CWC Docs: American Homeboy

Brandon Loran Maxwell is a political commentator, essayist, author of the forthcoming book Bomb The Wall! Musings From The Beltway To The Barrio (2025), and director of the documentary film American Homeboy (2024). His writings and commentary have appeared at the U.S. Supreme Court, The Hill, Salon, The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Vox, NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, Yahoo, and The Foundation For Economic Education, among others. In 2014, his personal essay “Notes From An American Prisoner” was awarded a Writer’s Digest prize. He holds a B.S. in political science.

Jerry Ramirez is an actor, model, and Chicano writer for the Maoist Internationalist Ministries of Prison. Jerry was serving a 32-year-to-life sentence based solely on gang allegations tied to his Chicano cultural tattoos before his case was overturned. During his incarceration, the class action lawsuit Ashker v. Brown, No. C 09-5796 CW was simultaneously in litigation. This landmark case allowed Jerry to witness a rare and powerful occurrence: OGs from different ethnic backgrounds uniting in solidarity to challenge stereotypes of criminality. The case not only deepened Jerry’s political consciousness but also sparked his passion for acting and film, driven by his desire to reshape Hollywood’s portrayal of Chicanos and other marginalized groups.

Clint Terrell is a formerly incarcerated PhD candidate in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara. He previously spent eight years incarcerated as a juvenile and adult in California corrections facilities. His dissertation, “Convict Nationalism: An Historical Materialist Assessment of Convict Identities, Racial Formations, and Theories of Power in Twenty-First Century Prison Literature,” looks at a series of hunger strikes that took place in California prisons between 2011-2013 and analyzes the language of solidarity in prisoner memoirs, poetry, testimonials, short stories, theater productions, and manifestos to demonstrate the etymology and genealogy of the convict as an epistemological identity group.