Jimmy Santiago Baca, a Chicano poet who was largely self-educated and learned to read and write while incarcerated in a maximum-security prison in Arizona, published his debut poetry collection Immigrants in Our Own Land in 1979 while still serving his sentence. The collection gave literary voice to the experience of Chicano and Native American prisoners, drawing on the iconography of prison culture — including tattoos, violence, and institutional dehumanisation — as primary poetic material. Baca's emergence as a major American poet directly from the prison system was a landmark in both Chicano literature and the broader tradition of carceral poetry.

Baca's poetry is deeply inscribed with the visual and cultural language of Chicano prison tattooing: the Virgin, the pachuco cross, the teardrop, the gang name written in Gothic script. His work established a direct literary link between body modification culture and a major stream of American poetry, demonstrating that the tattooed body's iconography could sustain a serious literary art. Baca's example influenced subsequent generations of Chicano/a poets — including Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo — who engaged with the politics of the decorated body as a site of resistance, memory, and cultural pride.