An Interview with Gabe Solis
Gabriel Solís is the Executive Director of the Texas After Violence Project, a nonprofit that is “dedicated to the telling, preserving, and sharing of personal experiences of people harmed by the criminal legal system, while always honoring the agency, dignity, and narrative power of every directly impacted person.” While undertaking a variety of efforts, the core of TAVP’s work is a video-based oral history interview archive. Gabe is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction, and his writings have appeared in the Texas Observer, Oxford American, Scalawag, and other publications.
Emily: Thanks so much for sharing with us, Gabe. The Texas After Violence Project is a really incredible organization that does a variety of transformative work. For folks who are unfamiliar with y'all, can you tell us some about the organization and summarize the work that you do?
Gabe: Yeah, sure. The organization was founded in 2007 by Walter Long. He founded it because he had been a longtime capital habeas attorney - so he was representing people facing death sentences at the late stages of their appeals. And he was just seeing all of the ways that the death penalty in Texas was totally devastating to basically everyone who was involved with it. Obviously, the families of the people who are given a death sentence and then executed were being devastated on intergenerational levels. The families of the murder victims were being devastated throughout the process as well. And lawyers, corrections officers, jurors, investigators, basically everybody who in some way played a part in the administration of capital punishment was being very traumatized. And so, he founded the organization initially to document that reality and to build an archive of stories that would try to get Texans to think differently about the death penalty specifically, but also more broadly about the cultures of retribution and revenge that have been so deeply rooted in our histories in Texas and within ourselves.
I think to his credit, he saw the long-term vision and the need for a permanent home for stories and other materials. Not only for abolition efforts today, but also to build an archive -- and archive really meaning preservation, not just like a fancy website, but actually preserving the materials. He wanted the death penalty abolished permanently, forever, and he didn't want future societies to bring it back. And I thought that was a really interesting perspective.
He also made smart moves in the early days by bringing on some really great people into the organization, including Virginia Raymond and Tony Cherian. Virginia at the time had just finished her PhD and had been a lawyer and an activist for a long time. And Tony was a public historian, documentary filmmaker, and I think had just finished his PhD as well. And they decided to use oral history as their primary method of inquiry, because they recognize it as a method with particular principles and ethics. The practice of oral history as a method of documenting life and social history is one that strives to give people as much power and dignity and agency as possible in the retelling of the experiences of their lives. And so, in that way, it was the exact opposite of what you typically see in the aftermath of violence -- if you think about a police investigative interview or a trial cross-examination, especially.
So I think Walter, Virginia, Tony, and others who started the project way back in 2007 held a very smart understanding of the intervention needed to truly transform how Texans and people outside of Texas understand the impacts of violence, the impacts of the state's counter-violence as manifest in the criminal legal system, and how to push deep cultural change for how we understand, address, and prevent harm and violence.
So, that was the beginning. I was actually involved back then as an intern, left for a while, and then came back in 2016. Since then, we've really expanded our scope in many ways, though the message is still the same. We still believe in careful, inclusive, ethical documentation. We still use oral history as a method of inquiry. We're still building really important community archival collections. But our scope has expanded both in terms of our understanding that we need to document all forms of state violence, not just the death penalty, and also in really putting a lot of effort in recent years into not just building the archive, but actually activating it in ways that both contribute to broader movements around transformative justice, decarceration, and abolition, and also in ways that build power for people who are directly impacted by state violence. We are trying to do everything we can to support survivors and families that we work with who've lost a loved one to police shootings or have a loved one incarcerated or whom themselves have been incarcerated or evicted. We have a very broad view of violence. Lately we're really growing in a way that is exciting, and I just want to make sure we grow strategically and sustainably.
Emily: As soon as I learned about TAVP, I thought, "This is so needed." Because, yes, we have to be doing the piecemeal policy changes at county, state, and federal levels. But that cultural change is what's really required - and yet it is much more of a Herculean task in a lot of ways.
I think part of what is really inspiring about the Texas After Violence Project is that not only are you doing this documentation through oral history of state violence, which alone is so critical for changing the larger communal history and narrative of how we interact with each other. But as an organization, you also have artists- and writers-in-residence who are invited to bring their creative gifts towards furthering the mission of the organization. So, what do you see the role of those writers and artists being as they work together with the stories that y'all document? And how are they working with the TAVP archive to contribute to the cultural change we were just talking about?
Gabe: I think this initially began when we started working with an artist named Mark Menjivar based out of San Antonio. He'd built art practice around archives before, so it was a natural collaboration with him. I think the initial collaboration was way back in 2014 maybe, so we’ve been working with Mark for years. Seeing what Mark was able to do with archival materials really opened our eyes to the potential for when we bring creative people into our work, and basically open up the archives to people and say, "Create whatever you want that's aligned with our mission to get people thinking about these issues differently.”
So, we work with various artists who do that, and then this year we invited our first writer in residence. And it was only natural for that first writer in residence to be Jorge Renaud, a dear friend of the organization and a dear friend of mine. AndJorge has his own thinking based off his own personal experience as someone who was incarcerated for many years, someone who was victimized while incarcerated, and someone whose own thinking about reform and abolition has evolved over the years in really interesting ways to where he is now - which is really bringing analysis and connections between the criminalization of immigration and mass incarceration and looking at that intersection. So, it was just a natural, no-brainer that we would have Jorge be our first writer. And he's not just writing essays -- he's a poet as well, a very gifted poet. And we all have been fans of his poetry.
In response to your question, though, I think that we want to do more and more of that creative advocacy work because the team, we all have our own understanding of the importance of the work. There are obviously parts of our work that stick with us and that we think might have some transformative potential. But when you bring in visual artists or poets or performers or fiction writers, that really expands the potential for doing that deep cultural work that really is at the core of our mission. And so, I'm excited about growing that part of our work and trying to continue to compensate the creators that we bring in and work with. That's really important too: to try to compensate them for their time and also for their engagement with our archival material. We’re really looking forward to growing that piece of it.
Emily: Yeah, it is so important. You can have this naive understanding that if people just have the right data then they'll make better decisions, but no – that only goes so far. You need the data, but bringing in the arts and the creative storytelling so that people are actually connected to it in an emotional way – that’s a whole different task. So, I love that you all are very intentionally doing that.
Gabe: Yeah, I’m excited. I feel really lucky to have the team that we have right now because everyone is creative and passionate, and I think that's another reason why our work is getting so much attention now is because we do things just a little bit different. We talk about things just a little bit differently. And we recognize that it's all pretty simple. It's go to the people who lived through it, and really listen very carefully, and ethically, and expansively to what they need for what happened. And it's a pretty simple mission when you really think about it.
Emily: I had mentioned earlier that the theme for the autumn social justice portfolio is sanctuary and shelter. It's been a year and a half ago now that the coronavirus pandemic started unfolding and that y'all launched the new initiative called “Sheltering Justice.” Can you tell us about what that project included, and how the pandemic changed, if it did, the conversation about incarceration and state-sanctioned violence in Texas?
Gabe: Yeah. I remember that day. It was the beginning of 2020, and we had been gearing up because we had just gotten a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support our Community Memory work. So, we were super excited that the grant had just started, and we were all energized and pumped up for the new year. And the idea that we had was that we wanted to build a cohort of people who had been crime survivors or perhaps survivors of sexual or gender-based violence. Our hope was to support cohorts of survivors together and meet every week on Sunday at someone's house, break bread together, have a meal together and just support each other. And if it resulted in an oral history interview or some project, then great. If not, then that was okay. We just wanted to do some work around a cohort of survivors and support people.
I have to credit my colleagues on this because really, they were the ones pushing this and planning it. Particularly my colleague Jane Field put a lot of work into getting this idea off the ground. We were making progress on it, and then, COVID came. We had to come together as a team and the idea of people gathering in a little house every Sunday was out. And then, it became very clear, very quickly - because we work with people who have a good understanding of what's happening inside jails and prisons and it became very clear to people who pay attention to everything happening, particularly family groups of people who are incarcerated - that folks were waving the red flag saying, "This is going to be a disaster for incarcerated people."
They already knew that the government and elected leaders would be very slow to respond to the pandemic, and they were totally right. So, what we did was that within days we paused everything we were doing, and we started planning Sheltering Justice. The idea there was to do what we do best, which was to work with people who are dealing with crisis and with loss and who are scared, and to try to document what they're going through in as respectful and responsible a way as possible.
But we also needed to change up our protocol a little bit, because this wasn't a situation where ushering through stories and other materials to our digital archive was going to be enough. We decided that we would switch up our protocol and only focus our interviewing efforts just to how people who were incarcerated were being affected by the pandemic. In other words, we wanted to truncate the regular consent and review protocol, which usually takes months or years because in the usual process an interviewee reviews all the materials before anything is made public, which is a very important part of our work. It's part of trying to honor people's power and agency by giving them full control over their story. So, what we did instead was we said, "Let's just make sure that everyone is cool with publishing just the part about how the pandemic is impacting their loved one who's incarcerated. And let's make sure that no one's talking about the cases or anything else." We wanted to make sure that we could release the information we were gathering as quickly as possible, and we also wanted to get that information into the hands of journalists and activists as quickly as possible. So, it was a little bit of a different protocol for us, but again, it was trying to respond in a way that made sense given that it was very clearly going to become a crisis.
And it did. We started interviewing maybe within a month or so, just after getting everything in place. In addition to the interviewing, we started asking people who were incarcerated to send us letters, poems, and other artworks. One lady sent the handmade facemask that she made for herself and the little bars of soap that they issued in the early days before they were giving PPE to people who are incarcerated. We built a public, digital collection of those materials, and then started to try to get everyone who would listen to engage with those materials, to put it into their teaching, to write about it. The Journal of American History profiled the project, which was cool. There was a lot of COVID-related documentation happening at that time, which was nice. We were part of a much broader effort around the US to document what was happening. And we had an extra piece of trying to contribute as best as we could to the “Safer at Home” campaign, which was pretty active in those first months after the pandemic, where people basically begged elected leaders and authorities who had decision-making power to please let out anyone they could so that they would not be at risk of being infected or dying.
Just a couple more things I want to say about Sheltering Justice. One is, we collaborated with another project called “Mourning Our Losses,” which is an online memorial for people who died during the pandemic in jails and prisons and detention centers. We worked very closely with that group and we are their fiscal sponsor, but we're also their archival home for their materials. That's a really great project.
Second thing I'll say is, we see Sheltering Justice as a long-term project recognizing that there's going to be lasting repercussions from this crisis and this tragedy for many years to come. It wasn't just about the early days of the pandemic until there was a vaccine, and then everything was fine. That's not true.
And the third thing I'll say, which is super important, is it seems like for a brief moment that the general public, whatever that means, was actually paying attention to the issue of mass incarceration during the early days of the pandemic. Writers and journalists like Keri Blakinger of the Marshall Project and Michael Barajas of The Texas Observer and many other writers and journalists were writing about what was happening, for example telling about the individual stories of people who were eligible for parole but who weren’t released and then died because of COVID in prison - just these horrible stories.
And it felt like just for a moment that people who normally don't care about people who are incarcerated were like, "Well, hold on a second. This isn't fair, because people who are incarcerated can't physically distance in a prison.” Or “Why isn't the government trying harder to get them PPE quicker?” I just feel like there was a brief, brief moment where there was a rupture in the dominant narrative about what we are told regarding mass incarceration, crime, criminality, and violence -- but it was very fleeting. Still, that was a really important thing that happened. I think community organizers, activists, and other people who have been working for a long, long time in various areas around decarceration, criminal justice reform, abolition, whatever their focus was -- they saw that rupture too. I think they tried to make as many gains as they could at that time, because they recognized that there was a little bit of an opening within an otherwise apathetic American public. I think about that all the time.
Emily: Do you feel like that window has already closed again with people's attention?
Gabe: Sadly, yes. I think it was very fleeting, only days or weeks. But like I said, I believe that people who have been doing this work every day of every month of every year, whether because they are directly impacted with their loved ones being incarcerated or because they were formerly incarcerated themselves, they saw it. I think they made moves on it as best they could.
The other thing happening in that context too was the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020. It was this really interesting moment around mid-2020 with the pandemic, what was happening with jails, prisons and detention centers, and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. Something really interesting happened. Now we're seeing the backlash to all of that, which is horrible, but I think there was a backlash because there was progress. I think the challenge is understanding how to make the most of the openings, which is why it's always important that in addition to organizers and activists, there are also writers, artists, and thinkers who can really mobilize in those fleeting ruptures to make lasting change.
One other thing I'll say on this is that the backlash that we're seeing is a direct one-to-one correspondence with the progress made in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement. People leisurely say, "We want to change narratives,” but what does that actually look like? To me, changing the narrative is not about changing people's minds, because what we see with the backlash is that many minds won't change and they only become emboldened in their beliefs. Instead, I see changing narratives as building power for the people who are living through and surviving the aftermath of injustice. I see the value of our work not merely in hoping that people pay attention to the stories or data that we’re sharing, but in supporting the process of building power for folks.
Emily: One aspect of changing narratives includes, I believe, joining together the various efforts of communities that have been divided. This folio within EcoTheo amplifies work that is at the intersection of ecology, theology, creativity, and social justice. Of course, there has always been some overlap between those issues and some folks who have been committed to both environmental justice and social justice. But historically, the conversation between those communities often has not been very intertwined -- though I do think that lately there has been more obvious intersections of work with people who are advocating for say, racial justice and prison abolition together with folks who are undertaking environmental justice and sustainability issues. So, I'm wondering how you're currently seeing that intersection of addressing harm that is caused by state-sanctioned violence like incarceration and the violence done to the natural world?
Gabe: I love that framing because it's so important. Every year our understanding of violence, particularly “state violence,” grows and grows, because there are so many ways that systems - and the people who make up systems - harm people. And so, I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming years, TAVP has developed the project or a program specifically linking up all of those issues that you just laid out. It seems inevitable because I think our analysis and our intention needs to be as broad as possible. We recognize that we're a small organization, but we want to take on big ideas and see the big picture of problems and changing cultures.
Just today my colleagues Murphy and Jane and I were talking about what transformative justice means for us. People have been envisioning what transformative justice could look like for a long time - that's not new. Putting it into practice is difficult but necessary, and it obviously includes access to clean water, access to healthy foods, access to social connection, and interrelations that are built on respect for the natural environment rather than degradation, alienation or isolation. Those are necessarily parts of what would need to be in place if we're ever going to actually be able to address harm, not only without putting somebody in a cage, but also without perpetrating more harm in the process. All of those things have to be in place first. I think anybody who knows anything about abolition and transformative justice will tell you that those actually can't be separated - the environmental piece and the piece of how we treat each other day-to-day. These can't be separated. I wish that we had the capacity to make more of those connections in our own work.
But I know that we're going that way because even in the last year, thanks to the people on our team who are very smart and who are thinking about all these issues, we did work around evictions and the criminalization of homelessness as a form of state violence. That's new for TAVP. But we recognize that we can't be talking about mass incarceration over here and police violence over here and not talk about criminalization of homelessness or no access to affordable housing, and gentrification, and displacement. These are all related. So, the next, natural progression is to really follow others and ask, "Okay, how can we concretely contribute to applying this in our community through good practice, not just in our analysis?” That's the challenge for us right now.
Emily: Ya, I agree that I think the challenge is to hold both that macro view of the interconnectedness of all these injustices while also being deeply rooted in a particular place and particular communities, where you can actually create change through lived practice.
Gabe: Yes, that's exactly right.
Emily: One final question for you, Gabe. In the work that you're doing at TAVP, you all are really diving into the deepest complexities of the human condition and social connections. You’re also bearing witness to both the darkest realities of trauma and how much harm we can do to each other, but also the resilience and courage that people are able to embody when they pursue healing and peace, both individually and collectively. As you listen to people's stories and you do all this community education and healing work, what do you see as the role of spirituality in that? Does that come up much in the work that you are doing, either individually for the people that y'all interview or collectively in the social transformation?
And I should say that I ask this question as someone who has grown up in Texas and experienced the larger religious and civic sensibility of concepts of punishment and healing and how they are often very tied to religious concepts like sin and grace. That's just in the air a lot in Texas and the Bible Belt, so I don't know how much that perhaps plays into the work you are doing in the cultural sphere.
Gabe: It's such a great question, and I think the only way really to approach it is to say that it is not surprising to me at all that spirituality comes up often and forcefully when we're bearing witness to somebody's experience of loss to violence. There's no surprise there.
I mean the first interview I ever did with TAVP way back in 2008 was with a man whose son had been executed by the state – a young, very young Black man. He was executed at 23 years old, which is unfathomable to me. And the first thing that the father told his family, after they got the call from the lawyer to tell him the execution had gone through, the first thing he did was turn to his family and say, "God has not failed us." I mean, imagine that. That's the first thing he said to his family when they got the call that the state government had executed their 23-year-old son. And by the way, the trial was full of racist strategies by the prosecution because the young Black man had killed a prominent White man. So, that always stuck with me because I thought, "Wow." I can't even try to understand what he was feeling at that moment, but to me, that was very interesting that that was the first thing that he felt called to say when they got the news.
Every single story, I would say, is some version of that, where this horrible thing happened that we can't explain because it's totally senseless. And yet people say spirituality somehow is only emboldened by that. We're building an archive of violence, because every story in there mostly has to do with violence. But it's also an archive of survival. It's people who are surviving in the aftermath of serious loss and violence. And one way that they do that, obviously, is through their spirituality and their faith. There's no question that it is a solid, foundational piece of people's experiences. In other words, I don't remember any story that I've heard where it's gone the other way - where someone has said, "I've lost my spirituality because of this experience." It always goes the other way, which I think is really interesting.
Emily: Definitely. Well, I think the work you're doing is so good, Gabe, and not just you but the whole team that you’ve put together there. What you all are doing is so inspiring and it's so needed. Thank you for being so generous with your time and I am really excited to share this with our EcoTheo community.