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Gallo's Body

Decoration and Damnation in the Life of a Chicano Gang Member

University of California, Los Angeles

Permanent body marking both reinforces and challenges existing social divisions. Looking at the life of a Chicano tattoo artist, this article presents an analysis of tattoo as self-damnation. For gang members and prisoners, layers of tattoos evince personal experience and social history alike. While they are tools of empowerment, individuality, and livelihood, tattoos also represent oppression and exclusion from the larger social world. Inescapable outside judgment rests in the inked articulations of barrio or prison histories, miring people permanently in lives they may later wish to leave behind. The irony that confronts many who are tattooed is that their material strategies for survival in one realm of life all but guarantee their failure in another.

Key Words: tattoo • gangs • prison • Chicanos • Los Angeles

Ethnography, Vol. 2, No. 3, 357-388 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/14661380122230966


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