Editorial

‘‘V I V I E N D O E N E L O LV I D O ’’ :
BEHIND BARS, L ATINOS AND
PRISON
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know,
What I was walling in or walling out.
(Robert Frost, 1914)

The worst thing about being in prison isn’t even the loss of my freedom.
Es saber que estoy viviendo en el olvidoy’’1 1 ‘‘It is knowing
that I am alive
but forgotten.’’
These are the words of an incarcerated Latino, currently in a prison in
upstate New York: words that echo throughout the penal system of the
United States, whether it is the jails, the state and federal prisons, the
immigrant detention centers, the high-security facilities, the private
incarceration buildings, the military prison in Guantanamoy. This special
issue of Latino Studies is a direct response to those words – an effort to say
to that incarcerated Latino, and to all the men and women in the US criminal
justice system: ‘‘No! You are not living ‘en el olvido.’ You, your lives, your
presence as part of both our community and our society – behind walls, or
otherwise – are important to us. You have not been forgotten.’’
The struggle of incarcerated Latino/as – indeed, of all incarcerated people
in the United States – for dignity, for their humanity, is the struggle that
Latino/as and this society as a whole must engage, today, now, as a firm
response to our government’s insistence on using incarceration to deal with
the nation’s minority populations. We must engage it lest our own dignity
and humanity dissipate in the use of incarceration as a method of controlling
the presence of minority and poor populations in this country and, in the
process, of providing jobs for all the small towns currently housing private,
federal and state prisons in regions depleted from their previous sources of
economic well-being.
What is being ‘‘walled in’’ – to use the words penned by Robert Frost in a
different context – through these prisons? What histories, what life stories,
what justifications, what violations and abuses, what secret methods of
breaking the human spirit? And, similarly, what part of our society’s role in
ensuring justice, equality, respect and human dignity for all, indeed, what
part of our humanity is being ‘‘walled out’’?

Latino Studies 2008, 6, (1–10) c 2008 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/08 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/lst
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The authors of these articles, and of the essays in our VIVENCIAS: Reports
from the field section, seek to address these questions in various ways.
Undoubtedly, the fact that Latinos are, as José Luis Morı́n’s essay notes, the
fastest growing group in the US prison system accounting by the end of 2004,
for 19.2% of the total population in US state and federal jurisdictions, is also an
underlying cause for the urgency of our journal’s publication of this Special
Issue. Providing an overview of the US criminal justice system and its
implications for US society, Morı́n goes on to explain that although ‘‘differences
between Latino/as and African Americans also exist, most notably that Latino/as
are subject to myths linking criminality to immigrant status,’’ there are several
reasons why Latinos, like African Americans, are increasingly ‘‘trapped’’ by the
2 According to phenomenon of ‘‘mass imprisonment.’’2 Thus, he retells key moments in the
Mauer and King history and experiences of Latino/as in the United States, focusing on various
(2007), African
prominent trends that feed into this society’s penal system, including the
Americans are
incarcerated at racialization of crime, the manner in which criminal justice policy is formulated and
nearly six (5.6) times justified around the fear of crime, how the courts and the criminal justice system
the rate of whites; operate, and the role of the media in promoting negative images of Latino/as.
and Hispanics are
Indeed the current increase in the incarceration rates of Latino/as, whether in
incarcerated at nearly
double (1.8) the rate state or federal prisons or in immigrant detention facilities; the rush to control
of whites. the borders, to build fences, to demand national identity cards – like the current
inhumanity of mainstream politicians and the media toward immigrants – not
only demeans us all, but is also undoubtedly reducing citizenship rights and the
freedom of movement and of human creativity that the ideals of this society’s
democratic traditions guarantee to all who live in this country. In their place,
what seems to be emerging is an impermeable barrier of complacency and
indifference grounded in social insecurity, fear, and even terror, of one another.
Public anxieties are creating new policies and methods of addressing these fears
that are challenging the basic premises and traditional practice of the nation’s
constitutional history and laws, including the very requirements of criminal law
curricula in the Law schools of the United States. As one prominent law
professor recently wrote:

I am a criminal law professor. I know about penal codes, police practices,

sentencing, and the use of incarceration to punish criminals. Like most
criminal law professors, I know precious little about American immigration
law. I have always considered it to be a different part of the law school
curriculum, and one that had little, if anything, to do with criminal law. Even
in my federal criminal law course, immigration law played no part in the
curriculum. Lately, however, it has become evident that things have changed.
In today’s world, immigration enforcement and criminal law enforcement
activities are two sides of the same coin, at least for non-citizens. What
criminal law professors and practitioners alike are discovering is that
immigration law – including the practices of detention and deportation, as
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3

well as prosecution for re-entry and document fraud – has emerged as a key
missing chapter in American criminal law. (Guerra-Thompson, 2007)

It is almost a cliché today to state that immigration has traditionally been one
of the key foundational pillars of this nation’s self-image and development. Yet
at a time of renewed concern and, indeed, of widespread hysteria about the
presence of immigrants, particularly Latino/as in this society; at a time when
there is an equally widespread, albeit unfounded perception of the threat
(curiously, detached from the nation’s political economy) that Latino/as
supposedly pose to US life and society, we have been treated to an unrelenting
racialization and demonization of immigrants – again, most specifically of Latin
American immigrants, and of Mexicans in particular although not exclusively,
living and working in this country.
The result has been a prevailing perception that Latino/as in US society are
primarily undocumented immigrants born in other parts of the hemisphere and,
as such, permanently ‘‘illegal,’’ ‘‘aliens,’’ foreigners in the United States.
Homogenizing the Latino/a population in these terms and, in this sense,
separating them from the general population has in turn allowed for the
development of laws and policies ostensibly aimed at protecting ‘‘us’’ from
‘‘them,’’ but in fact overtly or otherwise negatively impacting the constitutional
rights of all US residents, citizens and non-citizens alike.
Thus, despite the fact that more than half of all Latinos (59.8%) in the United
States today are native born citizens (Fry and Hakimzadeh, 2006), the
perception of Latinos as inherently foreign to the very image and idea of
‘‘being an American’’ has now become deeply ingrained, to such an extent that
from the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign, several of the prospective
presidential candidates have seen fit to base their respective ‘‘platforms’’ and
‘‘debate points’’ primarily and, in at least one case, exclusively on immigration
and border control.
As David Hernández makes clear, it is worth recalling that historically,
borders, like border controls, in the United States have marched in time with
detentions, deportations and the criminalization of the ‘‘other,’’ often under the
guise of the imperative to increase ‘‘national security’’ as well as of
(re)constructing and/or creating new notions of who is ‘‘illegal’’ (Ngai, 2005;
De Genova, 2006). Equally important is the historical recourse to xenophobic
and racializing responses to ‘‘otherness,’’ including linguistic, social, gendered
and sexual. For these responses in turn ensure the approval, tacit or otherwise –
if not the indifference – of mainstream public opinion to the fate of those
who, like the majority of the ancestors of US citizens of European descent,
were forced to leave their homelands for a variety of reasons, crossing this
country’s borders in search of a better life for themselves and their
children. Particularly in the last decades, societal responses to otherness have
reinforced in a fundamental way the perception of Latino/as as ‘‘criminal,’’ as
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disposable people, as unworthy of benefiting from the democratic and moral

values that are presumed to underlie our society’s insistence on fairness
and justice for all.
Indeed, as José Luis Morı́n states, ‘‘Latinas/os, like African Americans, are
perceived as a poor class of people of color that pose a threat to the social order,
and thus must be controlled and dominated.’’ Thus, Victor Rios’ discussion of
the juvenile justice system, for example, provides a case study of the way in
which the politics underlying the introduction of tougher sanctions against both
Latino and African American youth, increasingly rely and play on public
anxieties about race and crime, hence reinforcing the public perception of an
inherent connection between them. Morı́n’s point is also amply exemplified by
Mercedes Castillo, in her essay describing the LAPD’s disregard for Latino/as’
basic constitutional and human rights and the treatment and indignities to
which Latino/as are consequently subjected whenever they demand the very
right to uphold their rights.
As several of the authors emphasize, although Latinos have long been part of
the history, society, culture and economic development of this country, it is still
regrettably the case that they are too often consigned to a collective space of
non-belonging, regardless of their citizenship status and, again, largely as a
result of racial, language, social and xenophobic discrimination. At the same
time, the simultaneous ‘‘inclusion/exclusion’’ swings in public attitudes, like the
articulations about ‘‘what is to be done’’ about ‘‘them,’’ continues apace with
the complicated history of the relations of the United States to the rest of this
hemisphere. As a result, the country and polity is deprived of a sustained
discussion free of intermittent sensationalisms about the ongoing exclusion of
US-born Latino/as from full citizenship rights, as well as of the issues related to
the latest wave of immigrants, and their undeniable, multiple and ongoing
contributions to this society.
As is often noted, history repeats itself, although as Marx aptly stated – first
as a tragedy then as a farce. Therefore, historical examples are essential both as
records of past injustices and as a measure of how far a nation has moved, or
not, towards reconstituting itself as a more humane and just society. Alan Eladio
Gómez tells the story of Chicanos and Puerto Rican Independentistas
incarcerated during the 1970s in the Leavensworth Federal Penitentiary in
Kansas, both through his article on the period and his interview with Raúl
Salinas, the prominent Chicano activist-poet incarcerated at the time first in
Leavensworth and later in the Marion Correctional Facilities. Gómez discusses
the efforts of the Latinos at Leavensworth to create alliances with others,
particularly African Americans, to educate themselves about the US criminal
justice system; to understand and address the society that creates it; and to make
the connections and comparisons to the practices and implications of carcelary
institutions in other parts of the world, particularly Latin America and Africa.
In the process, he describes the ways in which this acquired self-education
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‘‘armed’’ those like Raúl Salinas ‘‘with knowledge and truth’’, hence leaving the
poet-activist ‘‘with his dignity intact’’. Gómez also narrates the ways in which
this empowering knowledge, education, affirmation of their human dignity,
contributed to their efforts to reform the system, whether through the prison
newsletter, through informing those on the outside about the conditions within,
or through court cases challenging the system’s brutality and inhumanity.
Noting that between 1972 and the mid-1990s, there was a 500% increase in the
US carcelary system (including a 2,800% increase in the number of women in
state and federal prison or local jails), Gómez concludes that
The political analysis of Latino prison activists uncovered how the intricate
calibrations of violence within the prison regime were related to law, race,
and social control outside prison, an important theoretical understanding
when trying to untangle the political ideology of law and order as it relates to
race, incarceration, and white supremacy (Rodrı́guez, 2006). Incarceration
functioning as ‘‘incapacitation’’ for a surplus army of labor of women, men,
and immigrants criminalized by their mere existence, is directly implicated
in the acceptance of preventative detention with regard to racial and, in a post
9-11 world, national and religious minorities.

Collectively, these articles seek to exemplify in various ways why it is imperative

today for more attention to be devoted to the connections between Latino/as
and the rest of US society, specifically from the perspective of the causes and
implications of the rising rates of their imprisonment, the conditions under
which they survive inside the prisons, and their subsequent lifestyles as both
private individuals and citizens once they are released. Looking inside the
conditions of Latino/as incarceration, including their pre- and post-incarcera-
tion experience, can serve to bring to light key moments in their historical and
present experiences, the socio-economic, political and cultural contexts from
which they come, as well as the role of society’s passivity and indifference to the
injustices of social and economic deprivation in Latino/a communities
throughout the country.
Latino/as’ struggle for survival within the confines of the prison walls, their
efforts at self- and group education, the construction of alliances and group
solidarities across national lines and under extremely adverse conditions, for
their part, serve to refocus attention on their lives and thoughts far beyond the
confines of specific prisons and their impact both on themselves and on their
families and communities.
Several of the authors in this issue draw specifically on their own daily
professional lives and experiences working with Latino/as caught in the
labyrinth of the criminal justice system, and in so doing provide valuable insight
into Latino/as’ pre- and post-incarceration experience. Laura Garcia, for
example, points out the irony of the self-incriminating implications of Latino/as’
reliance on a common language and cultural background, as they seek to
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communicate and explain their predicament to Spanish-speaking officers at the

time of their arrest; Juan Cartagena provides detailed case studies from various
parts of the nation, of the obstacles that Latino/a ex-felons confront as they
struggle to reintegrate into the society upon their release. He argues that what is
undoubtedly at stake, in both the unprecedented increase in Latino/as’
incarceration, as well as their loss of citizen rights and, hence, disenfranchise-
ment once they are released, is ‘‘civic engagement,’’ that is ‘‘the ability of
communities to exercise political strength and economic self-determinationy in
our barrios.’’ Dicxon Valderruten focuses on his work in the prisons as both a
health education facilitator and as a mentor to incarcerated men in upstate
New York. He discusses the ways that in addition to their educational value, the
use of health and, particularly, of AIDS education programs can serve to
empower the men within the prisons and to prepare them in a variety of ways to
confront the difficulties of recreating their lives once on the outside.
As Valderruten’s essay clearly shows, the existence and role of mentors
who help Latino/as once they leave prison has become essential in Latino/as’
process of reintegration. Indeed, in her essay on the pedagogical and
personal issues she had to address, Marcia Esparza discusses the need to
develop and stress mentors’ own individual and cultural strengths and
self-awareness, in the process of preparing her students to mentor recently
released Latinas.
Together with the collective solidarities and alliances they create among
themselves, Latino/as draw upon their culture and language background, their
ongoing learning, the experiences of their past, and the endless creativity of the
human spirit behind bars, exemplifying some of the ways in which Latino/as
adapt and resist the violent and brutal experience of the US system of
incarceration. Laurie Schaffner focuses on the ways in which juvenile delinquent
Latinas use language and culture as a way of both establishing a sense of
solidarity and belonging in prison, as well as of unsettling what Schaffner refers
to as ‘‘the orderly flow of the punitive surveillance.’’ Thus, Schaffner notes that
her findings run counter to traditional narratives of juvenile delinquency, which
often reinforce notions of juvenile delinquents as alienated.
There is no doubt whatsoever that further research is much needed on Latino/as
in prison – indeed, there is a serious dearth in available accounts of their
experiences, as these pertain to the penal system in the United States. Juanita
Dı́az Cotto’s essay provides an in-depth analysis of the available literature, and
reviews researchers’ motivations for conducting their studies, the major
questions they pose, their research methods, findings and conclusions, and
their interrelationship. She concludes that different methods and approaches
specific to prison research can yield quite different findings, results and
conclusions. She thus makes several suggestions for various future research
directions, specifically from the perspective of prison research methodology
aimed at ensuring a more comprehensive and specific understanding of the
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Latino/a experience of the prison system, including comparative analyses with

other incarcerated populations and criminal justice institutions in both the
United States and other parts of the world.
Indeed, there is a pressing need for further exploration of the relationship of
the United States to the larger global community, in terms of mass incarceration
and its impact on the fundamental rights of Latino/as as members of the
national and international communities. The authors’ discussion of the long and
multiple struggles of Latino/as against injustice and incarceration, as well as of
issues such as border control, the workings of the prison system, its relation to
efforts to control and subvert the rights of people of Latin American descent –
like their narratives of Latino/as’ experiences of incarceration and struggles to
maintain their dignity and humanity – thus ultimately aim to inform and to
contextualize recent international political developments within a broader
national and transnational sphere.
Finally, these articles collectively underscore the fact that prison writings
did not come to an end somewhere in the late 1960s and the early 1970s,
but rather continue to reveal specific aspects of the interconnections among
nations, societies, citizens, non-citizens, and human rights, which can no longer
be ignored. Together, they drive home the point that incarceration has a
significant impact on many levels of life, society and community, and for
millions of people beyond the individuals immediately involved.
The political rhetoric associated with immigrants, with crime, with national
security, with fear, today provides much of the mainstream’s justifications for
the increased ‘‘warehousing’’ of Latino/as and other racialized poor populations
in this country. At the same time, the shameful indifference towards those who
are less fortunate in our society – the richest and most powerful in the world –
and the willful neglect of the ravages of poverty, and of the long-term
consequences of the inadequate housing, unacceptable educational and
recreational facilities, and deteriorating neighborhoods in which large sectors
of the Latino/a population grow up and live, account for much of the lack
of societal and institutional support. The latter could easily prevent the
growing incarceration of large numbers of young Latino/as, the inhumane
treatment and suffering of those in prisons. Indeed, as Yolanda Martı́n
documents through the responses of the recently released men and women she
interviewed, this support could and, where it exists, does contribute instead to
empower and redirect their lives, as well as the lives of those who
are released.
There is no easy solution to the issues highlighted by the incarceration of
what Gómez estimates to be 2.5 million people (including immigrant detainees),
over 60% of whom are blacks and Latino/as in US federal and state prisons
alone (Harrison and Beck, 2006).3 To the extent that today, as Ben Olguı́n 3 On 5 December
points out in his article, ‘‘the War on Crime has converged with the War on 2007, a press release
by the US Department
Terror through the deliberate subversions of international treaties and protocols
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of Justice Bureau of to which the United States is a signatory,’’ it is essential that a two-prong
Statistics highlighted struggle against this practice of the government’s willful incarceration of Latino/as
that at the end of
be initiated. The first involves the restoration of the US government’s respect
2006, ‘‘one in every
31 US adults was in a for the rule of law both at home and abroad, clearly fundamental to the claim
prison or jail or on and well-being of this society’s democracy. In this respect, the various laws
probation or parole.’’ enacted since 9/11/2001 have served, as Olguı́n succinctly states, to
http://www.ojp.
usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/
press/
collectively curtail constitutional freedoms of speech, association and
p06ppus06pr.htm information; infringe constitutional rights to legal representation, a timely
(accessed 1/9/08) public trial and protection from unreasonable searches; and also allow for the
use of extrajudicial imprisonment and secret military tribunals for citizens
and non-citizens accused of aiding or abetting terrorism.

More importantly, the War on Terror has introduced the category of

‘‘enemy combatant,’’ a classification unique in American jurisprudence
because it situates its designee in the interstices of domestic and international
law.

It is this infringement of both US constitutional traditions and the Geneva

conventions, as Olguı́n’s article demonstrates, that justifies the second
approach to addressing the issues discussed above: that is, the relocation of
the debates on incarceration in the United States, firmly in the international
sphere, and specifically under the jurisdiction of international human rights
law. Olguı́n focuses on the incarceration primarily of Latino/as as well as
of other people of color to draw attention to and address the full implications of
the rejection by the United States of international human rights protocols;
of its insistence that as the only super power, it reserves the exclusive right
to choose to adhere to or ignore international agreements; and of the responses
by international organizations such as Amnesty International to the human
rights abuses and violations of the United States, both at home and abroad.
Arguing that the issue at hand is ‘‘the treatment of human beings not simply
prisoners per se,’’ Olguı́n calls for the use of the courts, mass mobilizations,
and the simultaneous internationalization of local prisoner campaigns.
‘‘We must,’’ he argues, ‘‘show that the new US Carceral is in fact inhumane
and in regular and deliberate violation of international treaties and norms.’’
Ultimately then, the focus on Latino/as and prisons invites careful and
nuanced analyses and discussions that call into question the current rhetorical,
opportunistic and problematic responses to the pressing problem of an unjust
and inhumane criminal justice system, which for so long has violated the human
rights of those it incarcerates, often with full impunity, as raúlsalinas attests in
his interview. Moreover, as these authors suggest, the full import of the
arguments and data they present can only be comprehended within a
framework that conceptualizes and questions the social and political institutions
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and polity of the United States, together with the government’s current emphasis
on national security, immigration, the militarization of border controls, and the
policing of Latino/as and other sectors of the population.
The demonization of individuals and groups, specifically of Latino/as, is
intimately related to the inescapable fact that the United States of America
as a nation and polity is today choosing injustice over justice, inhumanity
over compassion, xenophobic enclosure over its traditional ideals and insistence
both on human dignity and on human beings’ right to have rights. How to deal
with an enemy is the cornerstone of all human legal systems – ancient, primitive
or the most modern variety. It is therefore the sine qua non condition for the
continued existence of any and all human societies. For, the definition and
treatment of the ‘‘enemy’’ or of ‘‘guilt’’ and ‘‘blame’’ are but the corollaries of
our understanding and experience of humans living together. It is in view of this
that Aristotle (1983) – the eternal foreigner in the most celebrated of all
democracies, Athens, from which he was exiled in old age – claimed justice to be
‘‘what holds the city together,’’ a quintessentially human task.
Today, we are confronted with the very disturbing reality that this country is
indeed building walls, with no consideration for what it is walling in and what it
is walling out. This double issue seeks to highlight that recognition. For, once
this reality is fully acknowledged, and its implications better understood, we
then must mobilize to tear them down. The only ‘‘wall’’ that a genuine
democracy must build, and one that guarantees its true existence, is justice in all
its dimensions and for all the people, including Latinas and Latinos in the
United States.
The articles and most of the Vivencias essays in this Special Issue were first
presented at the conference, ‘‘Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prisons,’’ organized by
this journal and held at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in October 2006. In
addition to thanking UIC, I would like to say a special thanks to Karen Benita
Reyes and Marta E. Ayala for their invaluable support and enthusiasm both in
the weeks before the conference and during the conference itself.

Suzanne Oboler
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
City University of New York,
New York, NY

Re fe r e n c es

Aristotle. 1983. Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Genova, Nicholas. 2006. The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘‘Illegality’’.
In Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging, ed. Suzanne Oboler, 61–90.
New York and London: Palgrave Press.
Frost, Robert. 1914. Mending Wall. North of Boston, London: David Nutt.
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Fry, Richard and Shirin Hakimzadeh. 2006. A Statistical Portrait of Hispanics at Mid-
Decade. Pew Hispanic Center, August 29. http://pewhispanic.org/reports/middecade/,
accessed 03/01/08.
Guerra-Thompson, Sandra. 2007. Immigration and the Law. Center For Mexican
American Studies, University of Houston: Noticias, 5(1), Fall. http://www.tache.org/
pdfs/5520_CMAS_noticias_last.pdf, accessed 1/3/08.
Harrison, Paige M. and Allen J. Beck. (November, 2006). Prisoners in 2005 (NCJ 215092).
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Mauer, Marc and Ryan S. King. July, 2007. Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration
By Race and Ethnicity, http://www.sentencingproject.org/PublicationDetails.aspx?
PublicationID=59, accessed 1/9/08.
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Latino Studies (2008) 6, 1–10. doi:10.1057/lst.2008.18