Raúl Roy “Tapon” 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 Soleded State Prison in California. Over the span of the next 15 years, Salinas spent 11 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 were intensified, and so it is with keen insight into the subhuman conditions of prisons and an inhuman world that the pinto aesthetics that inform his poetry were formulated …
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This article appears in February 8 • 2008.