the occasion of Salinas’s visit to Stanford University to finalize the acquisition of his personal archives, closes the book by offering readers a portrait of a writer who is reflecting on his life as a journey of transformation. We gain insight into his childhood and the roles that his family, culture, barrio, school, and the police played in shaping his sense of self. Defining himself as “post-pachucho and pre-bato loco,” Salinas outlines how at a very young age it became necessary for him to develop a resistant identity in order to maintain his personal integrity. His vernacular aesthetics, in language and through the expressive symbology of graffiti and tattoos , emerged from a negative dialectic with school and police authorities who denounced his “difference” with the mainstream by attempting to force conformity upon him. But this negative dialectic shaped a positive mode of expression as he found a means of affirming his identity through resisting the social mandates that sought to control his behavior and forms of expression. By connecting the evolution of his resistant identity in prison to an identity inextricably linked to his political development, we see that Salinas’s sense of purpose, his world vision, and his artistic sensibility have become more finely honed over the years. Through a profound and deliberate spiritual and intellectual growth sparked by fellow prisoners who became his teachers, this new way of looking at and living in the world transformed his aesthetic sensibility into a poetics of resistance that is intended to both “critique and inspire.” As he muses on his literary influences, the development of Chicana/o literature, and his place within this canon, we can also see how Salinas has evolved into a quintessential poet of the Americas with his stylistic, multilingual innovations and cross-cultural, pan-American perspective. In addition to the motifs of the journey, ongoing transformation, and resistance, this interview also presents the writer’s efforts to resolve contradictions at multiple levels, within himself and with society —both personal and political. In doing so, we capture a picture of Salinas in his own words in a way that enables those who do not know him to gain insight from his life that can teach us about our own individual and collective journeys. r a ú l rsa l i n as a n d t h e ja i l m ac h i n e 296 ResistingMindfuck from Sunfighter (1974) IWASINLEAVENWORTHin ’72 when we had like 3 sit down strikes.† We were in the hole at Leavenworth and other people were in the hole throughout the country for different strikes. There was a lot of unrest, the shit was coming down, you know. After the Attica and the San Quentin tragedies, prisoners were saying who knew when they’re going to shoot us...