“Alcatraz is an idea,” famously said Richard Oakes, an organizer with Indians of All Tribes (IOAT).
As the approximately one million visitors to the island each year will observe, it is a contested idea. On the ferry departing from Pier 33 in San Francisco, visitors are interpellated by an audio introduction framing the island as the world’s most notorious prison. Upon arrival, one is greeted by a historical palimpsest. A large sign that once described the island as a federal penitentiary is layered with freshly restored red graffiti reading, “Indians Welcome” and “United States Indian Property.” A permanent installation, “The Great Lock Up,” opened in 2021 to address mass incarceration in the United States. As a National Park, the island offers a liberal embrace of social movements, which can conjure trust in social progress—a sense of calm amongst the choppy seas of the San Francisco Bay. However, the fleeting hope for a widespread understanding of the prison industrial complex’s inhumanity gives way the moment the cellhouse tour shoots you out into the gift shop, where you can purchase kitsch items such as beanie hats printed with “Property of Alcatraz Psych Ward.” The store offers replicas of lunch trays and cups, as well as correctional-officer badge pins.
It is precisely this friction—these overlapping histories embedded in the island’s infrastructure—that makes Alcatraz so available for ideological capture. On May 4, 2025, Donald Trump announced his intention to reopen the federal prison (which closed in 1963), reportedly after watching the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz during a stay at Mar-a-Lago. Never mind the failing sewage systems, the lack of fresh water, or the crumbling infrastructure now rightly reclaimed by birds and plants. But his stated desire to reopen the prison is less a logistical proposition than a semiotic one.1 Trump has effectively mobilized an idea of Alcatraz.
The IOAT coalition—initially composed of urban Indigenous organizers and student activists from across the Bay Area—recognized Alcatraz as a site of immense symbolic potential. In A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement, Kent Blansett describes the conditions that led to the occupation, including the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. This act, like all in the long chain of deceitful agreements between Indigenous groups and the US government, was full of false promises. The premise was to support Indigenous people in economically depressed regions (a.k.a. reservations that became depressed through the imposition of the atonement economy), encouraging them to relocate to big cities where they would receive support and job training. The flimsy promise of support created the conditions for pushing more people off their ancestral lands. The influx of Indigenous people to San Francisco created an area affectionately known as “The Little Rez” or “The Red Ghetto” along 16th Street.2
The American Indian Center (AIC) in San Francisco was a burgeoning center of this community. Consciousness-raising and organizing started blooming in tandem. As LaNada War Jack described, people were learning how to embrace their Native identities for the first time in their lives.3 Oakes and War Jack were part of the movement to organize for Ethnic and Native Studies at UC Berkeley at the time; participants in this struggle were key to instigating the occupation. On October 29, 1969 a fire of unknown origins incinerated the AIC. As then-director of the Center, April McGill stated, “It provided the spark that ignited the Alcatraz Movement.”4 With no place to gather after the fire, activists set their sights on Alcatraz. For nineteen months, they occupied the island, advancing demands that included the establishment of a Native cultural center and a university.
Citing the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, they argued that the island, rendered surplus after the federal penitentiary’s closure, should revert to Indigenous ownership. They offered to purchase it for $24 in glass beads and red cloth, a callback to the colonial transaction that dispossessed Indigenous peoples of Manhattan. In the 1969 “Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People,” the occupiers humorously compared Alcatraz’s infrastructural deficiencies—its lack of industry, inadequate sanitation, and geographic isolation—to those of reservations.5 The proclamation culminates in the declaration that “further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.” Alcatraz, they insisted, is both an island and an idea.
In this essay, I approach Alcatraz not only as an island and an idea, but as an image—both in the sense of its representation and in the way the island itself has been produced as a visual form. Its history is densely layered, sedimented in architectural remnants and material traces: dungeons retrofitted into solitary confinement cells, tunnels running beneath the recreation yard, and inscriptions of resistance etched into its surfaces—from the writings of anarchist conscientious objector Phillip Grosser to the Red Power graffiti that marks the island, which Dean Rader describes as “neo-petroglyphs.”6
Reading across an abbreviated archive of the island’s visual culture, I argue that Alcatraz has long operated as a site where speculative value is rendered as a symbolic image. It is a monument to discipline born of infrastructural failure, a landscape shaped by regimes of punishment that extend from imperial warfare to the violent separation of families—histories that resonate uncannily with the present. It is also a space where carcerality and imperialism are not merely linked but materially fused into its very structural foundations.
These overlapping histories help explain why Alcatraz proves so legible within a Trumpian imaginary. Its hypervisibility, its association with absolute confinement, and its cinematic afterlife make it uniquely available for reactivation as spectacle—whether in proposals to reopen the prison or in the cynical branding of sites like “Alligator Alcatraz,” the ICE detention center in the Big Cypress National Preserve of Okeechobee Florida that opened in July 2025.7
Yet Alcatraz is equally a site of resistance. This counter-history, no less embedded in terrain and representation, is worth defending.
Gold from the Get-Go
Alcatraz is a product of the Gold Rush. The discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848 led to a population boom in what is now California. It was during this time that a joint Army and Navy council recommended the militarized surveillance of San Francisco Bay, which was followed by an executive order signed by President Millard Fillmore in 1850 to fortify Alcatraz.8
Gold as a speculative form of value required new infrastructure for commerce, some of which was housed on Alcatraz. The first lighthouse on the West Coast was built on the island in 1854, helping to usher in an era of colonial expansion by guiding ships of migrants (and ultimately the value they were able to extract from the land). The Bay was becoming a nexus of an expanding global capitalism.9
Shortly after the Gold Rush, Alcatraz gained currency as an image through the work of the iconic photographer of the American West, Carleton Watkins (1829–1916). Watkins migrated from New York to California in 1849, drawn like so many others by the hope of finding gold. Instead, a chance encounter with a daguerreotypist seeking an assistant solidified his fate. Watkins is renowned for his monumental mammoth-plate images that helped define the visual and ideological contours of California during this period. While he has been theorized extensively in relation to the creation of sites such as Yosemite,10 his decades-long engagement with Alcatraz remains understudied.
Watkins’s earliest known photograph of Alcatraz is a glass-plate negative produced for General John C. Frémont, a figure whose career was deeply entangled with the logics of US expansion, extraction, and colonial violence. Frémont—a military officer, explorer of literary notoriety, and California senator—played a central role in the US seizure of western territories during and after the Mexican–American War. Simultaneously, he amassed personal wealth through speculative land claims and gold mining ventures. Watkins photographed the Frémont estate in the Sierra Nevada to attract investors for a mining operation, producing images that rendered the landscape as both resource and promise—an extractive vision calibrated to the speculative economies of the Gold Rush.
Within this context, Watkins’s first known photograph of Alcatraz can be understood as part of the same visual regime: the translation of land into property through photography. Frémont claimed he had purchased the island for five thousand dollars during the Mexican–American War, a claim later nullified by US government expropriation, though he continued to litigate ownership for the rest of his life.
At the time the photograph was taken, Alcatraz was already functioning as a site of incarceration. Men were held in the dark basement of the sallyport, the fortified entry to the island. Visitors today might easily miss the dungeon cell under the sallyport where people were held in darkness in its early years. Peer down into the holding area and you will find grass now growing.
Watkins would return to Alcatraz repeatedly over the course of his career, producing images across multiple photographic formats that circulated widely in the nineteenth century.11 He produced stereographs designed for parlor viewing, cabinet cards, and mammoth-plate prints. The island was rendered strikingly legible from afar, yet the lives and conditions of those imprisoned within it remained obscured. Photography played a crucial role in producing this disparity as the island became a commodified image representing California’s monumentality.
Spectacular Failure
Alcatraz’s evolution into a prison was not inevitable; it emerged from failure.12 By the start of Civil War, the island of 22.5 acres contained 111 cannons poised for defense. Not only was this extensive and expensive infrastructure never used; as soon as the war was over this military technology was deemed obsolete and dangerous. Major George Mendel from the Army Corps of Engineers was charged with redesigning Alcatraz. To update the gun batteries, he would require a cheap labor source.
His solution involved expanding Alcatraz’s capacity as a prison and procuring the labor needed to realize his vision, which involved “slicing away the entire southern third of the island, reducing its summit from a height of 125 feet to a uniform elevation of 60 feet.”13 The work was done by pick and shovel. Men serving longer sentences were sometimes tethered to twenty-four-pound iron cannon balls as they labored. As technologies of defense evolved, nature had to be remade, and prison provided the labor to do so.14
Eadweard Muybridge photographed the island for the War Department in 1869 during its post–Civil War period of transformation. Muybridge, later famous for the motion studies in which he proved that a galloping horse briefly lifts all four hooves off the ground at once, often did commissions in service of the state.15
Muybridge captured the first image of prison labor on the island. Here, two lines of men are depicted pushing wheelbarrows of earth from shrinking cliffs as part of the Army Corps of Engineers redesign. A soldier stands guard, rifle in hand. The earth they move was dumped over the island’s edge, filling in a beach—once referred to as Pirates Cove—that no longer exists.
In another photograph, two men lie in close proximity on a small patch of the soon-to-vanish beach, marked by rocks and coastal shrubs soft enough to recline on. The knees of one soldier appear to touch the elbow of another. From in between the men, a dog looks at the camera. The man on the left is looking through binoculars. His pose suggests that he is not surveilling the water for threats, but perhaps watching birds or marine mammals at close distance. Here, we have an alternate vision for the island, far from the nightmare Trump is conjuring. The carceral hell it became wasn’t inevitable.
The shape of the island itself is a monument to punishment in which alternatives have been buried.
Family Separation and the Disciplining of Dissent
It is unlikely that Trump recognizes how closely one chapter of Alcatraz’s history mirrors the cruelty of his own immigration policies, particularly the systematic separation of families. Yet the parallel is striking. In both cases, state violence operates not only through the act itself but through its circulation as image. Photographs and media accounts of such separations function dually: as instruments of intimidation and as catalysts for outrage, galvanizing movements of dissent. The 1895 imprisonment of the Hopi 19 offers a nineteenth-century antecedent to this dynamic. Their arrest and confinement were not isolated punitive measures but part of a broader strategy to discipline Indigenous resistance, particularly efforts to maintain familial and cultural continuity in the face of forced assimilation. As with contemporary images of detained migrant families, the visibility of their punishment served to reinforce state authority even as it exposed its brutality.
The Hopi 19—Heevi’ima, Polingyawma, Masatiwa, Qotsventiwa, Piphongva, Lomahongewma, Lomayestiwa, Yukiwma, Tuvehoyiwma, Patupha, Qotsyawma, Sikyakeptiwa, Talagayniwa, Talasyawma, Nasingayniwa, Lomayawma, Tawalestiwa, Aqawsi, and Qoiwiso—were charged with “seditious misconduct” after refusing to send their children to US boarding schools and for continuing to cultivate wheat on their ancestral lands. After a trial at Fort Wingate, they were sent to Alcatraz. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time, “Nineteen murderous looking Apaches were brought under strong guard,” a statement that reveals the racialized framing used to justify their incarceration, not to mention misidentifying the Hopi men entirely. Held on Alcatraz from January 3 to August 7, 1895, the men were subjected to hard labor, including crushing rock as part of the island’s ongoing transformation.
They were posed in front of the lighthouse, encircled by stacks of obsolete cannonballs repurposed as decorative motifs, as a uniformed guard stands nearby. Their coerced stillness becomes part of Alcatraz’s aesthetic of discipline. The photograph does not simply document their presence; it absorbs them into the island’s landscape, rendering their incarceration part of its visual and ideological terrain.
Two of the men had children born in the Hopi village of Orayvi, Arizona during their imprisonment, underscoring the intimate violence of enforced separation. This history finds a haunting contemporary echo in cases such as that of Mahmoud Khalil, whose son was born while he was held in ICE detention after being targeted for protesting the war in Gaza—one of countless such separations. Across time, these stories reveal a persistent logic in which the state disciplines dissent by severing familial bonds, turning both the act of separation and its visibility into instruments of power.
The men were trotted around San Francisco as part of a dual mission to convince them of the superiority of Western ways and to participate in the popular tradition of ethnographic display. In a photograph from one such outing, the men stand in front of Adolph Sutro’s house, the millionaire mayor of San Francisco whose property teemed with Eurocentric plaster replicas of classical antiquity, a kitschy tackiness that echoes Trump’s self-aggrandizing decor.
Despite the violence they endured, the Hopi 19 continued to resist US genocidal and assimilationist policies. Notably, Yukiwma, who experienced multiple periods of imprisonment, went on to lead the establishment of Hotvela, an anti-assimilationist village on Third Mesa, Arizona, affirming Indigenous sovereignty and cultural continuity in the face of sustained colonial pressure.
Carceral Imperialism
Visitors to Alcatraz today wander through restored gardens, pausing to admire heirloom roses bearing names such as “General MacArthur.” Their bright pink hue and heady fragrance mask how the island deploys plants and botanicals to perform imperial commemoration. The “General MacArthur” flower is named after Douglas MacArthur, a central figure in the US occupation of the Philippines, who was appointed military Governor-General in 1900 during the US–Philippine War (1899–1902).
Imperialism is not merely adjacent to Alcatraz’s history; it is embedded in the very foundations of its most iconic structure, the cellhouse. During the US–Philippine War, Alcatraz operated as the Pacific Branch of the US Military Prison, receiving hundreds of soldiers from across the empire. Many of these men were incarcerated for offenses such as desertion and refusal to participate in a colonial war. Frank Kinne, for instance, arrived on the island in 1900 to serve a fifteen-year sentence for desertion and treason after abandoning his regiment to fight alongside Filipino nationalists.16
The war dramatically increased the number of incarcerated soldiers, quickly exceeding the island’s capacity. Makeshift cells proliferated once again, underscoring the strain placed on existing infrastructure and prompting a more permanent solution. Those imprisoned were tasked with constructing what would become the island’s defining architectural feature: the massive concrete cellhouse. Upon completion in 1912, it was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world. Its rigid grid of stacked tiers, steel bars, and narrow corridors was engineered to maximize surveillance and control. As such, this enduring icon of American carceral imagery cannot be separated from the imperial conditions that produced it. The architecture of confinement quite literally rests upon the labor of those ensnared in the machinery of US colonial expansion.
Abolition and Ecology
Upon visiting Alligator Alcatraz, constructed within the vital yet fragile ecosystem of the Florida Everglades, Trump told the press that the name is “very appropriate because I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking … Very soon this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”17 His comments situate him within a longer tradition in which carceral violence and environmental exploitation are intertwined. The evocation of alligators as a naturalized security mechanism echoes earlier myths of the shark-infested waters surrounding Alcatraz, where the landscape itself is conscripted as an extension of the prison. In this carceral imagination, environments such as the Everglades and San Francisco Bay are not valued as complex, biodiverse ecosystems but instead instrumentalized as hostile terrains to reinforce the carceral goals of the state.
Despite its very short stint as a federal prison (1934–63), this version of Alcatraz looms large in the American psyche. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, it was transformed not only into a federal penitentiary but a moral spectacle. In the wake of the 1933 Kansas City Massacre, in which four FBI agents were killed while escorting Frank “Jelly” Nash from Leavenworth Federal Prison, Hoover selected Alcatraz as a federal prison for its visibility.
As a spectacular sight of punishment, it inspired films and myth, including the Birdman of Alcatraz, The Rock, and Escape from Alcatraz, the film Trump was watching while live-reacting on social media. The film portrays the extraordinary true story of Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. The Anglin brothers and Morris made a notorious prison break from Alcatraz on June 11, 1962. They have never been found. The FBI officially closed the case in 1979, claiming the men died, but the US Marshals Service has kept the case open: No bodies have ever been found. Morris had escaped from other prisons eleven previous times and the Anglin brothers had escaped twice. They were all sent to Alcatraz because of its alleged inescapability. The ultimate escape was a brilliant act with many moving pieces that had to be perfectly executed.
They were ultimately able to chip away at the concrete in their cells because it had been eroded by the sea air, a by-product of the shark-infested waters meant to contain them. They used spoons to bore holes that allowed them to make their way to the roof en route to their freedom (in life or death.) What was meant to be impenetrable was chipped away by a cafeteria spoon. This is an idea to hold on to.
Currently, the island is teeming with biodiversity. Birds such as snowy egrets that were once hunted to near extinction for decorative plumes and feathers in the nineteenth century build their nests in greenery under the former cell house. Vines and mosses subsume an old Officer’s Club and nesting blue-throated cormorants look out at the Bay.18
The closing of the prison has enabled ecological as well as cultural flourishing. The 2014–15 exhibit “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” received approximately nine hundred thousand visitors and drew connections between the prison and political prisoners around the world, using Lego portraits of dissidents ranging from Edward Snowden to Nelson Mandela. While Ai Weiwei’s installation was broad in its subject and used the sensational lore of Alcatraz as an attraction rather than as its material, other artists have engaged more explicitly with the island’s history, and the history of how it has been represented. The video artwork Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) by Sky Hopinka refuses the reduction of the island to a singular narrative of punishment.19 The film begins with the sun rising through the trees of a forest, the light appearing like an aperture dilating to take a photograph. This is overlaid with text: “I held an ancestor in my arms and we spoke of dust.” The text creates a cross-generational intimacy and conjures poetic associations of dust with bone, ash, and land. From the forest, the viewer arrives in Hopinka’s studio, where he views documentation of the Alcatraz occupation on his laptop. Richard Oakes fills the frame. Seeing Oakes from the vantage point of a laptop brings him into the present. Oakes reads point ten from “Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People”: “The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent on others.” Hopinka plays with the colors of the text; gradients of yellow and purple cross Oakes’s face. The oscillation between legibility and distortion created by the color evokes the history of representations of the island, in which the hyper-visible points to that which was hidden, undocumented, obscured. Oakes’s untimely death in 1972, understood as a politically motivated shooting, adds a layer of melancholy to the bright blue sea and sky where he stands. Hopinka’s digital conjuring of Oakes provides one example of holding an ancestor in one’s arms. Oakes was only thirty years old when he died.20
Hopinka cuts from the footage of Alcatraz to footage of the present-day site of the prehistoric Indigenous city of Cahokia, which flourished from 1000 to 1300 in what is now Illinois. Sound from the occupation bleeds into the footage. We hear him say, “Cut” after Oakes says, “Further.” He juxtaposes the footage of Cahokia, a World Heritage Site, with text from the “Proclamation”; the latter, with its humorous address to settlers, challenges how tourism frames the former. After Oakes stops speaking in the documentary footage, more text appears on the screen: “Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian Land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation.” The text overlays light-saturated frames. Hopinka addresses the history of landscape photography epitomized by photographers who framed Alcatraz at the mouth of the Golden Gate almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Whereas Watkins and Muybridge captured light on glass to monumentalize the entrance to the Bay as part of a colonial project, Hopinka unsettles this vision through experiments that destabilize notions of an all-encompassing vision.
Alcatraz is, as Richard Oakes insisted, an idea, but it is also an island and an image. Across this essay, I have traced how the island has been produced through overlapping regimes: as a site of military fortification born of Gold Rush speculation; as a prison shaped through failure and sustained by coerced labor; as an imperial outpost entangled with the US–Philippine War; as a space of Indigenous resistance during the occupation by Indians of All Tribes; and as a hyper-visible icon of the carceral imagination whose image has circulated through photography, film, and political rhetoric. These environmental and cultural histories have sedimented in this small island off the coast of San Francisco.
To reclaim Alcatraz from the Trumpian imagination is not to fix its meaning but to insist on its multiplicity—to hold open the tensions between its histories of violence and its potential as a site of critical reflection. As a National Park, it remains a space where visitors confront the entanglements of colonialism, imperialism, and the prison industrial complex, rather than consuming a flattened spectacle of criminality. As the subject of recent artworks, the island’s iconic status has been redirected toward making visible what has long been obscured: the labor, suffering, and resistance embedded in its foundations. We must fight for a future in which Alcatraz and Alligator Alcatraz are defunct reminders of forms of cruelty that are no longer socially acceptable—a future where people move freely on land, and the water is left to its sharks and alligators.
Calling it a “semiotic gesture” is not to discount its material impact. Trump’s many symbolic and impractical gestures have been incalculable in terms of the unnecessary deaths, traumas, and harms they have inflicted on people worldwide.
Kent Blansett, Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement (Yale University Press, 2018), 85.
Nick Estes, host, Red Nation Podcast, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island w/ LaNada War Jack,” November 18, 2019 →.
Kerri Young, “The American Indian Center in San Francisco,” SF Heritage, August 21, 2021 →.
See →.
Dean Radar, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the Nmai (University of Texas Press, 2011).
The inhumane conditions of Alligator Alcatraz have been widely characterized as similar to a concentration camp. Detainees have described being held in cages, denied food and clean water, and coerced into signing documents in English without necessary translation. As of writing this, an appeals court has overturned the order of a federal judge in Miami to close Alligator Alcatraz. It currently remains open.
It may be that Trump unconsciously senses that Alcatraz was fortified to protect gold, matching his own pastiche aesthetic coated in gilt. Going further, one could argue that Alcatraz’s fortification laid the groundwork of Trump’s obsession with gold as a signifier of American greatness.
James P. Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (University of California Press, 2009).
Examples include the 1999 traveling exhibition “Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception,” curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg; the 2014 exhibition “Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums,” curated by Connie Wolf; and critical texts written by scholars such as Siobhan Angus, Martin A. Berger, and Elizabeth Hutchinson, among others.
This is addressed in detail in my forthcoming book Picturing the Rock: Alcatraz, Photography and the Making of California.
This history of failure resonates with Trump’s use of the idea of Alcatraz as a distraction from his disastrous policies.
Donna L. Van Raaphorst, Alcatraz—The History of an Island Prison: From the Development to an American Myth (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
This terracing is visible in Watkins’s photograph Alcatraz and Black Point from Russian Hill.
Notably, he photographed the Lava Bed Wars from 1872–73, during which the US seized the ancestral territory of the Modocs in California and Oregon. In order to create a photograph of heightened dramatic intrigue, Muybridge posed Loa-kum Ar-nuk, a member of the Warm Springs tribe working as a scout for the US, as “Modoc Warrior on the War Path” with a gun behind a rock formation. He intentionally constructed an image of a threatening enemy to circulate as propaganda. The same year as the photograph, 1873, two members of the Modoc Nation, Brancho and Sloluck, were sent to Alcatraz for life sentences. Very little is known about their time on the island. Barancho died on the island and Sloluck was sent to Fort Leavenworth in 1878.
His imprisonment was short lived. Kinne and two others staged a daring escape, slipping away by boat.
Maria Briceño, Louis Jacobson, and Amy Sherman, “Fact-Checking Trump’s remarks at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on Immigration and Medicaid,” PBS NewsHour, July 2, 2025 →.
Chris Briggs, “A Bird’s Eye View of Alcatraz,” 2015 →.
See →. Another example of a recent site-responsive work engaging with the media history of Alcatraz is Live from Alcatraz (2022) by Raven Chacon. He engaged with the sonic legacy of the Native American occupation of the island, filling the former prison hospital with sounds from the occupation, especially clips from Radio Free Alcatraz, a radio show hosted by John Trudell that was broadcast nightly from the island during the occupation.
Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson, “The Killing of Richard Oakes,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2023 →.