MEXICAN RASHES - PART 1 Contraband, Commerce, and Art in One of Mexico’s Most Overcrowded Prisons BY ANTONIO VEGA MACOTELA, AS TOLD TO GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONT In exchange for my being the witness of his son’s first steps, Superaton spent the three hours that I was with his son cataloguing the cigarette butts in his cell.

I have been going to jail once a week for the past two years now. I stay for about seven hours each time, which means that as of now I have spent more than 500 hours in prison.

The first time I went I was truly scared. There are more than 2,500 men in this jail and when they saw this outsider coming into their world, let’s just say that they were not happy at first. They would constantly jostle me as I walked through the grounds. They would yell from afar, and a few times right up in my face, about how they were going to kick my ass. Many times they tried to steal my bags of materials. It was horrible, and I often wondered if I was an idiot, putting myself at risk for an art project. I had a knot in my stomach every time I arrived at the gate. Fortunately, since then I have made some friends among the inmates, and now they make sure that everyone behaves around me. It’s only the prisoners themselves who can guarantee your safety in there, not the guards or anybody else. Whether it’s comfortable to admit it or not, it is the prisoners who rule this prison—especially since there is a ratio of 1 guard to every 100 inmates. It’s only their weird power structure made up of dominant guards and dominant prisoners that keeps it all relatively calm.

I started going to the prison because I have been working on art that deals with the concept of time for more than six years now. Time has been appropriated by institutions. They’ve taken it away from us. In this somewhat Marxist mind-frame, I clearly saw that time has been transformed into production and then production into distribution. Our work time is converted into salary, and our leisure time into consumption. So we can actually represent and measure time with bills and coins. In the instant that time is transformed into hours, minutes, and seconds instead of experiences, well, then time has been taken from us. It has become objective instead of subjective. But time is not a representation. The only way one can feel time is through the free acts and personal moments that we create within it. And following this train of thought, I came to the conclusion that a prison is a kind of physical representation of this idea of appropriated time. Doing time—doing time for others, abiding other people’s instructions. So I started visiting a jail to get a better understanding of this concept.

The jail I picked is in Santa Martha Acatitla. It started out as a “model” prison 12 years ago. They would only admit people who were first offenders and given less than ten years of jail time, and they supposedly had all sorts of progressive social programs. But things have changed a lot since then. Jails all over Mexico are overflowing. Most Mexican prisons are 35 percent over their intended capacity, and it is getting worse day by day, in large part because of this whole government campaign going on right now to crack down on the drug mafia. There is nowhere to hold all of them. They send all the leftovers from other jails to Santa Martha Acatitla. You can find people inside that will be there for 20, 30, even 50 years. There is a women’s jail and a men’s jail, side by side. The women’s has about 1,500 inmates and the men’s has about 2,500. Both are overpopulated. They often cram 12 or more prisoners into a cell that was designed for 8.


In exchange for my giving Fernando’s mother a birthday celebration, Fernando spent the exact hours that I was with her finding every scar on his body and writing down the story of how he got it.


TO BE CONTINUED
MEXICAN RASHES | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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