[1] The term came from a bilingual play on the Spanish word for penitencia (penitence), since pintos and pintas are people who have spent time in penitentiaries.
Chicano men endure this criminalization at a heightened rate and are "the largest segment of the diverse U.S. Latino prison population conflated into the U.S. Department of Justice term 'Hispanic.'"
In his own experience as a pinto, raúlrsalinas notes that people who were caught engaging in tatuteando or if they had materials necessary to tattoo on them, were given a month in solitary confinement.
The designs that are created in these conditions, under insurmountable odds, threaten the whole system of incarceration because it shows ultimately that there are still ways to retain one's dignity.
[1]Paño, a form of pinto arte (a caló term for male prisoner) using pen and pencil, developed in the 1930s, first using bed sheets and pillowcases as canvases.
[9] Sedillo states how prison used to be a place he dreamed of going in his teenage years because he thought it would give him status, but has come to realize that this was a mistake and that it has only trapped him.
[1] Salinas' poem "La Loma" touches on themes that challenge the neoromantic portraits of the pachuco figure as a "defiant male warrior here," instead presenting "a more problematic portrait of Pachucos imprisoned by drug addiction and held captive by a phallocentric notion of empowerment (modeled as virility) that often leads to various forms of individual and collective self-destruction, including fratricide."
However, rather than being "a self-denigrating diatribe against Pachucos," Salinas constructs the barrio as "a subaltern space where the legacy of colonialism continues to manifest itself through tragic, seemingly senseless but ultimately significant episodes of internecine violence.