Cultural Resilience as Resistance
The World of Mexican Prisoners in Texas
GEORGE T. DÍAZ
Between Prohibition and the Second World War, Blue Ridge State Farm served as “Little Mexico,” or the state’s penal plantation dedicated to the detention of first-term ethnic Mexican prisoners.1 Located near Hobby, Texas, in Fort Bend County, Blue Ridge sat on 4,500 acres of land tended by prisoners tasked with picking cotton, corn, and various foodstuffs for the farm’s operation. Although Mexican Americans served time in prisons across the state and had been a part of the Texas prison system since its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, only at Blue Ridge did ethnic Mexicans constitute a majority.2 Prior to Blue Ridge’s completion in 1921, the state segregated Mexican prisoners by cell blocks or “tanks” within individual prisons.3 As the Texas prison system expanded with new acreage purchases in the 1910s, the state became more able to segregate prisoners by race and designated Blue Ridge as its dumping ground for ethnic Mexican prisoners.4
Mexican Americans serving time in Texas state prisons were a distinct minority, never constituting more than 13 percent of the total prisoners incarcerated throughout the early twentieth century. Like other prisoners, ethnic Mexican prisoners in Texas worked in fields and institution shops in a highly racialized environment. At Blue Ridge State Farm, however, Mexican prisoners utilized the benefits majority status afforded them as a means of resilience. Historians have made great strides in understanding incarceration and its relationship to race, highlighting injustices African Americans suffered in particular; however, other minority groups’ distinct experiences remain underexamined.5 Robert Chase’s and B. V. Olguín’s work sheds great light on pintos, or Mexican American prisoners in the latter half of the twentieth century, but no scholarship directly considers ethnic Mexican prisoners in Texas before the 1970s.6 Chase in particular demonstrates how Chicano prisoners were at the forefront of the prisoners’ rights movement in Texas.7 Ethnic Mexican prisoners’ resistance has deep roots. As early as the 1920s, ethnic Mexican prisoners refused demands to work in order to preserve their well-being and self-respect. My chapter builds on fellow contributor Ethan Blue’s Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons by examining Mexican American prisoners’ “mundane and unknown” lives directly.8 Like the black prisoners David M. Oshinsky considers in “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Mexican prisoners in Texas succeeded in creating a “parallel environment” in the midst of the institution designed to deny them their freedom.9 Without discounting the real abuses prisoners endured on a daily basis, this chapter argues that cultural practices Mexican prisoners maintained provided a means of resilience used to sustain their lives under duress. Indeed, guards’ unfamiliarity with Mexican customs and the Spanish language allowed prisoners to express their “hidden scripts” of resistance in a manner audible yet indiscernible to the state.10
My essay examines the period immediately after that considered by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Although the background of many of the prisoners examined in this chapter are lost, some of the men displaced by the Mexican Revolution fled to Texas and found themselves ensnared by the carceral state. Rather than focus on the detention of individuals for federal immigration offenses, this essay examines men convicted of state crimes whom Texas chose to hold rather than release.11 Texas classified Blue Ridge prisoners under the blanket term “Mexican,” imprisoning hundreds of distinct individuals, many of whom were U.S. citizens, within an imagined community.12 This imposed homogenizing, however, allowed prisoners to create a colonia within the carceral state.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, life for prisoners at Blue Ridge consisted mainly of laboring in fields for the state. Unlike prisons in the eastern United States, which were designed with isolation and rehabilitative reflection in mind, Texas prisons followed a Southern model, where the legacy of slavery endured after 1865. Blue Ridge itself resided on a land plantation that slaves once worked. Indeed, the state purchased the land for Blue Ridge and eight other prison farms with cash crop agriculture in mind.13 Displeased seeing tax money go to house prisoners, Texas legislators put them to work with the intention of generating revenue for the prison system. Down at Blue Ridge, unfree men picked cotton under the watchful eyes of overseers. Although the cultivation of vegetables and livestock contributed to the farm’s operation, the sale of prisoner-worked cotton and cotton seed provided Blue Ridge with over $98,000 of its total $155,432.88 credits for 1924.14 Prisoners, clad in the very material they gathered, typically worked from “sol a sol” or “can see to can’t” in year-round operations that ceased only when flooding or some other calamity made field work impossible.15
Brutal work regimens prompted resistance. In mid-August 1925, the Board of Prison Commissioners issued whipping orders for fifteen Blue Ridge prisoners for work stoppages that amounted to a convict strike.16 Arnold Garza, Ascension Martinez, and nine other men received twenty lashes for “laziness,” particularly “failing to pick even a fair amount of cotton.”17 Jose Zavala, Evarisco Gonzales, and Matias Jeminez refused to go out for work at all and received twenty lashes for their opposition. That same summer, prisoner Cleofus Garza laid down in the field and refused to work when he could not take it anymore. Although Garza received twenty lashes as punishment for his refusal, the sting of the whip faded before the daily tortures of field work, and he rebelled again the following year by refusing to come out of his barracks when called. For “absolutely refusing” to work, Garza received twenty lashes.18 Although Garza’s refusal to leave his building may be attributable to sheer exhaustion, the Texas prison system viewed convict work strikes as “mutinous conduct.”19 Prisoner Mariano Garcia appears to have led one of these mutinies. In late fall 1926, Garcia held back his work squad from their mandatory tasks and received twenty lashes for his organized resistance.20
Unable to meet the guards’ ability to utilize force, prisoners resisted through nonviolent means, such as refusing to work or “cutting up cotton.”21 Rare instances when prisoners challenged guards by using methods beyond passive resistance indicate exasperation rather than organized defiance. For instance, it is unclear what Rodolfo Reyes and Alberto Moreno hoped to gain from throwing ears of corn at their guard aside from immediate satisfaction.22 Still, acts of defiance offered prisoners a means of rekindling their individual agency. Edward Garza lost his fortitude one day and cursed a guard. For this affront, Captain J. H. Rozzell ordered Garza to stand on an upended barrel, a distinctive punishment in which prisoners were forced to stand in a narrow elevated space for as long as several days at a time.23 Unwilling to stand in the sun and possibly soil himself in front of his peers, Garza defied the prison captain and refused to get on top of the barrel.24 Prison records reveal Garza received twenty lashes for his offense but do not record how this act of defiance affected his self-worth or what it may have gained him in the eyes of his fellow prisoners.25
Designed as a farm, Blue Ridge had no walls surrounding it. Rather than brick buildings with cells, prisoners lived in wooden barracks resembling elongated sheds, which guards locked at night. There almost four hundred prisoners slept on wooden or iron bunks stacked three high in quarters, which the Texas Prison Board itself described as “crowded” and “unsanitary.”26 Bedbugs and other vermin dwelled among the incarcerated.27 With facilities seriously lacking, guards relied on vigilance, violence, and the isolation of the farm itself to keep prisoners in. Although ethnic Mexican prisoners spoke Spanish commonly, the all Anglo guard force could not understand them.28 Unable to communicate with prisoners through language, guards communicated through violence. Prisoner Abram Cisneros revealed his scars before the Texas Legislature in 1925. Using an interpreter, Cisneros informed investigators that guards whipped him “sometimes three times a day,” “just because they wished.”29 Cisneros showed great courage in testifying. Fear of retaliation kept most prisoners from speaking out against abuse. Blue Ridge prisoners brave enough to report abuse informed their doctor they “got beat” with a five-foot-long board, that was one-inch thick, and four-inches across in retaliation for their denouncements.30 Guards’ wrath could also prove fatal. Four years after Cisneros testified against the abuse he suffered, Joe Hill lost his job as a Blue Ridge guard for “Riding his horse over a convict.”31 Facing grueling conditions and beatings if they failed to satisfy their jailers, it is not surprising many prisoners looked for help from above.
The Texas prisons system’s neglect for their charges’ spiritual as well as physical welfare prompted informal religious practices among prisoners. For instance, in January 1925, after a guard shot and killed a prisoner at Senior Farm, where leased Mexican prisoners worked, Farm Manager J.D. Sallas claimed that no priest or preacher could be found to preside over the burial. Seeing the grave dug for their fallen peer, a prisoner asked permission to say a few words as a means of offering a “Christian burial.”32 After news of this disgrace reached state investigators, the Texas Prison Board recorded the employment of a priest “where the Mexican forces are located,” in its annual report for the following year, but maintenance of this care appears spotty.33 Although the Texas Prison Board slated money for a 1926 Christmas celebration complete with dinner, work holiday, and trees for prisoners who wished to have them, Mexican prisoners received few of these benefits.34 A Dallas Morning News article covering the festivities noted that the Anglo prisoners temporarily imprisoned at Blue Ridge Camp 2 celebrated Christmas that year but made no mention of fiestas among the Mexican prisoners nearby at Camp 1, aside from recording that Mexican prisoners “worked” to make the festivities a success.35
Lack of official commentary on Mexican prisoners’ religious practices does not mean an absence of devotion. Indeed, away from scrutiny, faithful Mexican prisoners maintained long-standing spiritual traditions. In 1932, a journalist visiting Blue Ridge noted a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe set up by prisoners at the Number 2 Camp. Prisoners’ devotion was evident in the great care taken in crafting and adorning a space they made sacred. In what can only be imagined as a masterpiece of prison rasquache, faded Christmas decorations, likely scavenged from celebrations at the Anglo camp, were refashioned into a canopy over the image.36 The picture of the patroness of Mexico resided in an “exalted place” high up on the wall.37 A shelf below served as an altar, and on it burned the candles that prisoners placed in prayer. Pictures of saints and loved ones tucked in among the candles testified to prisoners’ devotion and hope despite their incarceration. Even prisoners who professed no faith at all might find cultural comfort seeing the most iconic of Mexican images looking over them.38
Like other prisoners, many Mexican prisoners longed for home, and this desire, along with the difficult conditions they daily endured, prompted many to attempt flight. Candelario Salazar arrived at Blue Ridge in the spring of 1921. Without friends or any esteem among the guards or prisoners, Salazar scavenged food where he could and did and said as little as possible. New to prison and facing a life sentence, Salazar did not think he could endure. Rather than continue on the bottom rungs any longer, Salazar gambled with his life trying to “go home.”39 Pursuers shot Salazar three times, but he survived and returned to prison. Although he failed to get back to south Texas, Salazar made the most of his circumstances and eventually worked up to positions of honor, serving as a trusty and prison butcher. Seventeen years after his escape attempt, Salazar held such status that officials selected him for an interview on a broadcast of the Texas prison variety show Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls. When asked where his home was, Salazar reflected on whether his life on the outside was still there for him. Doubtful, he conceded, “just the Blue Ridge, I guess.”40
Despite Salazar’s and many Blue Ridge prisoners’ view of Texas as home, state investigators believed prisoners there nurtured a foreign hostility toward the state. Almost a century after Texas won its independence from Mexico, Anglo racists retained anxieties about their settler colonial hold on the borderlands.41 In 1924, a state committee on prison labor singled out Mexican prisoners as a particular problem. Investigators claimed that Mexican prisoners, unlike black or white prisoners, viewed Texas as their “enemey’s [sic] territory.”42 Indeed, investigators reported that Mexican Americans across the state shared this hostility and served as “compatriots” assisting escapees to reach Mexico.43 Aside from casting suspicion on all Mexican Americans in Texas, even those not accused of any crime, the report highlights ethnic Mexican prisoners’ otherness and perceived “allegiance to Mexico” despite their U.S. nationality.44
Indeed, the Texas prison system’s perception of Mexican Americans as foreign others was such that the system sorted foreign-born and U.S.-born ethnic Mexicans together. For instance, of the 1,657 prisoners who entered the Texas prison system in 1922, the state identified 197 as “Mexican.”45 Of the 197 prisoners classified as “Mexican,” 143 were born in Mexico. The state classified fifty-four additional prisoners born in the United States as “Mexican” by their parentage and “Mexican color and characteristics.”46 Although the Texas prison system condemned Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals to serve together at Blue Ridge or as leased prisoners at another farm, Mexican nationals could use their distinction as foreign citizens to lobby for release. On January 7, 1927, Manuel Gonzales sent a letter to the governor’s office in Austin asking for deportation. Rather than serve behind bars any longer, Gonzales confessed that he had violated U.S. immigration law by swimming across the Rio Bravo [Rio Grande] at night. Gonzales stressed his unauthorized entry without a visa or passport and identified himself as an “undesirable foreigner” who “should be deported by law.”47 When apprised of the matter, the Mexican government formally contacted Texas governor Dan Moody asking for an investigation of Gonzales’s case. Not inclined to answer the request personally, the governor’s assistant wrote the Mexican consul in San Antonio back and directed him to contact the Board of Pardon Advisors directly. If bouncing the official request through bureaucracy was not enough to convey Texas’s dismissal, then the state’s closing assurance that “where clemency is merited, clemency will be given” expressed the Lone Star State’s confidence in its criminal justice system.48
For many prisoners, their time in the Texas prison system began in the custody of Bud Russell. Between 1912 and 1944, Bud Russell served as the principal transfer agent for Texas, hauling convicted men from county jails across the state to Huntsville, where prisoners would either serve their sentence or be held until their transfer to farm work. Russell made a legend of himself during these long rides by never losing a prisoner in approximately 100,000 transfers. Carlos Brazel shattered Russell’s perfect record by escaping during a stop in Abilene in late July 1932. Russell’s long day began when he picked up Brazel and other prisoners in El Paso before dawn. Driving all day, they arrived in Abilene after dark. While Russell transferred his human cargo off the “rolling prison” for the night, Brazel somehow managed to slip his bounds and run.49 Russell shot Brazel twice as he fled, but Brazel managed to get up and escape into the night. Dazzled, Russell remarked, “what manner of man was this?”50 Russell’s question is worth exploring. Brazel was born in Texas in 1907. Despite having only two years of formal education, he could read and write. He identified as Baptist and worked as a laborer around El Paso. In May of 1932, a jury found Brazel guilty of robbery and of robbery with a firearm, and a judge sentenced him to sixty years of imprisonment. Transferred to the custody of the Texas prison system, Brazel became prisoner 71205. Prison officials measured his height at 5-feet-9.5-inches, his weight 145 pounds, his eyes dark brown, his hair black, and his “COMPLEXION: Mexican.”51
Rather than attribute Brazel’s escape to simple luck, it is worth pointing out that Brazel succeeded where countless others failed despite being shot twice. Russell dismissed Brazel as a “diminutive,” dirty fool when he first met him, but the experienced officer was wrong.52 Indeed, Brazel’s description as “shifty-eyed” is better understood as a marker of intelligence.53 Brazel feigned passivity by smiling and singing during his ride in the prison wagon. Brazel’s choice of singing “La Cucaracha” furthered the impression he exuded as a serene placid prisoner who would not cause trouble. Brazel, however, only played the fool and outwitted Russell, who sulked back from his failed pursuit covered in sweat and bug bites. A Mexican family sheltered Brazel for a week after his escape. Partially healed from his wounds, Brazel made his way back to El Paso and intended to flee into Mexico, but Border Patrol officers apprehended him before he could cross. Taunted by wardens and colleagues for his failure, Russell offered his resignation but was denied. Brazel himself taunted “Senor Rue-sill” upon his recapture, greeting him cheerfully, exclaiming, “thees is no firs’tam we meet, verdad?”54 Brazel returned to prison after a month at large but escaped again the following year in 1933, this time evading recapture entirely.55
Although many prisoners were born in the state that incarcerated them, prisoners across Texas imagined Mexico as a region of refuge and freedom. Indeed, men serving harsh sentences in Texas faced the added torture that Mexico lay tantalizingly close. Ramiro Galvan could see the Chihuahua Mountains from his jail cell in El Paso in 1934 and teared up knowing he faced death in the electric chair.56 Mexico loomed large in prisoners’ hopes and in prison officials’ anxieties. As general manager for the entire Texas prison system, Lee Simmons only half-jokingly asked a prisoner considered for assignment as a trusty if he would stay or try to use his privileged position to make a run for the border.57 When print shop worker Noe Portillo fell asleep on the job, fellow prisoners cut short his visit to a “Mexican mountainside” by dropping a metal sheet at his feet.58 Awakened, Portillo admitted having taken a trip to his “homeland,” left his dream behind, and returned to work on the line.59 Portraits of an imagined Mexico appear frequently in the Echo, the newspaper that served as the state-monitored voice for prisoner-composed information and offered escapism from prisoners’ daily burdens. In April of 1940, Echo readers were treated to an anecdotal piece that informed them that during the “old Aztec period,” Mexican Indians gathered huge “fire beetles” for use as natural lanterns.60 Later that month, institution officials granted prisoners a screening of Juarez, a sympathetic if fanciful epic about the French Intervention starring Bette Davis and Paul Muni.61 Mexican American and non-Latino prisoners’ image of Mexico as a place of freedom became overt that spring when “South of the Border” became the most requested song on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls.62
Despite the wishful imagining and occasional breakout, escape “down Mexico way” eluded most prisoners, leaving them to make new lives behind bars. If Mexico could not be reached, perhaps it could be made. As their sentences dragged on, many prisoners came to see their prison as home and embraced an array of activities as a means of getting by. After joking that he and his fellow prisoners preferred freedom south of the border, J. T. Sanchez referred to his farm as “little Mexico” and “home.”63 Sanchez’s concept of his prison as “little Mexico” provides a glimpse of Mexican prisoners’ resilience and success in forging community within the institution that confined them.64 At Blue Ridge, Mexican American prisoners composed a majority. This status allowed ethnic Mexican prisoners the ability to communicate in Spanish, prepare familiar dishes, play their own music, and form their own sports teams.65 Unlike other prisoners in the 1930s, who typically ate steamed rice and hot buns for breakfast, Mexican prisoners bragged they prepared eggs and “frijoles” to their liking.66 Considering how many Americans struggled to find enough to eat during the Depression, prisoners’ robust diet offered a very reasonable source of pride.67
Rather than be sidelined or denied participation in sporting events between the various state prisons, ethnic Mexicans’ majority status allowed them to star in teams they formed and managed. In 1937, “El Macho” Juan Flores managed the Blue Ridge baseball team with the help of “Lupe,” their coach.68 Such participation gave prisoners an opportunity to feel pride as well as escape their routine. Prex Trejo, for instance, worked as a waiter in the guard’s dining room, but he also played for the team and practiced regularly. On the diamond, Trejo could imagine himself a “flatbrush” and the cheers that affirmed him as a man, not a mesero.69 Blue Ridge Red Sox games also provided an occasion for celebrating Mexican American culture. The Blue Ridge band, the Mexican Stringsters, entertained prisoners and “free world visitors” before the game and between innings throughout the 1941 season.70 Outfitted in new gray uniforms, smartly trimmed in red with matching sox and caps, the team felt confident about their prospects that season. Such feelings prisoners likely held on to long after the game ended.71
Rodeo season began when baseball season ended, and few cheers matched the roars of the annual Prison Rodeo in Huntsville. In 1931, the Texas prison system instituted an annual rodeo as recreation for well-behaved prisoners and to raise revenue during the blighted years of the Great Depression. The prisoner-constructed corrals and stands were initially designed to accommodate a modest show for institution employees, their families, and prisoners but proved insufficient as interest in the Prison Rodeo grew, as did the crowds. By the mid-1930s, the vacant lot behind the Huntsville “Walls” Unit was transformed into an arena where prisoners performed as “zebra-clad” cowboys for several Sundays in October. Although prisoners participated on a voluntary basis, officials limited competition to select individuals, which, out of prejudice, practically excluded prisoners of color. Not counting “Pedro,” the goat-riding monkey that served as the event’s unofficial mascot, only two Spanish names appear on the list of participants in the 1933 Prison Rodeo.72 That year Camillo Ramirez rode “Quarter to Midnight” in the bronco-riding competition and also participated in calf and goat roping events before an audience of 15,000. Whereas roping and bronco busting originated as vaquero skills necessary for ranch work, other events at the Prison Rodeo served no practical purpose and mocked prisoners by design. For instance, Camillo Ramirez and Mike Ramirez both participated in “Wild Cow Milking,” a competition in which two-man teams rushed to subdue an enraged cow and gather its milk into a soda bottle before the animal trampled them.73
Despite the dangers and exploitation inherit in the rodeo, competition allowed prisoners a rare opportunity to earn prestige and self-respect. Prisoners who risked their well-being in dangerous foolhardy events not only benefited from cash prizes if they won; they also gained applause, the audible affirmation of their worth as men. For a moment, after a hard ride or a terrific display, the crowds celebrating convicted men momentarily erased the stigma that marked prisoners as plainly as the stripes they often wore. Performance also provided an opportunity for friends and prisoners’ families to applaud their loved ones. Given the ordeal of simply getting by, the importance of this support is difficult to underestimate. For instance, Felipe Rodriguez mounted “Hells Angel” in the first bronco-riding competition of the 1939 Prison Rodeo.74 A large group from Mexico City in the crowd, “pulled hard for the lone Mexican contestant,” but he was thrown from his mount.75 Although Rodriguez failed to make his ride, the Mexican audience applauded his “gallant effort,” helping provide the strength he needed to get up and keep going despite his loss.76
The rodeo proved a public relations coup for the Texas prison system and provided a means to wrangle state prisons away from their image as Southern plantations by framing the institution in a triumphant Anglo-Western narrative.77 Despite its location behind the pine curtain of east Texas, the 1939 souvenir rodeo program identified Huntsville as part of the “Southwest.”78 By marketing themselves as Southwestern, prison officials placed themselves in a position where they had to concede Mexican American accomplishments. After declaring rodeos “much as part of the red-blooded American’s world as the Star Spangled banner,” a writer in the prison newspaper credited the tradition to “the Spanish Don” and the “Hacienda owners” who “gathered their Vaqueros and staged a rodeo.”79 Spanish terms such as “ACION [sic],” “ARMITAS [sic],” and “BARBOQUEJO” dotting advertising for the event bewildered Anglo audiences to the extent that officials felt compelled to explain the “Rodeo Lingo” in English.80 In a bit in the prison newspaper, noted folklorist and explainer of all things Texan, J. Frank Dobie remarked that the rodeo originated from the “days when Texas was part of Mexico.”81 If Dobie’s authority was not enough to explain the tradition’s origins, the 1941 souvenir program included a contribution from Texas governor Coke R. Stevenson, who explained that the “word ‘rodeo’ was used by Mexican cattle herders long ago.”82
Such definitions and professorial explanations indicate administrators’ consciousness that although the prison rodeo had Mexican roots, that detail was lost on a mostly Anglo audience. Despite marketing the rodeo as a Mexican tradition, the presentation of the state and U.S. flag, as well as the national anthem, which began events, stamped a white American identity on the action.83 Few ethnic Mexicans are known to have attended the event. Aside from the prison newspaper’s mention of a Monterrey dentist and his guests garbed in beautifully embroidered shirts—the “hand work is the pride of his race”—an ethnic Mexican audience is largely absent from the historical record.84 Given the endemic racism of the time, such exclusion is not altogether surprising.
Mexican American cowboys may have performed before thousands in the annual rodeo, but prison radio offered the opportunity for Mexican American prisoners to reach millions. On Wednesday nights during the Depression, fans stayed up till 10:30 to hear Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls broadcast from the library at the Huntsville “Walls” Unit. Inaugurated on March 23, 1938, the radio program followed a variety show format and took the vaudeville routines already conducted in the prisons to the airwaves.85 Prison officials envisioned the broadcast, much like the rodeo that preceded it, as a public relations gimmick that doubled as a service message, reminding listeners that crime did not pay.86 Although administrators controlled segments and monitored the show closely, the broadcast offered prisoners a rare opportunity to literally have their voices heard beyond the bars that confined them. Telephone lines carried the show from Huntsville to the WBAP studio in Grapevine, Texas, where technicians linked it to the station’s 653-foot antenna, which producers boasted was the “tallest man-made structure in the Southwest.”87 Transmitting at 50,000 watts, the show flew far beyond the southern plains to households across North America, where some five million listeners tuned in and listened to “forgotten men.”88
The voice of the Texas prison system often sang and spoke in Spanish. Although Mexican Americans participated in an array of activities during their time behind bars, their presence was most prominent on prison radio. One month after the first broadcast, Humberto Boone and the Blue Ridge Troubadours played Latin hits “Maria Elena,” “El Rancho Grande,” and “La Paloma” in a show dedicated to Mexican American prisoners.89 The show tapped into the burgeoning Anglo craze for Latin music and was such a success that Mexican Americans became a part of the regular broadcast. Music not only allowed ethnic Mexican prisoners an opportunity to celebrate their culture and have it recognized by their jailers; performances transcended language barriers and helped break through the bars that separated them from the outside world. Boone himself became a regular on the show, receiving fan mail and numerous requests despite his inability to speak English.90
One request in particular stands out. On the last show before Christmas 1938, a fan asked Boone to sing “Cielito Lindo.” It is unknown if the letter arrived in English or Spanish. The show’s Anglo announcer read the letter over the air in English. Although the ethnicity of the letter’s author is unknown, Boone and other Mexican Americans’ regular participation on the broadcast are evocative of a following as large as any performer of the era. The letter not only evinces the audiences’ ability to reach out to its star; it provided Boone a bridge to reach back by singing the most Mexican of Mexican songs. Moreover, the song opened an opportunity for mutual comfort between performers and audience members conscious of the meaning of the chorus, “Canta y no llores, porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.”91 For prisoners and their families, the holidays prompted particular aches, which although impossible to overcome could be endured by singing instead of crying.
If singing gladdened hearts, as the song said, it also provided ethnic Mexican prisoners an avenue for advancement and figurative escape. The prison newspaper bragged that talent scouts sought Boone out.92 Boone’s incarceration prevented him from capitalizing on opportunities outside of prison, but other prisoners did use their talents to break out as artists. Tony Serra’s string of forgery convictions made it unlikely he would ever leave prison, but music kept his “hope alive.”93 A talented composer and artist, Serra once performed on Broadway in George White’s Scandals. Behind bars, Serra kept busy and composed 119 songs in a three-year period. Serra’s creativity won admirers who enjoyed his music and friends who asked him to help write songs they composed together. Not only did Serra’s skills bring him social capital in the prison, it won him financial capital as well. Serra sold at least five songs he composed “in his spare time.”94 With something to live for, Serra kept his record clean, thereby earning the privilege of being on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls and performing again before a large audience. In an interview in the prison newspaper, Serra explained, “I want to get out again—to get back into show business and make money the right way.… I think this program is my only chance.”95
Ultimately performances offered prisoners a chance at redemption. Only a handful of prisoners won the possibility of making a career in music if they ever got out. Jose Cortez, (see figure 2) a “golden voiced Mexican baritone,” earned a radio contract upon his release, but it is unknown if he ever made entertaining on air his livelihood as he hoped.96 More important, Mexican Americans’ performances helped chip away at the stigma they suffered as convicts and the prejudice they faced because of their ethnic identity. Indeed, performances on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls brought prisoners into people’s parlors—in many instances, some Anglo families’ first time having a Mexican in their home. Telling their stories in interviews and pouring their hearts out in song helped win prisoners’ sympathy. Fan mail and requests inundated the station. Over 190,000 letters came in for the show’s fifth anniversary broadcast in 1943.97 One letter confessed the show made the writer reconsider his or her views, acknowledging prisoners “made a mistake, but they are not completely bad as I used to think.”98 A Dallas listener expressed her change more frankly; listening to the show made her realize prisoners “are human. I had never before thought of inmates in that way.”99
Figure 2 Jose Cortez, Fourth Anniversary “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” Texas Penitentiary Broadcast. Huntsville, Texas 1942. Courtesy of Texas Prison Museum.
Mexican American prisoners’ success in connecting with the outside world is all the more notable given most prisoners’ lack of formal education. Like other prisoners, most Mexican American prisoners possessed only rudimentary education. Unlike their Anglo and black counterparts, however, undereducated Mexican American prisoners’ problems compounded with their inability to communicate adequately in English. Administrators’ frustration with Mexican prisoners’ persistence in speaking Spanish further contributed to their illiterate label. In 1933, the Texas prison system classified one in five Mexican prisoners as illiterate.100 Despite this added stigma, Mexican American prisoners enrolled in Texas prison schools and performed well. In 1934, Blue Ridge tied Anglo prisoners at Eastham for fifth place in the system-wide annual school contest. Efren Escobar, one of less than a dozen Mexican prisoners who served as teachers at Blue Ridge, finished only thirteen points behind the competition’s winner. Pointing out that Mexican schools competed at a disadvantage contextualizes these achievements. No Mexican class continued pass the fourth grade, whereas classes for white and black prisoners extended beyond the seventh grade, allowing non-Mexican prisoners to achieve an overall higher score.101 Aware of these constraints, the prison newspaper credited Escobar for his teaching, acknowledging that if given classes at higher levels, he may have proven that the contest’s “long shot pay off.”102 Despite being denied equal access to education, Mexican American prisoners made their time in school pay off in numerous ways. Escobar himself received two packs of cigarettes as his teaching prize, but his reward reaching other Mexican prisoners proved far greater.103 Going to school not only helped Mexican American prisoners get by; it provided hope. Upon release, former prisoners could find a job and perhaps use their education to get a second chance at life. Although it is unknown how many former prisoners realized these hopes upon their release, the classroom in the very least offered escape from work in the cotton field.
Enrollment at the Blue Ridge school peaked in 1940 with 341 students, or 71 percent of prisoners taking classes.104 Although a portion of these prisoners participated on a voluntary basis, the high number of students at Blue Ridge is due largely to the fact that the Texas prison system mandated enrollment for individuals it dubbed illiterate and those who tested below the third-grade level.105 Of the 898 ethnic Mexicans condemned to Texas prisons in 1940, the state classified 253 as illiterate.106 Imposed education programs challenged Mexican American resiliency by mandating an Anglo-dominant state view that further stigmatized ethnic Mexican cultural practices, particularly the speaking of Spanish. Even educated Mexican prisoners working in clerical positions for the prison faced ridicule for speaking Spanish. Baltazar Rodriguez, for instance, worked as a biographer and interpreter in the Bertillon office, which classified prisoners when they first arrived in Huntsville. One day while processing arrivals, Rodriguez greeted a new prisoner in Spanish. Dumbfounded, the new arrival blathered, “Wahoo, me Big Chief.”107 Big Chief’s remark evinces non-Spanish speaking prisoners’ frustration at their inability to comprehend the language Mexican American prisoners commonly used among themselves. Although a portion of Mexican American prisoners were undoubtedly illiterate, some, like Rodriguez, could communicate in English and Spanish. Indeed, prisoners’ general lack of formal education should not be confused with a deficit in intelligence. Feigning ignorance by limiting their communication to Spanish allowed Mexican American prisoners to exchange information among themselves and offered a form of resistance through resilience. Although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought Americans together against common enemies, old prejudices surfaced in racist appeals to a distinct Anglo-Texan patriotism. In May of 1942, the prison newspaper republished a story about “Texans” observing “San Jacinto Day” on besieged Corregidor Island.108 Implicit in its celebratory retelling of the final battle of the Texas Revolution, was the message that Japanese forces assumed the role of Santa Anna’s army and Mexicans remained the enemy. Intended to appeal to Anglo-Americans’ sense of heroism against overwhelming odds, the writer revealed his ignorance that the only ethnic Mexican soldiers present in the Philippines were those then serving in the U.S. military. Another piece in the prison newspaper opined that Anglo-Texans honed their tenacity for war by “chasing Mexicans.”109 Racist xenophobes likened Mexicans to enemy Axis forces throughout the war as a way to further their own self-interests. One prisoner became so incensed that the United States chose to import braceros rather than utilize prison manpower, he fumed, “too many people have forgotten that one hundred years ago it was not a guy named Hitler but one named Sanata Anna [sic].”110 Despite their long presence in Texas, ethnic Mexicans remained suspect racial and alien others. Rather than blend in, one Anglo prisoner complained, Mexicans flaunted their otherness by wearing their uniforms like a “Zoot Suit,” with their trousers too large at the waist and folding each leg so it “hugs the ankle yet leaves the impression of a cuff.”111 Railing against such nonconformist habits, racist prisoners called ethnic Mexicans “pepperbellies.”112
Rather than accept prejudiced attacks, ethnic Mexican prisoners asserted their American identity and commitment to the war effort in order to overcome the double stigma they faced as convicts and racial others. Tony Serra gave up performing Mexican music he composed to play patriotic tunes during an hour-long anniversary broadcast of Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls.113 Mexican American prisoners also bought war bonds. Indeed, Blue Ridge actively participated in prison administrators’ approved “Buy a Bomber” campaign, with prisoners at the farm raising $225 in the drive, averaging a contribution of $1 a man.114 Conscious of the stigma racists infused in the term “Meskin,” ethnic Mexican prisoners embraced the term “Latin American” more and more during the war.115 Importantly, the war awakened ethnic Mexican prisoners’ sense of Americaness. In January 1943, F. Ortega exhorted his fellow “Latin American” prisoners to learn and speak more English so as to “be understood as we really intend.”116 Refusing to communicate in English amounted to obstinacy, Ortega argued, and was counterproductive to their greater good. Although cultural traditions helped sustain ethnic Mexican prisoners, asserting an American identity offered a path for better treatment within the system. Foreshadowing the struggles of activist prisoners a generation later, Ortega made his case clear arguing, without “English how can we protect out rights?”117
Ortega and other prisoners’ efforts to secure their rights as Latin Americans came just as Blue Ridge slipped faster in its road to ruin. Never built to last, the Texas prison system allowed the wooden buildings housing prisoners to deteriorate. Moreover, conviction rates declined during World War II as more men were sent to fight and fewer entered prisons. As prison populations dropped, officials shuffled first-term ethnic Mexican prisoners to modern facilities and the population at Blue Ridge dwindled. By the end of 1943, the prisoner population of Blue Ridge totaled only twenty-four.118 With fewer men, operations at the prison could not continue as before. After operating at a loss for two consecutive years, prison officials converted Blue Ridge from a cotton plantation to a rancho or “livestock” unit in 1944.119 Despite Blue Ridge’s contribution raising animals used in the annual prison rodeo, the editors of the 1945 souvenir rodeo program chose not to include the unit in their two-page spread on the Texas prison system’s facilities. Administrators instead highlighted the system’s “modern fire-proof buildings” constructed from brick, concrete, and steel and removed Blue Ridge from public view.120 As Blue Ridge faded, so too did prisoners’ distinct Mexican identity. In 1946, the Texas Prison Board adopted “Latin-American” and “Spanish Speaking” in its classifications and dropped “Mexican” as an official term of identity.121 Segregation and racial bigotry, of course, continued in Texas prisons, but Mexican Americans lost their majority status with the decline of Blue Ridge and became minorities in other prisons across the state.
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Although only a small portion of total Texas prisoners, ethnic Mexican prisoners constituted a distinct minority in the early half of the twentieth century. Rather than serve time silently, Mexican American prisoners formed community in the midst of harsh conditions. Prisoners labored, escaped, played sports, celebrated their culture in song, contributed to the prison newspaper, and took classes with Mexican American instructors who, like their students, were also incarcerated. Mexican American’s utilization of their cultural practices, in particular, transformed the institution that confined them into a space they identified as their own. This achievement, in part possible from their majority status at Blue Ridge, allowed some prisoners to view their prison as home and gave them the strength and even comfort they needed to get by.
Notes
1. Kathleen E. Houston, “Mexicans Hard at Work upon Prison Farm,” Houston Post, July 17, 1932.
2. Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 13, June 15, 1938, 83, Texas Prison Museum, Huntsville, Texas [hereafter TPM].
3. Gregorio Cortez, easily the most famous Mexican American incarcerated in the early 1900s, served time at the Huntsville “Walls” Unit alongside white prisoners despite his “Mexican” complexion. Inmate 24947, Gregorio Cortez, TPM.
4. Chad R. Trulson and James W. Marquart, First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 80–81.
5. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); and Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
6. Robert T. Chase, “Cell Taught, Self Taught: The Chicano Movement behind Bars—Urban Chicanos, Rural Prisons, and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 5 (2015): 836–61; and B. V. Olguín, La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture, and Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
7. Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 73–86.
8. Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 4.
9. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 227.
10. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), xii–xiii.
11. For more on “crimmigration,” see David Manuel Hernández’s essay, “Carceral Shadows,” within this collection; and Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 141–51.
12. Criminal Record Clerk’s Report, Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Texas State Prison System for the Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1924, 58, TPM; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso 1991).
13. Trulson and Marquart, First Available Cell, 80–81.
14. “Blue Ridge Farm Operations,” Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Texas State Prison System Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1924, 32, TPM.
15. “Quedo en Libertad un Mexicano Condenado a 99 Años de Prision,” La Prensa, July 10, 1925; and Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 77, 86.
16. Although the word “convict” has a derogatory connotation, this essay follows the term as used by B. V. Olguín—namely, that prisoners have appropriated the term “convict” to refer to individuals who resist state pressure and refuse to be subordinated. Olguín, La Pinta, 29.
17. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for August 17, 1925, TPM.
18. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for May 7, 1926, TPM.
19. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for May 7, 1926, TPM.
20. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for December 6, 1926, TPM.
21. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for May 9, 1927, TPM.
22. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for December 6, 1926, TPM.
23. “Standing on Barrels Latest Form of Punishment for Texas Convicts,” Austin American Statesman, July 5, 1925, 1.
24. Anthropologist James C. Scott goes into depth on how indignities are compounded when suffered in public. For more information, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 113.
25. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for May 7, 1926, TPM.
26. “Farm Buildings,” in Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1928, 9, TPM.
27. 1988/069 Texas Legislature, Joint Committee to Investigate the State Penitentiary System Proceedings, Joint Committee Investigation, February 1925, vol. 1, 240, Texas State Archives, Austin [hereafter TSA].
28. 1988/069 Texas Legislature, Joint Committee to Investigate the State Penitentiary System Proceedings, Senate Committee of the Whole, 454, TSA.
29. 1988/069 Texas Legislature, Joint Committee to Investigate the State Penitentiary System Proceedings, Joint Committee Investigation, February 1925, vol. 2, 11, TSA.
30. 1988/069 Texas Legislature, Joint Committee to Investigate the State Penitentiary System Proceedings, Joint Committee Investigation, February 1925, vol. 1, 197, TSA.
31. Texas Prison System Criminal Record Department Statement on Guards Discharged, August 30, 1929, 2007/170-85 Dan Moody papers, “The Prison System,” folder “TX Prison System, July 26—Sept. 16, 1929,” TSA.
32. 1988/069 Texas Legislature, Joint Committee to Investigate the State Penitentiary System Proceedings, Joint Committee Investigation, February 1925, vol. 2, 311, TSA.
33. “Commissioner’s Report,” in Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Texas Prison System for the Year Ending December 31, 1926, 2, TPM.
34. Office of Board of Prison Commissioners, Minutes for December 6, 1926, TPM.
35. “Christmas Celebrated at Blue Ridge Farm,” Dallas Morning News, December 30, 1926.
36. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto defines rasquachismo as a distinct Chicana/o art form that “assumes a vantage point from the bottom up … through such strategies of appropriation, reversal, and inversion.” Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Art: Resistance to Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wright Gallery, 1991), 160. For more on rasquachismo among Chicano prisoners see, Olguín, La Pinta, 130.
37. Houston, “Mexicans Hard at Work.”
38. Houston.
39. Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 6, April 27, 1938, 35, TPM.
40. Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls.
41. Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 7.
42. A Summary of the Texas Prison Survey (San Antonio: Globe Printing Company, 1924), 54.
43. A Summary of the Texas Prison Survey.
44. A Summary of the Texas Prison Survey, 53.
45. Criminal Record Clerk’s Report, in Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Texas State Prison System for the Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1922, 43, TPM.
46. Criminal Record Clerk’s Report.
47. Manuel Gonzales Albarado to Hon. Lieutenant Colonel Governor of the State, January 7, 1927, 2007/170-121 Dan Moody Papers, “Mexico-Mexicans,” Jan. 7–June 17, TSA.
48. Assistant Secretary J. D. Hall to Consul General of Mexico A. P. Carrillo, April 14, 1927, 2007/170-121 Dan Moody Papers, “Mexico-Mexicans,” Jan. 7–June 17, TSA.
49. “Chinaman’s Chance,” Echo, December 1936, 8, TPM.
50. “Chinaman’s Chance.”
51. Inmate File, Inmate 71205, Carlos Brazel, TPM.
52. “Chinaman’s Chance.”
53. “Chinaman’s Chance.”
54. “Chinaman’s Chance Part 3,” Echo, January 1937, 8, TPM.
55. Having escaped once before, Brazel was no longer a first-term Mexican prisoner and did not go to Blue Ridge. Instead he escaped from Ramsey State Farm in Otey, Texas, a prison then dedicated to housing recidivist prisoners. “Chinaman’s Chance Part 3”; and Lee Simmons, Assignment Huntsville: Memoirs of a Texas Prison Official (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 183.
56. “Condemned Man Trains Pet Rat in Death Cell,” El Paso Herald-Post, June 23, 1934, 1.
57. Simmons, Assignment Huntsville, 202.
58. “Noe Portillo, Print Shop Line Operator, Visits Homeland,” Texas Prison Echo, September 1937, TPM.
59. “Noe Portillo, Print Shop Line Operator, Visits Homeland.”
60. “Nature’s Lamps,” Texas Prison Echo, April 1940, TPM.
61. “Nature’s Lamps.”
62. “Fan Mail Sets Record as Local Staff Is Swamped,” Texas Prison Echo, March 1940, TPM.
63. “Ramsey Number Four,” Echo, July 1939, TPM.
64. “Ramsey Number Four.”
65. Houston, “Mexicans Hard at Work”; and “Blue Ridge Reporter Says Mexican Camp Not Forgotten Farm,” Echo, May 1937, TPM.
66. For more on Texas prisoners’ typical diet in the 1930s, see the Texas State Library and Archives Commission’s virtual exhibit, https://
67. Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 86.
68. “Blue Ridge Reporter Says Mexican Camp Not Forgotten Farm.”
69. “Blue Ridge Reporter Says Mexican Camp Not Forgotten Farm.” A mesero is translated literally as waiter. Still, the word has an additional layer of condescension in Spanish.
70. “News from Below the Border,” Texas Prison Echo, June 1941, TPM.
71. “News from Below the Border.”
72. “Third Annual Prison Rodeo,” Echo, October 1933, TPM.
73. “Third Annual Prison Rodeo.”
74. “Largest Rodeo Crowd in History Sees First Show,” Texas Prison Echo, October 1939, TPM.
75. “Largest Rodeo Crowd in History Sees First Show.”
76. “Largest Rodeo Crowd in History Sees First Show”; and Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 180.
77. Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 174.
78. Program Prison Rodeo, 1939, 11, TPM.
79. “Local Writer Recalls Other Famous Rodeos,” Texas Prison Echo, August 1938, TPM.
80. Although Prison Rodeo promotions used Spanish terms, this terminology lacked proper accent marks when printed, leaving these words misspelled. These careless errors further demonstrate organizers’ Anglo gaze and target audience. Acíon is a leather strap that hangs from a stirrup. Armítas is a short leather apron worn to protect the rider’s legs. Barboquejo is a chinstrap on a vaquero’s hat. Robert N. Smead, Vocabulario Vaquero/Cowboy Talk: A Dictionary of Spanish Terms from the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 3–4, 15, and 19–20; “Rodeo Lingo,” Texas Prison Echo, September 1941, TPM.
81. J. Frank Dobie, “To Save Necks from Pursuers,” Texas Prison Echo, September 1941, TPM.
82. Coke R. Stevenson, “TO VISITORS AND PARTICIPANTS TEXAS PRISON RODEO,” Official Souvenir Program Eleventh Annual Prison Rodeo, 1941, TPM.
83. Mitchel P. Roth, Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016), 54 and 65.
84. “Dentists,” Texas Prison Echo, November 1944, TPM.
85. 1941 Radio Program, TPM.
86. Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 136.
87. “Souvenir Radio Program Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls Texas Penitentiary Broadcast,” 1941, TPM.
88. Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 136.
89. Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Texas Prison Broadcast over WBAP, Program 6, April 27, 1938, TPM.
90. “Boone ‘Speaks No English,’ ” Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 33, November 2, 1938, TPM.
91. Translated into the English, the verse reads, “don’t cry and just sing. For when you sing your heart will be happy, darling heaven, the hearts.” Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 39, December 14, 1938, TPM.
92. “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls Starts 3rd Year,” Texas Prison Echo, March 1940, TPM.
93. Don Hinga, “Texas Prison Radio Program Is a Great Morale Builder,” Texas Prison Echo, January 1942, TPM.
94. Tony Serra Puts over New Song,” Texas Prison Echo, August 1941, TPM.
95. Hinga, “Texas Prison Radio Program Is a Great Morale Builder.”
96. “Fourth Anniversary Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls Texas Penitentiary Broadcast,” 1942, TPM.
97. “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls Texas Penitentiary Broadcast, Fifth Anniversary,” Texas 1943, TPM.
98. Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls.
99. “Songs from Prison,” Souvenir Radio Program “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” Texas Penitentiary Broadcast, 1941, TPM.
100. “Annual Report of School Supervisor,” Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1933, 90, TPM.
101. “Annual Report of School Supervisor,” Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1934, 89, TPM.
102. “Harlem Number One Wins Annual School Exhibit Contest,” Echo, September 1934, TPM.
103. “Prison Schools Hold Class Examination and Work Exhibit,” Echo, July 1934, TPM.
104. “System’s Twenty Academic Units Report, 2,295 Enrolled,” Texas Prison Echo, May 1940, TPM.
105. “System’s Twenty Academic Units Report, 2,295 Enrolled.”
106. “Results of Grade Placement Tests Administered to New Inmates Received in 1940,” Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 1940, 171, TPM.
107. “Thumb Prints,” Texas Prison Echo, April 1940, TPM.
108. It is worth noting that the Philippines, like Texas, was a former Spanish colony. “Texans Observe San Jacinto Day in Corregidor,” Texas Prison Echo, May 1942, TPM. For more on “San Jacinto Day” on Corregidor, see John A. Adams Jr., The Fightin’ Texas Aggie Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016).
109. “Yard Bird,” Texas Prison Echo, May 1943, TPM.
110. “Foreigners Can; We Can’t,” Texas Prison Echo, April 1943, TPM.
111. Emil Bock, “My Sunday Shot,” Texas Prison Echo, December 1942, TPM.
112. “Casual Comments on Current News,” Texas Prison Echo, June 1943, TPM.
113. “Fourth Anniversary Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls Texas Penitentiary Broadcast,” 1942, TPM.
114. “Bond Interest Lagging,” Texas Prison Echo, September 1943, TPM.
115. “News from Central One Farm for Colored,” Texas Prison Echo, January 1943, TPM.
116. F. Ortega, “A Word to the Spanish Speaking Inmates,” Texas Prison Echo, January 1943, TPM.
117. F. Ortega, “A Word to the Spanish Speaking Inmates,” Texas Prison Echo, January 1943, TPM; and Chase, “We Are Not Slaves,” 73.
118. Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board for the Year 1943, 97, TSA.
119. Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board for the Year 1944, 8, TSA.
120. Official Souvenir Program 14th Annual Prison Rodeo, 1945, TPM.
121. Annual Report of the Prison Board, 1946, 37–38, TSA.