Archive Note
The Mexican domestic register is anchored institutionally in the Palacio de Lecumberri, opened in Mexico City in 1900 and closed as a prison in 1976, and in the later CERESO state and Cefereso federal prison systems and the Tijuana cluster around La Mesa. The transnational register comes from Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, which formed among immigrant youth in Los Angeles but became entrenched in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala after the 1996 U.S. deportation pipeline sent thousands of members to the Northern Triangle. Devotional and gang imagery circulates across both prison and street registers, including the skeletal Santa Muerte and the Jesus Malverde bandit portrait tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, along with numbers, letters, and gang signs. The machines are improvised from a pen barrel, a sewing or guitar-string needle, and a small motor, which produces the fine-line, heavily shaded black-and-grey look shared with the U.S. tradition. Since the late 1990s the police in both Mexico and Central America have used tattoo visibility as evidence for arrest, reaching an extreme in El Salvador's 2022 state of exception and the CECOT mega-prison opened in 2023.