Politics and Prison Ink in Arizona A Map for Navigation in a World of Post-structural Violence

Abstract

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• Politics and Prison Ink in Arizona A Map for Navigation in a World of Post-structural Violence
• Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo (bio)

The American Southwest is a land of myths, legends, and folk heroes, complex in terms of the cultural confluence and geographic idiosyncrasies of the region. Even the notion of the "Southwest" is fluid, youthful, still working itself out through processes of politics and policing, from immigration reform to the increasing militarization of the southern border. The American Southwest is culturally indebted to the Mexican Northwest, for everything from the names of its streets and the food eaten to the illegal narcotics consumed by Anglos who now lay claim to the land. The Southwest is an unsteady amalgamation of Mestizo, Anglo, and Native cultures, still in flux, still learning how to coexist without bloodshed. It is a concept as well as a place, struggling with contradiction, with history, and with its own imagination. And no place is more quintessentially "southwestern" than Arizona.

Arizona, its desert drenched in startling fluorescent purple and orange sunsets, is a place of extreme contrasts. It is home to both one of the largest and fastest-developing metropolises in the United States, the urban sprawl of the greater Phoenix area, and thousands of square miles of unpopulated, unique ecosystems where the myth of a barren desert wasteland is laid to rest in blooms of vibrant, colorful flora. It is a land where the cherished figures of the cowboy, the vigilante, and the outlaw have transcended their geographical constraints to inhabit the global imagination, immediately recognizable thanks to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood by way of Hollywood. There can be no mistaking that it is also a place of violence, in the imagination and in its bloody and war-torn history. A modern history of Arizona—downright recent when compared to the likes of the Revolutionary War or Civil War, or even with World War I—was fully built upon, planned out, and paved only after Pearl Harbor. [End Page 302] There are bricks in the walls of bars in Boston hundreds of years older than the great state of Arizona, although the administrative presence of the Spanish, along with their garrisons and jails, dates to the late 17th century.

An indelible part of Arizona's historical tradition is the prison. From the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison, constructed in 1876, to the modern-day correctional bloat that boasts the fifth highest rate of incarceration in the country, Arizona has always been a place that believes in hard time. Today, Arizona spends one billion dollars per annum on maintaining its prison system.¹ That is nearly 10 percent of the state's entire budget. The demographics of Arizona's incarcerated population will not shock anyone familiar with policies like SB 1070: a disproportionately high number of Black and Native people given their small numbers in the state, poor White people, and Mexicans. Lots and lots of Mexicans.

On many of these Mexicans will be found rich tapestries of tattoos that tell a tale of cultural heritage and ethnic pride. In prison, tattooing is a way of coping with incarceration by reclaiming the one material possession that the State of Arizona does not have absolute control over: the prisoner's very body. While in custody, every aspect of life boils down to a form of violence, whether it is administered from the top-down authority of the state or from the bottom-up control of racialized prison gangs.² Tattoos become more than a mere representation of who a person is or claims to be; tats become a map to navigate the (im)material world of prison violence. The material aspect of this invisible but ever-present violence is manifested in the application of tattoos, which become an iconographic language unto themselves that prisoners must learn to read quickly, lest they unknowingly find themselves up against extreme danger.

Tattoo artists in prison command a large degree of respect, in part because the products of their trade are so widely sought. Artists primarily tattoo members of their own race, although they are free to tattoo members of other races if that race is not considered an enemy by an...