Urban Unrest

15 February 2008 | Community | Ernesto Aguilar

Raul Salinas, a regional poet and sometime KPFT guest, has died. Raul was an inspiration to many people in the Latino community and beyond. Bold, thoughtful and always kind, Raul was involved in many social justice and cultural efforts. His obit is below.

Raul Roy Tapona Salinas was born in San Antonio, Texas on March 17, 1934. He was raised in Austin, Texas from 1936 to 1956, when he moved to Los Angeles. In 1957 he was sentenced to prison in Soleded State Prison in California. Over the span of the next 15 years, Salinas spent 11 years behind the walls of state and federal penitentiaries. It was during his incarceration in some of the nation’s most most brutal prison systems, that Salinas social and political consciousness were intensified, and so it is with keen insight into the subhuman conditions of prisons and an inhuman world that the pinto aesthetics that inform his poetry were formulated.

His prison years were prolific ones, including creative, political, and legal writings, as well as an abundance of correspondence. In 1963, while in Huntsville, he began writing a jazz column entitled THE QUARTER NOTE which ran consistently for 1-1/2 years. In Leavenworth he played a key role in founding and producing two important prison journals, Aztlán de Leavenworth and New Era Prison Magazine, through which his poetry first circulated and gained recognition within and outside of the walls. As a spokesperson, ideologue, educator, and jailhouse lawyer of the Prisoner Rights Movement, Salinas also became an internationalist who saw the necessity of making alliances with others. This vision continues to inform his political and poetic practice. Initially published in the inaugural issue of Aztlán de Leavernworth, a Trip through a Mind Jail (1970) became the title piece for a book of poetry published by Editorial Pocho-Che in 1980.

With the assistance of several professors and students at the University of Washington - Seattle, Salinas gained early release from Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972. As a student at the University of Washington, Salinas was involved with community empowerment projects and began making alliances with Native American groups in the Northwest, a relationship that was to intensify over the next 15 years. Although Salinas writes of his experiences as a participant in the Native American Movement, it is a dimension of his life that has received scant attention. In the 22 years since his release from Marion, Salinas involvement with various political movements has earned him an international reputation as an eloquent spokesperson for justice. Along the way he has continued to refine and produce his unique blend of poetry and politics.

Salinas’ literary reputation in Austin earned him recognition as the poet laureate of the East Side and the title of *maestro* from emerging poets who seek his advice and a mentor. While his literary work is probably most widely known for his street aesthetics and sensibility, which document the interactions, hardships, and intra- and intercultural strife of barrio life and prison in vernacular, bilingual language, few people have examined the influence of Jazz in his obra that make him part of the Beat Generation of poets, musicians, and songwriters. His poetry collections included dedications, references, and responses to Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Charlie Parker, Herschel Evans, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, for example. Academics have primarily classified Salinas as an important formative poet of the Chicano Movement; yet, while he may have received initial wide-scale recognition during the era, it would be unfair to limit a reading of his style, content, and literary influence to the Movement.

There were many dimensions to Salinas* literary and political life. Though, at times, some are perplexed at the multiple foci of Salinas life, the different strands of his life perhaps best exemplify what it means to be mestizo, in a society whose official national culture suppresses difference: his life*s work is testimony to the uneasy, sometimes violent, sometimes blessed synthesis of Indigenous, Mexican, African, and Euro-American cultures. Salinas currently resides in Austin, Texas, were he is the proprietor of Resistencia Bookstore and Red Salmon Press, located in South Austin. Arte Publico Press reissued Salinas* classic poetry collection, Un Trip through the Mind Jail y otras Excursiones (1999), as part of its Pioneers of Modern U.S. Hispanic Literature Series. He is also the author of another collection of poetry, East of the Freeway: Reflections de Mi Pueblo (1994).

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