Chicano Tragedy

by Marcos Eduardo Vigil, C36354 P.O. Box 7500 / C9-212 U Crescent City, CA 95532-7500

Locked in time are we, the incarcerated Chicano, imprisoned in a labyrinth of cubicles inside the utter madness that is Pelican Bay State Prison. Most traces of humanity have been erased from our sordid lives; even the sun has been extinguished by our keepers, who do not permit us to enter into the equation of nature. Rather, we are force-fed a diet of anguish and solitude, forbidden to be who we are, the ever proud descendants of Teotihuacan, Tula and Tenochtitlan!

We are society's faceless and discarded human waste, who could not be trusted with our own dismal fates, forgotten sons who dare not dream of a world beyond the perimeters of our allotted cells, who yearn to find some hidden passage out of this fortress of perpetual time to take us back to our barrios and the lives we left behind.

I wonder if the barrios still stand or if they too have perished from the face of the earth like their children, the forsaken 60 percenters who live only in memory, their names scrawled across some picket fence like indelible symbols of their former selves-true barrio warriors who carried the banners of their calling with heads held high, backs ever to the wind, making futile attempts to reclaim a piece of tierra stolen from us long ago. We ran about the streets like nocturnal creatures of the night seeking our fame and fortune in an impoverished landscape. That landscape offered us little hope and gave us only the bumps and bruises that our broken and bullet-riddled bodies bore from the countless street wars fought throughout the barrios of Califa-Chicanos chasing down Chicanos as if they were raptors in some primordial hunt for wild game. But a game this was not! We were disenfranchised young men who saw ourselves as the dispensers of life's tragedies, young men who harbored little regard for a society incapable of embracing us as equals and acknowledging our inherent worth as human beings.

As our apocalyptic world, the inner-city cesspool of crime and poverty, orbited upon its bloody axis, we were systematically relegated to the bottom of society and painted as the worst of the worst-dysfunctional, illiterate dregs who could not function on our own but must be chained, warehoused, and controlled by the state, separated from all that defined our unacceptable characteristics and recalcitrant behavior. Thus the Chicano was made a prime candidate for Pelican Bay's infamous SHU, a prison environment designed solely to test an individual's threshhold for unabated pain and physical abuse, as though we deserve nothing better than a steel-toed boot to the face and balls.

This is the existence that many of us will never escape-invisible and mute half-men who live in the shadows of confinement, pacified and numbed, unable to touch, feel or hold our loved ones.

It is obvious to me, facing a lifetime of incarceration and spitting in its eye, that ten or twenty Pelican Bays erected on the morrow will not alter the crime rate one iota! There will always be a need to pour billions of dollars into prison after prison to incarcerate Chicanos so long as we continue to spawn chavalitos who don't know who they are nor where they came from-chavalitos who will never know of such men as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Vasconcelos-all men of color and vision who sought to enlighten the minds of Chicano/Mexicano children.

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