The power of Latina/x/o studies beyond the ivory tower and inside prison walls

Although Blacks and Latinas/xs/os make up about 31% of the US population (13 and 18%, respectively), they make up about 59% of the prison population (40 and 19%, respectively) (Sakala 2014). What power can Latina/x/o studies have for those incarcerated in prisons? In the spring of 2017, as part of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project (PNAP), I taught an introductory Latina/x/o studies course at Stateville Correctional Center (Stateville), a maximum security prison outside of Chicago, Illinois. Over 14 weeks, the students and I built an intellectual community that allowed us to critically interrogate and transform our understandings of the societies in which we live and of ourselves. In this vivencia I describe the context of the class through a discussion of PNAP, Stateville, our class, and course outcomes. More generally, I argue that Latina/x/o studies provides tools for individual and collective transformation by building Black-Brown solidarity, developing criticality, and building self-confidence among incarcerated people.


Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project
Since August 2016, I have been a member of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. PNAP, cofounded by Sarah Ross in 2012, is a collective of artists, writers, educators, and activists in the Chicagoland area that provides arts and humanities courses to men incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. Classes run on a fourteen-week semester schedule and meet once per week. Three to five classes are offered in fall, spring, and summer, with each class enrolling about fifteen men. Courses have included African American studies, history, theater, writing, drawing and animation, criminology, Latina/x/o studies, philosophy, and art history, among many others, and are taught by Chicago-based artists and faculty from various colleges and universities. Each course results in scholarly and creative work that is exhibited in publications, community spaces, and galleries around Chicago.
PNAP's goal is to connect the ideas, knowledge, and work of those incarcerated at Stateville with members of the surrounding communities. We, collective members of PNAP, believe that the arts and humanities are important tools for social transformation and knowledge production. Through our courses, we provide students with the vocabularies and skills that allow them to articulate their wealth of knowledge and critical perspectives. Additionally, within the context of a prison system that has almost completely defunded any kind of educational and art programming for incarcerated students, PNAP has taken up the task of providing critical and rigorous interdisciplinary programming that combines art-making with history, sociology, philosophy, and literature.

Stateville Correctional Center
Stateville Correctional Center is a maximum security prison located about thirtyfive miles southwest of Chicago, Illinois. Stateville opened in 1925 and currently incarcerates about 1100 men (IDOC 2018). It has been featured in popular media, such as the film Natural Born Killers and an episode of National Geographic's Lockdown, and photos of its "F-House" (based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon layout) can be found in publications of Michel Foucault's (1977) Discipline and Punish. Stateville shows its age in the paint peeling off the walls, rusted doors, gates that can be opened only by physical key, and poor heating and air conditioning systems. The lack of proper cooling systems led to an extended prisonwide lockdown during the summer of 2016. Outdated plumbing, pest infestation, and overall deterioration were central reasons for the F-House being permanently closed in 2016.

Course preparation
In response to years of student requests, PNAP coordinator Sarah Ross asked her artist and educator friends if they knew anyone who would be interested in and qualified for teaching a Latina/x/o studies course. On the recommendations of multiple people, Sarah contacted me in August 2016, asking whether I would be interested in teaching at Stateville the following spring. I quickly and enthusiastically accepted the position. At that time, I was not involved in PNAP and had never taught in a prison setting, but I was familiar with their work. PNAP and the 96 Acres Project, an artist collective of which I am a member, collaborated on a public art project in 2015. My course, Introduction to Latina/o Studies, critically examined the historical and contemporary experiences of Latinas/xs/os in the United States.
Course descriptions were due 3 months prior to the beginning of classes, to be approved by Stateville administration and circulated to prospective PNAP students. To enroll, prospective students had to complete an application in which they detailed past educational experience, experience with PNAP classes, and why they were interested in taking a PNAP course. Five courses were offered, but each student could take only one course. Two months prior to the beginning of classes, course instructors met to review student applications. I chose fourteen students out of the seventeen applications for my class.
Seven of my students were Latino (two Mexican, one Puerto Rican, and four Mexican-American), five students were African American, and two students were both African American and Mexican-American. Three students had taken college courses, four students had a GED, and seven had less than a high school diploma. Students' ages ranged from 22 to 45. All students had long-term prison sentences (45-60 years) with two having life sentences. Some Latino students stated in their applications that they wanted to take the class to learn more about their histories, the African American/Mexican-American students both claimed they knew about African American history and culture but felt disconnected from their Mexican side, and several African American students said they were interested in the connections between their experiences and Latina/x/o experiences.
Learning a little bit about my students before constructing my syllabus allowed me to shape the structure and content of the course around their interests, strengths, and needs. With reflection on my students' lived realities, their interests, and what they could gain from this course, I decided this course required aims and goals that went beyond simply improving their intellectual skills, such as critical thinking, writing, and speaking. I saw this course as an opportunity to create a space that resists the larger violent institution in which PNAP students must live. During my conversations with other PNAP collective members, they shared their knowledge of what life is like for PNAP students. Isolation, boredom, and a lack of expectations/ structure are central punishment mechanisms at Stateville. To resist these, I wanted to build a classroom community that facilitated personal trust and relationships among PNAP students, allowed students to honestly express their ideas and feelings, instilled confidence in students, and connected students to outside communities.
Various institutional restrictions forced me to be creative and extremely intentional about my course preparation. I could not bring my own laptop to class, nor would I have access to the internet. All course readings, films, and other materials had to be approved by prison administration. Certain images and language were not allowed, such as maps, images of weapons, sexuality, negative portrayals of Stateville and prison officials, and words like "revolution." This surveillance over class material required me to take a fugitive approach. By "fugitive" I mean finding ways to subvert the power of the institution that would not easily be legible as resistance by the institutional gaze. The genealogy of fugitivity in the United States can be traced back to the practices of African Americans escaping slavery using forged documents, cultural practices, and physical disguises that seemingly complied with dominant social systems and ideologies while actually resulting in the undermining of those very structures (Browne 2015). I chose readings and films that would provide students with tools to critically analyze the United States and its major institutions, to recognize the ways that they are personally harmed by and maintain systems of oppression, and to resist systems of oppression. I hoped that the chosen material would be useful in helping students minimize the violence of living in a maximum security prison. Therefore, I needed to strategically select readings and films that would be approved by prison officials but would also lead my students and I to address topics that may not be allowed in course material.
For example, I chose the revised edition of Harvest of Empire by Juan González, because it provided a concise and accessible analysis of the imperial violence that the United States has perpetrated throughout Latin America. I also chose this edition because I felt that the cover image of a child holding a U.S. flag would not motivate prison officials to deeply scrutinize the text. Similarly, I chose Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her because it would facilitate discussions about patriarchy, genderbased violence, heterosexism, sexuality, and toxic masculinity while possibly gaining legitimacy and limited scrutiny with its "New York Times Best Seller" label.
I also purposefully centered work by and in the tradition of women-of-color feminists in order to challenge students to question the roles that toxic masculinity, misogyny, and heterosexism play in the maintenance and operation of the institution in which they lived and in the ways they interact with other incarcerated men and those in the outside world. My hope was that they would reflect and transform the ways that they saw themselves, others, and the prison. I wanted to make our classroom a space that was not structured by the gendered social norms that structure prison life. Our classroom would be a space in which students could be vulnerable, talk about emotions, and openly question gender and sexuality. However, material that could be viewed by prison officials as being explicitly about sex was not allowed. For example, Sandra Cisneros's "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess" was rejected from the course reader during the approval process.
Each student was given copies of Harvest of Empire and This Is How You Lose Her, a reader composed of scholarly articles and book chapters, and paper, and pencils. When possible, I would bring materials that students had requested, such as images, English as a Second Language workbooks, and poetry books. We covered topics such as the history of US intervention/interference in Latin America, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the Chicano Rights Movement, Chicana feminisms, Latino threat narrative, Afro-Latinidad, immigration control, multiracial solidarity, and family and romantic relationships. We watched the documentaries Latino Americans and Black in Latin America. Students were assigned seventy-five to one hundred pages of reading per week. They had to complete weekly reading commentaries, design a cover and write an introduction for the course reader, and write a final academic paper or creative writing project connecting course material to the theme of "The Long Term." Throughout the course, we used in-class exercises and formal debates to further investigate and discuss course topics.

Inside the classroom
My class met for 2 hours and 45 minutes once per week for 14 weeks. PNAP faculty would arrive at Stateville about 45 minutes before classes started and enter together. It usually took about 30 minutes to go through inspection and the three security checkpoints on the way to the classrooms.
Books, course readers, and films had to be approved by the prison administration, but additional material that I brought with me, such as supplemental readings, images, slideshows, CDs, and video clips, were not under as much surveillance. It was up to individual guards to determine how deeply they wanted to examine these materials. For example, there were several times when guards at checkpoints would take time to read through materials I brought or would arbitrarily attempt to confiscate books, colored pencils, or artwork. While prison guards did not sit inside classrooms, a guard sat about thirty feet away from the classroom door, which had to be left open. They would sometimes randomly sit in classes and listen to discussions. Students could also have their cells searched without notice.
Each week, students completed commentaries on assigned readings. Commentaries required students to articulate the main arguments of a text in their own words, reflect on the ideas and feelings that the texts elicited, and pose a discussion question to the class. We opened each class with students sharing their reflections and questions. During discussions, students shared their personal experiences, collectively worked through difficult concepts and theories, and engaged in intellectual disagreements. For example, in one of the more impressive discussions, students worked together to understand theories of biopolitics, necropolitics, and sovereignty and used them to analyze the experiences of Latinas/xs/os in the United States.
Because of their limited access to visual media outside of the classroom, students deeply engaged with films, which elicited strong reactions and profound questions and discussions. For example, we watched a documentary on Latina/x/o social movements of the 1970s. During the film, students raised their "power fists," clapped, and cheered when the film showed marches, walk-outs, or other direct actions. Afterward, we had a lively discussion about the relevance of these histories to today's social problems.
Organized in-class debates were an opportunity for students to learn to clearly and concisely articulate their ideas and respond to opposing views. For example, I divided the class into two teams to debate social change. One side had to argue that social transformation comes from increased Latina/x/o representation in mainstream institutions. The other side had to take the position that social transformation comes from the creation of new institutions by grassroots, community activism. Students learned how and why individuals, organizations, and movements take different approaches to social change.
Throughout the semester students had several in-class exercises. They used visual art, creative writing, and policy recommendations to respond to a prompt. When we covered Chicana feminisms, students had to creatively respond to the question, "How have I benefited from patriarchy and how have I been harmed by patriarchy?" One student wrote a poem titled "Parallel Lives," in which he discussed the very different treatment that he and his sister experienced growing up and the effect it had on their relationship. Another student wrote a semifictional short story based on his regret for not intervening when a friend of his experienced gender-based violence. Students also designed their own cover for the course reader (Figs. 1, 2, 3).
Another exercise required students to develop an immigration policy recommendation. They could not just say what they wanted to get rid of, such as the Border Patrol, Donald Trump, or the border wall. They also had to critically think about what institutions they would create, how they would address current issues, and what new occupations and training would be needed. One student developed a plan that included abolishing the Border Patrol and retraining agents to provide services to immigrants. They also wanted to provide housing for immigrants and improve mental health, job placement, and education services for immigrants.
We concluded the semester with a celebration attended by PNAP students and faculty from all five courses. During this celebration, students were presented with certificates; students performed poetry, theater, and sang; and students and faculty

Course outcomes
This course had three main outcomes: increased Black and Latina/x/o solidarity; increased student criticality; and increased student self-confidence.
One of my goals while preparing this course was to facilitate Black and Latina/x/o solidarity. Throughout the class I highlighted histories of multiracial solidarity activism, the similarities between Black and Latina/x/o communities, and theories that argue that Black and Latina/x/o communities are oppressed by the same social structures, albeit in distinct ways. On the last day of class, students were given time to reflect on all that they have learned during the semester. A Latino student and an African American student both shared that they better understood the similarities between Black and Latina/x/o experiences. They proposed that they should share their knowledge from class with other men locked up at Stateville. A student wrote in his course evaluation, "I was thinking perhaps the course could be geared for the students to create a platform that can help increase Black-Brown solidarity to improve the racial tensions and misnomers of both groups so that we can go forward inside and outside these walls." These students noted that they could try to advocate for better treatment (less guard brutality, more resources, better food, etc.) if they organized across racial lines. For his final project, a student wrote a manifesto, "Long-Term Plan," in which he calls for Black and Latina/x/o communities to unite for social change.
Students also gained critical thinking skills about their own lives and social structures. One student wrote in his course evaluation that he learned to respect women's rights more. Another student, inspired by a chapter in This Is How You Lose Her, wrote a letter to himself from the perspective of his girlfriend about her experience being in love with someone who is in prison. In this fictional letter, the student critically analyzed how gender and race ideologies label his girlfriend as "crazy," "deviant," and "sad" because she loves him. He displayed a profound and reflexive understanding of how women are treated in our society. Many students used their final papers to analyze the ideologies and structures that lead our society to so heavily rely on incarceration. One used poetry, some composed manifestos, and others developed op-ed pieces. They all displayed a nuanced understanding of the economic, social, and political causes of mass incarceration and long-term sentencing.
One of the most important outcomes was for students to gain self-confidence. Life in a maximum security prison is often defined by a lack of expectations. Men who are incarcerated are told that they are of no value to society, unintelligent, monsters, and unable to achieve anything. One student remarked on his course evaluation that he discovered that "I can achieve anything I put my mind in." Several students noted that they gained more respect for themselves as intellectuals with improved speaking and writing skills. They learned that they are just as smart and capable as college students, because they read and understood the same material that I assign in my college courses. One student said that he "grew as a man, but more importantly as a human being." Many shared that they felt empowered and excited to share their ideas and knowledge with their families.

Going forward
As this was my first time teaching in a prison, there were many unanticipated challenges and much room for improvement. First, I should have done more to facilitate a sense among students that they were connected to individuals outside of Stateville. An important prison rule is that PNAP cannot be viewed by prison officials as facilitating personal communication between students and the outside world. Letters from students and personal addresses are viewed as contraband and have gotten former PNAP faculty kicked out of the prison permanently. However, I believe there are ways that I could have used communication between students and the outside world as a tool in the course without breaking the rules. For example, students could have been given an exercise to write a letter to a public official or to a social justice organization. Because isolation is a major form of prison punishment, students appreciate any sense that they are connected with other people, that people on the outside know they exist, and that their voices are heard.
I also realized how much I rely on the availability of internet access in my regular college teaching to answer student questions, provide examples, or share current events. Teaching in prison requires that you be overprepared as an instructor. Students often asked questions about authors, current events, and historical events that I could not answer off the top of my head. I suggest instructors bring an "extra resource packet" to every class. This would include biographical information about authors and important figures related to the day's topic, additional readings, articles about current events related to the day's topic, and so on.
On a logistical level, I highly recommend having a meticulous digitization process. Students' work is ephemeral. At any moment, prison officials could shake down their cells and throw away their work. I do not have a record of all the work produced by students. I wanted students to keep all of their work for their own use, but sometimes they lost it and I did not have a copy. Therefore, I suggest consistently scanning everything students produce for class.

The power of Latina/x/o studies in prison
Given the large number of incarcerated Blacks and Latinas/xs/os and the mechanisms of carceral punishment, Latina/x/o studies can play a powerful role in prisons. The development of critical consciousness that makes Latina/x/o studies (and other ethnic studies) so important for college students of color is also what makes it important for incarcerated students of color, such as fostering a sense of collective history, providing representation and validation of their experiences, and developing a vocabulary so they can better understand themselves, their communities, and the societies in which they live. However, so much more is at stake for incarcerated students because of the everyday violence of incarceration. Latina/x/o studies can provide Black and Latina/x/o incarcerated students with tools that may help them resist the dehumanizing reality of incarceration.
First, Latina/x/o studies provides incarcerated students with a framework and vocabulary that counters the hegemonic, dehumanizing, hyper-individualist narrative that portrays them as monsters. Latina/x/o studies helps incarcerated students better understand the historical and contemporary structural reasons why they and individuals from similar racial and class backgrounds are overrepresented in prisons. The path that led them to prison is not solely paved by inherent deficiencies, wickedness, or worthlessness. Learning this can be a liberating process for incarcerated individuals who live within an institution that does not recognize them as human beings with any value. Latina/x/o studies affirms their humanity.
Second, Latina/x/o studies opens up possibilities. Learning about the struggles and successes of Latina/x/o communities, Black and Latina/x/o incarcerated students begin to see that, despite their oppressed position, there is always a possibility to organize and try to improve their conditions. They learn that a "wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down" (Shakur 1987, p. 1). They begin to question and analyze why incarcerated individuals, who share a common material condition, are so divided, and they develop strategies to overcome those divisions. This can help them resist the overall feeling of powerlessness that incarcerated people are supposed to feel.
Lastly, Latina/x/o studies turns prison walls sideways, into bridges. Latina/x/o studies connects incarcerated students with the outside world. A major function of prison is isolation. Incarcerated individuals feel separated from the outside world and frozen in time. The outside world progresses and changes, while incarcerated people feel stuck. Latina/x/o studies breaks that isolation by connecting Black and Latina/x/o incarcerated students to various communities. By actively engaging with current scholarly debates, they feel like they are a part of a larger intellectual and political community. Their increased knowledge about the historical struggles of Latinas/xs/os gives them a sense of being connected to a historical community. Overall, they feel a part of the outside world when their work is shared and their voice is heard. These connections resist the dehumanization and violence of isolation.
This vivenicia has illustrated that Latina/x/o studies has power beyond the academy and power inside prison walls. The large numbers of Blacks and Latinas/xs/os in prisons make prison an important place for Latina/x/o studies to be taught. Latina/x/o studies scholars often talk about making higher education more accessible, producing more accessible scholarship, and being more engaged with our communities. However, we often forget about those members of our communities who are behind prison walls. As shown with my PNAP students, Latina/x/o studies can help incarcerated students resist the dehumanizing violence of incarceration.