Cell taught, self taught: The Chicano Movement behind bars - Urban Chicanos, rural prisons, and the prisoners' rights movement

This essay places the Chicano Movement at the center of a struggle over prisoners' rights and the construction of carceral states. It chronicles the prisoners' rights movement through the lens of two urban Chicano prisoner activists incarcerated on rural prison farms - Fred Cruz and David Ruíz. It recounts the intellectual and political evolution of Fred Cruz, a native of San Antonio, who promoted social justice by embracing the law, traditions of civic nationalism, and American constitutionalism. It also considers the more politicized path of David Ruíz, a native of Austin and the author of the nation's longest civil rights trial, Ruiz v. Estelle (1978-1980). His turn to radicalization linked the legal effort for prisoners' rights with the wider Chicano movement outside of prison walls. As a study of urban Chicanos incarcerated on rural prison farms, this article demonstrates how geographical dislocation allowed Chicano prisoners to imagine their coerced geographic dislocation as analogous to the ways in which slavery uprooted African communities. In the American southwest, the coerced dislocation of urban minorities meant that rural prisons received a rising number of Mexican American prisoners who carried with them into prison their experience as city dwellers exposed to an urban Chicano radicalism and also as exploited workers for the vast agricultural empire of the Southwest. By offering an analysis of the ways in which Mexican Americans pioneered the prisoners' rights movement in Texas, this article serves as a reminder that Latino/a prisoners constitute an essential cornerstone to social justice movements that confronted the construction of carceral states.