These paintings show members of the Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that is found over Central America and in the Los Angeles region. They are based on photos I found in a local newspaper in Mexico. I tried to track down the photographer but was unfortunately unable to.

They show gang members that are heavily tattooed to make sure they will stay with the gang forever – you can’t really drop out if the gang name is written on your face. These people live in a town on the border of Guatemala and are really bad guys; they even rob the very poor illegal immigrants trying to pass the border on the train.
As in the paintings of the Prisoners, one of the questions arising is that of prejudice – this time prompted by the tattoos that mark these faces as “bad”. While they “describe” the people and pin them down to a fixed identity, they also shift their other possible identities out of focus – of being poor themselves, or being part of a family or being adorers of La Santa Muerte or whatever else. Even if we might not like it, they denote the gang members' desire to become someone else, and I think they also love them, if they weren’t forced to have them. In fact the tattoos are beautiful and very sad at the same time.