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Ernie López and Rafael Pérez-Torres
University of Texas Press, Austin, 2005
230pp., $22.95 Paperback
ISBN
0-292-70683-9
; Juanita Díaz-Cotto
University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006
335pp., $21.95 Paperback
ISBN
0-292-71316-9
Chicana and Chicano prisoners have not received sufficient attention, even among prison reformists and abolitionists. An example of the magnitude of this inattention is the fact that for many, Theodore Davidson's flawed 1974 study, Chicano Prisoners , remains influential over 30 years after its publication, despite previously unimaginable increases in the US prison population since 1978 and the prominent place of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in this increase. Scholars and activists will therefore welcome these two new books. While different from each other in methodology, time period covered, and attention to gender and sexuality, they complement each other in offering new perspectives "from below" on the experiences of Chicanas and Chicanos in prisons and jails in California since World War II.
López is a Chicano former prisoner whose involvement with the police began in his early teens during the Great Depression in Los Angeles. UCLA English professor Rafael Pérez-Torres worked with López over the course of a year to produce a life-narrative that spans his boyhood to the 1960s. During this time, López experienced repeated arrest and imprisonment, brutality at the hands of police and guards, and stints (as the book's title tells) at the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island and on California's death row, convicted for a murder of which he still claims innocence. A useful "Afterword" by the academic coauthor describes the details of their collaboration in producing this book, which Pérez-Torres characterizes along the lines of Latin American testimonios. Many academic readers might want to start with the Afterword, as it reflects on the conditions of the narrative's production, offers some historical context for López's story, introduces questions of authorial reliability, and draws some connections, parallels, and points of disjuncture with Edward James Olmos's American Me (1992), with which many readers will already be familiar.
In terms of the view from below, the chronicling of abuse, injustice, and racism, and the collaborative relationship between traditional and organic intellectual, Pérez-Torres is correct in comparing To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back with testimonios. However, López's own self-presentation and the flavor of the narrative remind...