Liberation News received this letter from Pelican Bay State Prison hunger striker Jose Villareal. We have transcribed the handwritten letter and lightly copyedited for style.
We have begun a peaceful protest here in the Pelican Bay SHU [Security Housing Unit] that has taken the form of a hunger/work strike. Today is the first day that we have begun to deprive our bodies of food for what we see as an indefinite hunger strike. The history of state repression tells us that we will be denied human rights even if that means the state will have to refuse to abide by their very laws.
What we are seeing today in Pelican Bay, in California prisons and in U.S. prisons more broadly is a popular uprising that occurs when the contradictions sharpen between the oppressed and the oppressor and the only alternative is to resist to survive. U.S. prisoners today are in such a survival mode, where the repression has reached an unprecedented point, where the levers of control have gone to a level that is inhumane. This development has led to the prison strikes we are seeing today.
Some may have remembered that in 2011 we had another hunger strike event here in Pelican Bay SHU that spread to other prisons. This was ended after we were given small items and promised with many things, among them an end to the debriefing process where we are forced to give information about wrongdoing to our captors even if this wrongdoing is false. We refuse to make up information on other prisoners that would only be used to release us and torture them, and for this we are further tortured. The state has refused to live up to their promises of 2011 and this torture continues, as does their barbaric debriefing program.
It is our last attempt to stop this torture, just as the grave men in Guantanamo have gone on a hunger strike to stop their torture. The U.S. is seeing its prisoners here on the mainland and in its prisons offshore resist its horrific treatment of people, its dirty secret is being shown to the world. No more criticizing of a nation’s treatment of its people coming from Amerika when U.S. prisons hold people in sealed windowless cells in extreme sensory deprivation where even the sun is used to coerce prisoners into being informants for the U.S. Empire — We refuse the offer!!!
I have not had the sunlight touch my skin in years, something that should be accessible to all human beings, and throughout the world it usually is, but here in Pelican Bay SHU access to the sunlight is sold or bartered by the state for information on dissidents or illegal acts of other prisoners.
The majority of prisoners held in California SHUs are Chicanos who are given as much attention by most of the public as a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. We are being kept in conditions which many in the medical field acknowledge causes psychosis. Aztlán is very familiar with attacks from the state, indeed many know the bloody history in California, particularly the Greaser Laws of the 1800s, which were laws asked primarily at Chicanos and other Latin@s. But repression today has evolved, no longer are the oppressed nations lynched, or made to pay outrageous fines, nor are we forced into debt peonage like in the early theft of Aztlán, following the U.S. War on Mexico. Rather today, the youth, the rebellious elements out in society who in the future will be the backbone of a future revolution, are tracked in the Barrios and ghettos, tagged and captured in U.S. prisons; where those who begin to study and learn about Amerika’s bloody history of exploitation around the globe and teach others, and organize prisoners, are then once more captured and held in Supermax prison units. It is precisely when prisoners out in the prisons’ general population make the qualitative leap in consciousness that the state locks the prisoner down in a Supermax.
These tactics are mirrored where people or parties begin to make huge strides in development and the state comes in to destroy or disrupt the momentum. This serves to expose the reality that in the U.S. “democracy” is non-existent. This is something prisoners see very early, particularly those held in control units across the country.
One thing we have come to understand is our oppression has a class contradiction to it. Most prisoners, whether Black, Brown, Red, yellow or white derive from the lumpen proletariat. The lumpen in the U.S. are those at the bottom of the totem pole in society, the chronically unemployed who are the poorest sector in the country. Although we have national contradictions out in society, once we are inside the prisons we develop a class character and are forged into a prison class.
Mao once said: ” It is up to us to organize the people. As for the reactionaries in China, it is up to us to organize the people to overthrow them. Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.”
As prisoners, we have come to see like Mao described, it is up to us to organize the prisoners. We can be assisted with study material from comrades on the outside; we can have a rally or picket line in front of the prison from activists in the community, but no one can sweep the prison floors but us prisoners. The dust is on our floor, we had to find ways to fashion our own brooms and teach these lumpen prisoners how to sweep and how we will clean up our living environment. This hurdle has been accomplished!
This prison repression has helped us conscious prisoners to do our work and made it easier to educate prisoners as we are not merely speaking of abstract terms, but rather living examples of oppression. These prison strikes prove that the SHU had been the best organizer the lumpen had meet in US history! Once again, Amerika and its “analysts” have failed in underestimating the power of the people in using the opponents’ strengths against itself. Million dollar technology will never be able to defeat a determined people.
The real fruits of the torture occurring in U.S. prisons will bear we expect when these newly conscious prisoners begin to spill out into society after they are released. We will see the real blowback occur when a new culture begins to spill out from the prisons to the Barrios and ghettos where ex prisoners, mostly Black and Brown, replenish the movement for social justice out in society. The state has fertilized a whole generation of prison activists via its repression.
Marx once said when differentiating himself with Feuerbach: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.”
Just like Marx, I see our current actions in this prison strike as “sensuous activity.” Our actions are revolutionary acts that are much more important than may be perceived by the state just as Feuerbach or others would have perceived our acts. Our actions in these prisons are but the manifestation of the contradictions within the Imperialist countries that were spoken of in the “classics” decades ago. The SHU is not just a torture center. It is also the slave quarters, the concentration camp and internment camp. The names have changed but our colonizer remained the same.
People power siempre!
Jose Villarreal
