Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursiones (Pioneer (Arte Publico))

by Raúl R. Salinas (raúlrsalinas)

Here is the long-awaited second edition of a pioneer work of Chicano literature, originally published as a collection in 1980 after individual poems by Salinas had appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and anthologies from the 1960s through the 1970s.

These fifteen years of poetry forged in the heat of the Chicano Movement (a period Salinas spent, in part, in prison) reveal the growing politicization of intelligent and talented minority convicts incarcerated at a time when their communities were marching forward. As with Ricardo Sanchez and Jimmy Santiago Baca, prison bars were not strong enough to limit Salinas's highly lyric, even rhapsodic calls for liberation -- poems inspired by jazz, the Beat writers, nature, and political skirmishes.

Un Trip through the Mind Jail will stand for generations as a seminal text of Chicano and U. S. minority literature.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Raúl / Roy / "Tapón" 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 Soledad State Prison in California. Over the span of the next 15 years, Salinas spent eleven years behind the walls of state and federal penitentiaries. It was during his incarceration in some of the nation's most brutal prison systems that Salinas' social and political consciousness was shaped. 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 called "The Quarter Note" which ran for eighteen months. In Leavenworth he played a key role in founding and producing two important prison journals, Aztlan de Leavenworth and New Era Prison Magazine. It was in these journals that his poetry first circulated and gained recognition within and outside of the prison 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 Aztlan de Leavenworth, "Trip thru 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 obtained early release from Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972. As a student at the University of Washington, Salinas worked in various community development projects and forged alliances with Native American groups in the Northwest, a relationship that was to intensify over the next fifteen 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 twenty-two years since his release from Marion, Salinas' involvement with various political movements has earned him an international reputation as an eloquent spokesman for justice. Salinas literary reputation in Austin has earned him recognition as the poet laureate of the East Side and the title of "maestro" from emerging poets who seek his advice and leadership. His literary work is perhaps most widely known for its street aesthetics and a sensibility which documents the interactions, hardships, and strife of barrio and prison life. The influence of jazz within his oeuvre connects it with the work of "Beat Generation" poets, musicians, and songwriters. His poetry collections include dedications, references, and responses to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Charles Parker, Herschel Evans, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, for example.
via http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:...

Reviews

[Mark Surya]

in the end and in truth I was just a plain bad reader of this book, and it deserves better. I could follow the Spanish, but I couldn't actually get any of the lines right---either the meaning would shine through or the sound, but I couldn't do both at once. which is, you know, the point. but I *want* to come back---the vision and scope are worth it. (What a curiosity that so much of the classics coming from POC re: Seattle feature men leaving confinement---wanted to read it alongside No-No Boy). At it's best Salinas could do so much---epic, mythic, sentimental without banality, passionate. Even the early jail poems---him clearly working out how poetry works, "doggerel" I guess---has a stakes to the language that isn't just "context". And now I know---I never really lived in Seattle, even if I too prayed to Mt. Rainier every morning. Rest in peace---"history is crying for change."

[coslyons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for a class. I didn’t understand a lot of it but I can see why he was important. I feel like a major reason we read this was because my professor was friends with him.

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic memoir about an extraordinary man! Read for my Mexican American Chicano/a Studies class

[Kendra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sacred and profane, furious and glorious and sly and enormous, Raul Salinas' UN TRIP THROUGH THE MIND JAIL is a rager of a text. Salinas batters the poetic page with writing that is sad and hilarious and draining, encompassing Texas and Mexico and jail, drugs, women and loss and violence in wildly energetic poems written in English and Spanish, and often, dizzyingly, both at once.

It's a book that points in every way toward the word "important" while thumbing its nose at such constructs:
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You know? It's... a trip.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great genre-bending and genre-melding in this book.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the topics discussed but I felt that the code switching in some of the pieces felt forced. They didn't feel natural, didnt mesh with the writing's rhythm. The art work is pretty good, though.