and everyone involved with the Young Scholars Symposium for their valuable input. Finally, I want to extend a special recognition to Anthony Peguero and Robert Durán—not only for providing their own feedback on earlier drafts of this research, but also for laying the groundwork for a community of Latina/o criminologists that has provided me and so many others with a professional space to grow into. You have all not only helped me tremendously in developing this book, but have also welcomed me into the academy and made sure I knew that the scholarship I had to offer was valued.
Throughout the process of planning and writing this work, I have been lucky to be surrounded by a talented group of peers and colleagues who have always helped me immensely and pushed me to keep up with their own brilliance. Thank you everyone from the 2014 cohort of the SRI—Daniel Gascón, Reuben Miller, Michael Walker, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Evelyn Patterson, Lallen Johnson, and Valerie Wright—for your feedback, ongoing friendship and encouragement, and memories of racist dots and cracking the ground. Thanks to Jerry Flores and Adrían Félix for being motivating writing partners I could always rely on to meet up at the library or coffee shop and actually write. Equally important were Katie, Scott, Armando, and Danny, who kept me sane by getting me out of the house during this process, congratulating me when it went well, and encouraging when it got dicey.
Most of all, I need to thank my partner and colleague Melissa Guzman. You have been there for me the entire time and never let me give up—when I couldn’t find a research site, when I didn’t think I could afford to stay in the field, or when I hit a wall while writing and didn’t think that I could finish it. You always keep me sharp and challenge me to think about my research in new ways. You have made me a better writer, teacher, and scholar. But most importantly you always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself, and not only reminded me that this was an important project but convinced me that I was capable of doing it. I love you, and can never thank you enough for the support you gave to me during this research. You influenced this work more than anyone.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my grandparents Jorge and Emma Lopez-Aguado. The entire time I was conducting this research, you opened your home to me and gave me a place to stay and recover from long days of traveling, volunteering, and interviewing. You have always shared everything you have and done everything you could to help and take care of me. It was a personal blessing to me to be able to spend this time with you, to share meals and desserts with you, and to get to know the two of you again as an adult, and I will never forget it. I owe finishing this book to you, because without you this entire project would have never been possible. Thank you grandma and grandpa, for everything.
Introduction
The Carceral Social Order
Frank went to prison the first time when he was twenty-one years old. Coming of age on the predominantly Chicana/o Eastside of Fresno in the early 1990s, he became active in its drug trade as a young man—he started rolling with Crips at fourteen, selling crack at sixteen, and by nineteen had moved on to robbing drug dealers. Then his daughter was born. Frank decided to quit gangbanging, leave the drug game, and make an effort to straighten his life out. “[I] started slowing down everything. Stopped hanging around with my cousins, just started working. Just doing the right thing.” But working in the formal economy was not making him enough money to get by and support his new family. As times got more desperate Frank turned back to what he knew made money—drug robberies. After one robbery his victims report him to police, and when the police come to investigate they find stolen property in his home. Frank is arrested and eventually sentenced to three years in prison.
As his bus pulls up in front of the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, he sees a collection of armed guards waiting. They pull him off the bus and march him and the others into the facility like cattle, past the large barking dogs that lunge and sniff at him as he passes by. His eyes catch hostile glances from everyone around him, both the prison staff and the other inmates. Once inside, nobody will talk to him. He gets nervous seeing everyone else around him start to clique up into small groups, but he stays by himself on a bench waiting to see what is going to happen to him. A corrections officer finally comes for him and escorts him to a large gymnasium lined with rows of double bunks and filled with hundreds of inmates. Not sure why he’s been brought here or who else is here, he sits on a bed feeling alone and unsure of what he is going to do. But hearing someone yelling behind him, Frank turns around and realizes something.
He already knows a lot of the men in here.
“[I hear] hey Frank! And I look. My heart was like thank you! I was like thank you God!” So many years later Frank would laugh as he remembers how relieved he felt in that moment, and how surprised he was to see so many familiar faces in the prison with him. “[W]hen I got there, to Jamestown, I knew practically everybody in there. From all the years I was growing up, all from the Eastside. [I knew a] lotta guys there.” Soon he hears more and more calls of “Frank!” “Hey man, what’s going on?!” “Frank!” “What’s up?!” Many remember him from high school as one of the students who always got good grades. “Man what are you doing here?” All he can think to tell them is “I got caught up.”
Frank finds several of the guys he grew up with in his neighborhood are already here, meaning that he won’t have to face the prison alone. Their presence helps him feel much less fearful about how the next three years are going to unfold. But with the unexpected support Frank finds with this group, being associated with them also exposes him to new tensions and conflicts, and in some cases violence.
Then I didn’t roll with the Crips. I told him I don’t wanna be gang-banging no more, I was just from Fresno. And so they just put me with the Fresno people but they were all Bulldogs in there, but they didn’t know me. I was just running with Fresno. Everybody asked me “Where you from?” “Fresno.” “Oh you a Bulldog?” “No, I’m just from Fresno,” but they would get it twisted sometimes. “Oh you from Fresno so you have to be a ‘dog!” but I was like “Naw, naw.” I had some problems with that, [had to] fight a few people over that.
Frank’s ability to find some support with the others from Fresno also subjects him to being associated with Bulldog gang members from Fresno. As Frank begins doing his time and acclimating to the prison, he starts to face challenges from other groups of inmates, some of which escalate into fistfights. But these do not start just because others suspect he is a rival gang member. Instead, he gets into fights for breaking the rules.
Not long after arriving at Jamestown, Frank joins a basketball game with a group of Black inmates one afternoon on the yard. He thinks nothing of it, but afterwards other Latino prisoners confront him about it. Latino inmates from Southern California flex their authority on the yard and tell him he can’t be hanging around with the Blacks. Frank reacts angrily to people he doesn’t know telling him who he can or cannot hang out with, but his friends quickly intervene. They tell him that even though the Fresno group doesn’t care about socializing across races, he should abide by the Southerners’ rules in order to keep the peace because they drastically outnumber them. Frank can’t believe it and protests: “You got me messed up dude. I don’t even know these people! I ain’t playing that!” But the others insist.
“No man, you just can’t. You gotta follow prison rules.”
The rules surrounding race that Frank has to learn to navigate are determined by a complex history of conflict between the powerful prison gangs in California’s system. In the late 1950s a group of Los Angeles-based Chicanos form La Eme, ostensibly to protect the few Mexicans inmates held in the then mostly White system. However, over time they begin preying on Latino prisoners from rural territories in Northern California, who some ten years later respond with their own group, La Nuestra Familia. Around this same time, shifting racial demographics in state prisons push White inmates to form the Aryan Brotherhood in response to losing their majority status to a growing population of Black and Latino prisoners, and compel George Jackson to form the Black Guerilla
