Colonial Origins and Arizona Prison Narratives

The relative modernity of Arizona as a US state has obscured the colonial origins of its prison system and its prison literature. These origins consolidated in the latter nineteenth century as a confinement system of military... [ view full abstract ]

The relative modernity of Arizona as a US state has obscured the colonial origins of its prison system and its prison literature. These origins consolidated in the latter nineteenth century as a confinement system of military forts turned into Indian reservations, reservation guardhouses, local jails, and the Yuma territorial prison.  This paper argues that the literary production that has emerged from Arizona’s prisons continues to resonate with this history.  In a contemporary state prison system where six out of every 10 prisoners are black, Mexican American, Mexican, or Native American, the poetry and prose its prisoners write significantly constitute a contemporary restatement of dispossession, displacement, disempowerment, and existential marginalization.  The current paper will evidence the history of systematic racialized confinement as a feature of nineteenth-century Arizona Territory.  It will employ records of Apache murder trials, incarceration of Mexican Americans, and narratives from the Yuma territorial prison to establish an evidentiary foundation for discussion of the colonial order that gave rise within a century to mass incarceration.