We listen: the Texas After Violence Project

The Texas After Violence Project Seeks Candidates for Executive Director Position

2012-01-19T20:23:00.001-06:00

The Board of Directors of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) is seeking candidates for the position of Executive Director. Please visit out website to learn more. Completed applications should be sent to EDsearch@texasafterviolence.org by Feb. 6, 2012.

The Texas After Violence Project seeks a nonprofit leader who can build on the organization’s rich history and move the organization into its next phase with insightful leadership, well-honed fundraising skills, thoughtful and effective communications, and a keen sense of operating a nonprofit organization. TAVP seeks an Executive Director who will maintain the organization’s strong commitment to achieving justice through oral history, attracting diverse leaders and participants, and serving as a resource to the community. Read the full job description at our website.

Interim Executive Director Appointed for the Texas After Violence Project

2011-09-25T18:47:00.006-05:00

The Texas After Violence Project ("TAVP") announced today that Steve McKee assumed the position of Interim Executive Director effective September 20, 2011. Steve comes to TAVP through Greenlights for Nonprofit Success.

Steve McKee, MSSW has extensive experience providing successful leadership in non-profit organizations. From 1980 to 1998, Steve was the founding Executive Director of Pathways Community Counseling, which served more than a thousand adolescents and families annually in Central Texas. In 1998, Steve co-founded LifeWorks, a leading provider of mental health, emergency shelter, transitional living and education services for a diverse population of adolescents, adults and families in Austin, Texas. While at LifeWorks, Steve oversaw prevention, mental health, and housing programs, and he also helped initiate a strategic alliance between LifeWorks and the Seton Community Health Centers that continues to flourish today. In 2001, Steve founded Organization Development Consulting to help organizations and communities formulate strategy, successfully manage change, and achieve social impact. Through ODC, Steve has brought expertise in consulting, facilitation, training and coaching to a range of public and non-profit organizations.

Steve holds a Master of Science degree in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin and is on the faculty there as a lecturer teaching undergraduate and graduate social work courses. He is a graduate of the IBM Leadership Development Program (Armonk, New York) and the Certificate Program in Administration of Non-Profit Organizations (the University of Texas at Austin). He recently completed ten years of service as a reviewer for the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration Exemplary Program Committee.

The Board welcomes Steve and looks forward to working with him in strengthening TAVP in its entire range of activities.

A search for the next Executive Director of TAVP will begin later this year.

Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change

2011-08-15T00:25:00.008-05:00

My heart practically jumped out of my body (seriously) when I saw this announcement on an oral history list serve at the end of July:

*Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change*

"Groundswell will bring together a small group of oral historians, cultural
workers, and community organizers that are experimenting with ways to use
oral history for movement building and social change. Over the course of a
day and a half, we’ll

share our work and stories (of course!)
explore the practical and ethical questions we face in doing this work
workshop our campaigns/projects and receive critical feedback and support
map out plans for future outreach and collaboration

With this gathering, we hope to contribute in some small way to the development of a community of praxis engaged in an ongoing dialogue about effective and creative ways to use oral history for community & movement-building, advocacy and social change."

A few days ago, I received word from the planners that indeed they've made room for me at the gathering, which will take place in September. I couldn't be more thrilled at the prospect of thinking with oral historians, archivists, and educators from the Freedom Archives in San Francisco; Brooklyn Historical Society; Threshold Collaborative of North Bennington, Vermont; Sophia Smith Women's History Archives at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; James Madison University (Virginia); the University of North Carolina; and the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon. Mil gracías to the brilliant and thoughtful planners of this event for coming up with the idea, work in planning, and especially for keeping the cost of participation so modest.

Planning on thinking hard, learning a lot, and coming back reinvigorated and inspired.....

Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) comes to South Congress Avenue

2011-08-14T23:48:00.005-05:00

Katie Thornton (left) and Anna Lamphear (right)

Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) staff came to our office for a training and discussion on preparing videos and transcripts of interviews for online posting at the HRDI site on June 29, 2011. We're very grateful to Katie Thornton; Anna J. Lamphear, MSIS, an Audiovisual Digitization Librarian works in Preservation and Digitization Services at the UT Libraries; and T-Kay Sangwand, MLIS, is the one and only Human Rights Archivist at the UT Libraries and our best friend at HRDI. The training -- a review for some, brand new for others -- showed us how to perform digital captures of MiniDV tapes and edit them specifically for posting on HRDI. Participants included Olga Castro, Maurice Chammah, Kalli Henderson, Celeste Henery, Walter Long, Rebecca Lorins, Mary O'Grady, Erin Park-Markert, and Virginia Raymond.

Above, left to right: Erin Park Markert, sitting on green ball; Dr. Celeste Henery (just a part of her face); Olga Castro (back to camera, white top); Katie Thornton (center back, by computer); Anna Lamphear (red top); T-Kay Sangwand (turned away from camera, blue and green top)

Above, left to right: Anna Lamphear (red top, holding papers); T-Kay Sangwand (blue and green top); Kalli Henderson (in the back against dark green wall); Olga Castro (center, with white top); Erin Park Parkert (in the front, short dark hair); Walter Long (back)

Above, left to right: Olga Castro, Erin Park Markert, and Dr. Celeste Henery

Above, left to right: Kalli Henderson, Walter Long, and Maurice Chammah

Above, left to right: Kalli Henderson, Olga Castro, Erin Park Markert, Katie Thornton (seated), Anna Lamphear, T-Kay Sangwand, Dr. Rebecca Lorins, Walter Long, Maurice Chammah, Dr.Celeste Henery.

Present but not pictured: Mary O'Grady and Virginia Raymond. Photographs by Virginia Raymond

Kalli Henderson: anthropologist, native of East Texas, human rights activist, & mom

2011-08-12T17:01:00.012-05:00

Kalli Henderson is an outstanding intern who has been with us since June. In a short bio, Kalli writes,

"I am a senior at Texas State University, majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Studies in Popular Culture. I will (finally) graduate in December. I have a beautiful 15-month old daughter, Kezia Laine, who occupies the majority of my time. When I am not fulfilling my mommy duties, I work at Texas State in the Philosophy office. My post-graduation plans will either consist of pursuing a master's degree in Anthropology, or finding a "real" job, preferably in the realm of human rights activism, depending on what my previously mentioned mommy duties will allow. My interest and involvement with the Texas After Violence Project was sparked by my upbringing in a very small town in east Texas near Huntsville, where my experiences led to a lot of curiosity about the death penalty and the broad realm of people affected by it."

During her short time here, Kalli has made invaluable contributions to the project. Her accomplishments include pursuing, scheduling, and videotaping an important interview in east Texas: we'll let you know when that interview becomes public. Kalli also conducted an audio-only interview with a lawyer, who explained a complicated and unusual (perhaps unprecedented) aspect of a death penalty case that resulted in execution. We're hoping that that interview will become part of a podcast in the future. As, as you can see from the previous blog post, Kalli was one of the crew who pitched in to help Tia Leone complete the massive mailing to 254 county sheriffs.

The summer has been incredibly busy and the time has flown. That's why I'm especially delighted that Kalli Henderson will continue to be involved with the project in the fall, through a directed study course with Dr. Neill Hadder of the Texas State University Department of Anthropology. Because Kalli has a paying job, essential for a student and mom, she will not be able to spend as much time as we'd like at the office, but will be working on podcasts from fully public interviews.

It's been a delight to get to know Kalli -- a tremendously intelligent, thoughtful, and disciplined young woman. I'm endlessly impressed by my colleagues.

Transgender Inmate Project

2011-08-12T09:50:00.016-05:00

Kalli Henderson (left), Texas State anthropology intern, and Tia Leone (right), UT Bridging Disciplines Program intern, show off the fruits of their labor before Tia heads to the post office: 254 surveys, one for each county sheriff in Texas

On February 9, 2010, allgo: a queer people of color organization hosted a movie night featuring Cruel and Unusual, a documentary about transgender inmates. After watching the film, which depicted the uncivilized punishments for transgender inmates, Professor Matt Richardson curated a discussion about the film. Virginia Raymond expressed the wish that her colleagues at the Texas After Violence Project could have seen the film, as well, and Dr. Richardson offered to bring it to the project. For our March 6, 2010, training session, we invited friends and allies of the project to join us. During the discussion, despite the fact that the room contained numerous people familiar with Texas jails and prisons, it became clear that no one knew anything about jail treatment of transgender inmates. That is how allgo: a queer people of color organization, the Texas Jail Project, and the Texas After Violence Project decided to start a project to investigate policies toward trans inmates in county jails.

The Texas After Violence Project has sent a survey to every Texas county jail about their public policies towards transgender inmates. The surveys ask specific questions about jail policies like their policies over medication to solitary confinement. The last remaining questions ask the county sheriff’s if they would like to participate in training or receive updated policies towards transgender inmates. If a county has agreed to training, allgo will be pushing the project further to work with the county.

After months of circulating the proposed survey until we came up with a one-page version that covered some of the most important issues, and after weeks of research on each county’s sheriff department, we sent out the surveys on June 7, 2011. Each envelope consisted of one survey, a cover letter explaining the project and a stamped envelope to return the finished survey. So far, we have received 29 responses and they are still rolling! It is gratifying to open mail from Beaumont and McAllen, San Antonio and Abilene, from law enforcement officials who want to receive information and training on transgender inmates. We are completely thrilled with the results thus far and can’t wait to see what else will be coming to our P.O. Box.

Allgo, as a queer people of color organization, will assume primary responsibility for providing information and training for the county sheriff's departments who wish to learn about transgender folks. Allgo, unlike the Texas After Violence Project, is a membership organization and transgender people are among its members; allgo has the organizational history, experience, and expertise with trangender issues that the Texas After Violence Project lacks. For these reason, it's more appropriate for allgo to design the training, although we at the Texas After Violence Project are eager to support such efforts.

Today, we spoke with Ray Hill, a queer ex-convict human rights activist. Ray founded and hosted, for thirty years, "The Prison Show" on Houston's Pacifica radio station KPFT 90.1. The current host is David Babb, and we're hoping to persuade him to let us make an "appearance" on the program. Meanwhile, Ray Hill will interview Virginia about the trans project next week on his new worldwide internet radio show. He has listeners from Indonesia, Egypt, and so many other amazing places! Hopefully, it will bring more information to us about transgender inmates in Texas or anywhere else for that matter!

Research is underway and we can’t be anymore pleased with where the project is going!

Witnessing an Execution in Texas

2011-08-03T16:56:00.001-05:00

Witnessing an Execution in Texas

2011-08-03T16:27:00.007-05:00

After lots of hard work, here is the first Texas After Violence Podcast, which describes the experience of witnessing an execution from the perspective of friends and family members of executed persons. The transcript follows:

Witnessing an Execution in Texas

Produced by Maurice Chammah and the Texas After Violence Project

CHAMMAH: This is the first in a series of podcasts by the Texas After Violence Project, which works to create a foundation for public dialogue on violence in Texas through interviews with individuals affected by murder and execution. The podcasts include clips of interviews with friends and family members of murdered and executed persons, as well as lawyers, law enforcement, and others connected to the criminal justice system in Texas. My name is Maurice Chammah.

In this podcast, we hear the experiences of people who have witnessed an execution. We will hear accounts of final visits, phone calls, and meals, followed by the time in the execution chamber, and finally the aftermath.

Dr. Dennis Longmire is a professor at Sam Houston State University, who for decades has stood outside executions holding vigil. In 2008, he was asked to witness the execution of Eric Nenno, with whom he had been corresponding for several years.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: When I talked to Eric, and told Eric — and I first asked who he had listed on his witness list, and he told me his sister and his attorneys, two different spiritual advisors who had corresponded with him over his long term of confinement, who had also come to visit him; they were all on his list.

And I said, Good, so there will be someone there with you.

And he said, “Well, no, my sister and her husband are not going to witness. I prefer that they not see this. They will come visit me for the long weekend visits that they give prior to an execution, and then they’re gonna go home back to their home.”

He said, “My body will be cremated and the ashes will be transported to her and then later at some time she will take them and spread them in a small property in Pennsylvania where we grew up and it is the best time I can remember in my life. So,” he said, “They won’t be there.”

And I said, What about the spiritual advisors?

He said, “Well, it’s a very long trip. One of them is in Florida, one of them is in France. I know they won’t be coming.”

And I said, What about your attorneys?

He said, “Well, I don’t think they’ll be coming either.” So I said, Oh, Eric, if it’s possible to get on the list, I will come. I will be happy to come.”

CHAMMAH: Prior to an execution, family members and friends of the person to be executed are given an opportunity to visit. Burnett Clay witnessed the execution of Johnny Ray Johnson in 2009, after spiritually ministering to him for several years.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: And that then, the last three days she and I were there. They gave us from eight to five to visit you know. They gave us three days. We went all of those three days, and in all of those three days, you would never believe the mood that he was in, and the happiness that he experienced. A man in three days facing death.

“Oh,” he said, he called me “Mom Dear” and her “Aunt Helen.” He said, "I'm ready" because I'm goin' to a better place than here.

CHAMMAH: Lee Greenwood remembers visiting her son, Joseph Nichols, shortly before his execution.

MS. LEE GREENWOOD: The day of the execution, or prior to the execution, we were allowed to visit him each day, up until twelve o’clock on the day of the execution. That day, one of the guards refused to—tried to turn his daughter away the day before the execution, so that she was not on the visiting list. That was not so. She was always on the visiting list, because after all she was just a little girl when he went to Death Row. Well, this ranking officer and I had words, and Joseph had already told us, instructed us what we were to do if we had a problem. So we followed what he said, and the problem was taken care of. She was allowed to come in and visit.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: The chaplain who was sitting with us, sat with us — I was asked to be at the Hospitality House, which is a facility that is available for people visiting inmates in the prison system who can’t afford hotels, and it makes a special accommodation for the nights of execution for family members of the people being condemned to go there in preparation for their witnessing and also for a place to stay if they need to. So they asked that everybody that was going to witness the execution show up at the Hospitality House at three o’clock. The execution is scheduled for six. So from three o’clock until five, we sit in this Hospitality House, and then from five, at five we’re escorted over to the Administration Building where we wait, or we wait until all of the appeals have been held, have been stopped, and so we could have been in that room from five o’clock until eleven-thirty, and still not known what was happening. There is no clock in that room, and it’s not a very comfortable room. So anyway, we, I sat from three o’clock until five with the chaplain, until six, with the chaplain, who is, who escorted us and stood with us.

CHAMMAH: Joanna Vaughn also witnessed the execution of Johnny Ray Johnson, and had a similar experience with the chaplains at the Hospitality House:

MS. JOANNA VAUGHN: So then the chaplain whose last name was Hart, H-A-R-T, Hart was there to give us orientation and he did a really, really, really thorough job, and I really appreciated it.

MR. GABRIEL SOLIS: Was he just explaining the process?

MS. JOANNA VAUGHN: Exactly what we were going to experience, and he said when you get to the actual room where you’re going to be looking into the execution chamber, you’re going to feel like you’re in there forever. He said, “You’re only going to be in there for a few minutes, but it’s going to feel like forever.”

And just every, every, every step of the way he gave us a preview of what we’re going to see, do, experience, and I told him afterwards, they should do such a good job before you go to the hospital before you have an operation. Well this is going to happen, this is going to happen ‘cause they never do, and it’s really nice to know ahead of time what you’re going to experience, I think.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: So anyway, they took him away, and we went to Huntsville, and we was down there at the wall, we went to the hospital at the house first. We sit there until it was time for me---me bein' his spiritual advisor---they let me go over to Huntsville to see him for about an hour. And I wanna tell you, we had ourselves a good time. He was so happy, because the guards that were sittin' down the hall from us, we got their attention and they just stood up and looked, because he was talkin' about K.C.

He said, "I'm ready." He said, "I'm ready to go see Jesus and I'm ready to go see my brother."

They called Keith, “K.C.”

And he said "Momma don't worry about me," he said. "Because I will see you in heaven."

And he had a chance to talk to them on the phone. So I had an hour with him, just me alone, and he talked to her on the phone, and he talked to Joanna on the phone, and I think he talked to Gretchen and he talked to my brother. And the last thing he said to her.

"I'm eating," he said "but I'm ready."

And the warden---the chaplain---came back over to the Hospitality House after he went---after I went. And he came back and he told us, he said, "You know Ms. Clay," he said, “Johnny is ready,” he said. “His lawyer called, and he told him, said 'tell my lawyer I don't have anything to say to him, cause right now, I'm having a consultation with Jesus.'

CHAMMAH: Helen Phillips, Ms. Clay's sister, as well as Joanna Vaughn, also had a chance to talk with Johnson over the phone.

MS. HELEN PHILLIPS: The last time he called he said, "Aunt Helen, it’s a quarter to five. This will be my last goodbye," he said, "I just called to say goodbye." And he said "I want to thank you for everything you've done, all your visits," and he was saying, "Tell Uncle Gilbert---"

And I said, "What are you eating?"

He said, "I'm eating some chicken."

I said "it must be good. You just smackin' you know?"

MS. JOANNA VAUGHN: He was cheerful. I mean like I said, he had this great laugh, okay. He was enjoying his food. He was enjoying the conversation. He was just kind of enjoying being alive, as far as I could tell. You know, I don’t really know what we talked .about. It’s interesting. What do you talk about with — I mean—

CHAMMAH: Not all of the experiences involve this kind of joy. Greenwood's son, Joseph Nichols, had a very different experience than Johnson:

MS. LEE GREENWOOD: On the day of the execution, as a lot of the inmates do, they won’t go peaceably. They won’t just say, “Okay, here I am. Take me.” As it was, they kind of knocked him a round a bit. They disrobed him. Finally gave him a pair of boxer shorts to put on, and that’s how they transported him from Livingston to Huntsville, in a pair of boxers, no shoes, no nothing. Shackled. When he got to the Walls Unit he was given clothing to put on. We made the caravan from Livingston to Huntsville and along the way they had, I guess there were sheriffs’ cars stationed along the way because it was about six or seven cars, and we could not follow him because evidently they took a different route that we did. So when we got to Livingston, of course they had me wait at the hospitality house.

CHAMMAH: Numerous people we talked to described waiting, including Joanna Vaughn, as well as Jamaal Beazley, whose brother Napoleon Beazley was executed in 2002.

MS . JOANNA VAUGHN: So at that point, then there’s just waiting. We hear all this information, and then its chaplain goes off with Mrs. Clay because she’s the spiritual advisor and they go to have this last visit. And then, what do you do? You’re just waiting and waiting and waiting.

MR. JAMAAL BEAZLEY: And we’re just sitting around waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Just waiting. Six o’clock came. We still waiting, waiting, waiting. Still no answer. 6:05 came, and I think, I think Walter called at like 6:02 or something. He was telling us, I mean like there was nothing else he could do. He had already did everything else.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: Something about the light of day also makes it more real. In the wintertime, the time period from five until six is when dark starts to happen, and it’s a very, very kind of morose moment sometimes. The lights that are on the walls of the Walls Unit are some kind of an electrical, neon gas light and the first couple of, the first minute or so when they click on, they are blood red, and I have had witnesses ask me, who are there ask me, “Do they do that because the execution has started?” Or, I don’t know if the clock chimed at six o’clock for you guys, we didn’t hear it inside, but that’s something fairly recent, but the clock chimes every hour. It’s not just six o’clock. It just happens. And they would say, “Does this mean it’s happening?”And there’s nothing public that happens to let the people outside know what’s happening.”

CHAMMAH: Jim Willett was the warden of the Walls Unit, where the executions take place, for many years, and oversaw eighty-nine executions. I asked him what he remembers about his first execution:

MR. JIM WILLETT: I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, because all I had to go on, was people telling me, well this is what happens, and then this happens, and you're trying to play a movie in your head of what this looks like, and it's just not an ideal situation, you know, I mean.

…

Then the other thing that strikes me about your question is just the matter of dealing with an execution, of having somebody who is quite as healthy as you are, strapped down to that gurney, and the thought hits me that, you know, in a few minutes you're going to give a signal to an executioner who is going to end this guy's life. I was going to do that. And the guy was perfectly healthy. I mean that's just, almost, unrealistic.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE And that was how horrific the moment was, how horrible that ten-minute period is, however long it takes for us to kill him, how horrible it was because it was so antiseptic, because it was so sterile, because it was so quiet, because it was so inhumane. The humanity of life was absent in that execution chamber. It was absent in the witness chamber where I stood. It was absent from everything I could discern in the witness chamber that was beside me. There was silence, virtual silence throughout the whole process. Eric’s body responded. Eric didn’t utter any final statements, although as we entered the room, Eric acknowledged our presence and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” and we heard him. He didn’t even speak them clearly but he just whispered them. We could hear them through the amplification. He said, “Thank you, it’s going to be all right,” and then he lowered his head and closed his eyes.

CHAMMAH: Tina Duroy witnessed the execution of her brother, James Colburn, and describes the scene similarly:

MS. TINA DUROY: When you go into the execution room, he’s strapped down like this. His hands are wrapped in Ace bandage like this so you can’t see. So it’s like this. He’s like a coroner body that’s wrapped in a white sheet, cuffed at the chest. They already have the IVs running his arm to the wall. They have this size of a little window with the IVs going in and out.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: You see, when we got there, they already had him in the room, and they had the IV in his arm, and when we first got there you could tell they had administered the first drug to him, because he was very calm. He was very relaxed because when he began to talk, and when he said what he did---First he gave the speech about how it was down there in the Polunsky Unit. He called it a dungeon and he said "people need to know how people are being treated," he said, "because there are people down there that are not treated like humans.” And when he got through making his speech, then that's when he looked over and said "thank ya'll. I love ya'll," and he said "I'll see ya'll in heaven."

MS. TINA DUROY: “They have a man come down and bring down like a jockey microphone and ask him, “What’s your last words?”

And my brother said, “I can feel the drugs. It feels like I’m on drugs.” And he said, “I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done and I won’t hurt anybody anymore.”

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: The warden asked Eric, “Do you have any final statement?” Eric said “No, warden, “ and we had already been advised that if Eric were to say, “No, warden,” or if he were to say nothing, that immediately the warden would give the signal to the people in the other room that the procedure could start.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: And then that's when he began to sing "Jesus keep me near the cross" and when he got to the second verse of it, you could tell that was it.

MS. TINA DUROY: And that, to me—and he was looking straight at me and my aunt. He took—he laid like this and he was looking at me and he goes [takes a deep breath and that was it.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: At that point Eric closed his eyes. He had already closed his eyes before the warden said that, and fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty seconds passed before I saw Eric’s chest rise. He had been breathing. I had been watching him breathe, and he took a deep breath and that breath paused for a moment, and then there was a sputtering sound that came from him. The chaplain beforehand had characterized what we would likely hear as a snore. I think of it as a reverse snore. Most snores that I know are— you hear the air coming in. Like that.

Eric’s snore was a sputtering as he was exhaling, and there were three sputters, three relatively quick exhales. The final one, the loudest of them, and then there was nothing. Eric’s body was still. His right eye opened slightly, and that was the eye that was facing us. I could see his left eye through a reflection in a Plexiglass window that was directly across from us.

Immediately beside that window was a small door with two catheters streaming from— One of them I could see affixed to his left arm in the reflection. The other one I could see affixed to his right arm, which was immediately in front of us, so I could see the reflection of his left side. His left eye remained completely closed. His right eye opened slightly and never changed. His right eye remained open through the rest of the hour that we waited there, which was really only about five minutes, maybe seven, but it just seemed like an extraordinarily long time.

We had been warned in advance that it would be a long period that might seem like twenty minutes but that usually it was only five or seven. So we had been told to anticipate this long wait. We stood there in the room for this “hour” and as we stood there, the warden looked at the chaplain.

The chaplain was immediately in front of us with his back slightly turned toward us. He was holding what looked like a Bible in his left hand and his right hand was on Eric’s leg. I watched his left hand and it was relatively stable. The warden watched the chaplain, the chaplain watched the warden and at one time I saw the chaplain’s fingers start to tap the Bible.

And I watched the warden watch his finger. I then watched, and about eight, maybe ten seconds later the chaplain’s fingers started tapping the Bible again, very, very aggressively.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: And then that's when he began to sing "Jesus keep me near the cross" and when he got to the second verse of it, you could tell that was it.

And it was so beautiful. It was no struggle, or anything. You could see the expression on his face. as the undertaker man said "That guy died in peace." He said “the expression he had on his face,” he said "it let you know he really died in peace," which he did.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: And then, seconds later, maybe thirty seconds later, the warden turned around, and opened the door, didn’t say a word but turned and opened the door, and in walked a man with a stethoscope over his neck and a jacket on. White, it wasn’t a white jacket, but it was a regular kind of jacket. He walked in…

He’s a—I don’t know him personally but I know of him, and he’s got a very, very good reputation for being a wonderful assistant in the community.

He also witnesses and pronounces—he also pronounces death at all of the executions. He doesn’t witness them, but he’s brought into the room after the two witnesses who are the official witnesses, the warden and the chaplain, believe that the condemned has expired. I don’t know if the tapping of the fingers was a signal. My suspicion is that the warden is feeling for a pulse in the vein of the condemned’s leg. The chaplain told us that he would put his hand on the leg of the offender for human contact, and that’s probably how it may have may ultimately started.

My suspicion is that there’s— that he’s feeling for some pulse, or for something, and I don’t know what happens at the last moment of death. Watching that, my suspicion is, when his heart stops, there must be some kind of fluttering of some sort and that’s where the tapping was, but I don’t know that. That’s my suspicion.

So after the doctor comes into the room, there’s still not a word said. The doctor takes a pencil flashlight out of his pocket, and he moves to Eric’s left eye, the first time I see Eric’s left eye open, and he shines a light in it and I’m looking at that through the reflection in the Plexiglass.

He then moves to his right eye and does the same. When he closes, when he lets go of Eric’s left eye, his eye closes completely. When he lets go of Eric’s right eye, it again closes only partially. So his left eye remains open. The physician then puts his flashlight away and moves his hands and feels the left side and then the right side of Eric’s carotid arteries, doesn’t say a word. He then puts his stethoscopes into his ear and he moves the sheet that was covering Eric’s chest slightly away, clearly listens to Eric’s chest in the center of his chest and then to the left side.

He then looks up toward the chaplain and says, “Six-twenty.” He turns and walks away, which must be the pronounced time of death, so Eric was pronounced dead at six-twenty p.m., probably died at six seventeen p.m. or six eighteen p.m., but it took that, maybe two minutes, maybe not, maybe it was only fifteen seconds. At that time, the whole notion of time is invisible to me. I’m not sure how long it’s taking. But Eric is pronounced dead, and that’s the only word that is spoken after the warden has said, “Everything is, everything can proceed,” or whatever it was that the warden uttered.

The warden and the chaplain then drape, pull the sheet over Eric’s face and at that time, nothing is said. The warden resumes, returns to his position, the chaplain returns to his position, which, the warden is at the head of Eric, the chaplain is at the foot of Eric, and nothing is said. I hear movement in the room beside me and I know that the witnesses for the victim’s family are being escorted out.

CHAMMAH: After the execution, the witnesses are escorted out. Duroy remembers what she saw when she walked out of the prison:

MS. TINA DUROY: Yep. These three officers were there. We walked out the door, down here, and these were his personal belongings, what were left, I mean, I had gotten everything. He had canned sodas, he gave away like his coffee pot and everything else, his radio to other inmates, because I didn’t need them and he wanted to.

CHAMMAH: Witnesses for the person executed can go to the funeral home if they choose to after the execution.

MS. BURNETT CLAY: So the next morning, she and I got up, and we went to the funeral home, where his body was, because I told her "I'm going to make sure that that's Johnny."

And we got to the funeral home and they pulled him out of the cooler, and we felt his face, we touched him, we talked to him, and all of that. So that's how that came about. But he did die happy.

MR. DENNIS LONGMIRE: I was on my way to the funeral home because I wanted to be able to feel Eric’s body before I went home to give, in one sense, for me, I didn’t know it in advance, but I needed a sense of humanity to return to that moment, because everything from the time that we walked in to that building was surreal and inhumane… lack of any sense of humanity, any sense that anything, anything human is associated with the process. It’s all sterile and almost like it’s a machine. That’s the only way that I can explain the experience at the moment.

CHAMMAH: This has been a Texas After Violence Project podcast. It included clips from interviews with:
Jamaal Beazley
Burnett Clay
Tina Duroy
Lee Greenwood
Dennis Longmire
Helen Phillips
Joanna Vaughn

The interviews were conducted and recorded by:
Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon
Papa Diallo
Lydia Crafts
Sabina Hinz-Foley
Virginia Raymond
Victoria Rossi
Gabriel Solis

This podcast was produced by myself, Maurice Chammah.

For more information on the Texas After Violence Project or to hear the complete interviews, please go to the Texas After Violence Project website, where you can find transcripts and links to videos. Thank you.

Texas After Violence Project on TV Channel 8

2011-07-16T15:19:00.003-05:00

Jennifer Borget, and John Pope visited the Texas After Violence Project office on June 20, 2011. Ms. Borget, anchor and features reporter,and Mr. Pope, photographer, for Channel 8 YNN/Your News Now, filmed this segment, which first aired on July 13, 2011. The person you see diligently transcribing is volunteer Shane Cruz, a University of Texas student who has contributed his labor for almost two years.

You can see videos on the computer monitors. Rest assured, all (including the one Shane is transcribing) are fully public interviews for which narrators specifically authorized web publication. I ran around for an hour before our YNN friends around, moving every confidential piece of paper or DVD or hard drive out of the big green room and into the small, red room.

As I dread the camera lens when pointed in my direction, I was surprised at how much i enjoyed their visit! Although the segment is short, Ms. Borget and Mr. Pope stayed to talk with us much longer than strictly necessary for the shoot. We deeply appreciate their careful listening, engagement, and support.

The ethics of oral history: our responsibilities to non-narrators populating the oral histories

2011-07-08T15:30:00.005-05:00

At the Texas After Violence Project, we seek to do "the right thing," the ethical thing, insofar as we can discern what that is in given instances. We are guided by our Code of Conduct. We are also bound by the law.

In considering what responsibilities we owe non-narrators who populate the oral history interviews/narratives we record, especially as we prepare to publicize these stories online, we need to be aware of a tort known as "Public disclosure of private facts."

This is a distinct tort. It is not the same as slander (generally oral) or libel (written), which are torts about making and publicizing false statements about a person.

The tort of "public disclosure of private facts" concerns "facts" or statements that are or might be completely true, but shouldn't be everyone's business.

Here is a nifty summary by the Digital Journalists' Legal Guide.

Thus far, we have in two or three narratives withheld certain information that seems "tangential" to the narrator's main story, and that might hurt individual private people who didn't act in any way to put themselves in the limelight. But what is "tangential" and who are we to decide?

At other times, we may delete a person's name from a transcript online, but left the name in the audio. Thus, if you listen to an entire interview, you might hear information that is not especially newsworthy, and private but not highly offensive. "I found out from the television while I was waiting for the doctor to deal with my ingrown toenail. Joey Banana Walnutmuffin was there for the same treatment, and he said, hey, isn't that your house?" If you listen to the entire interview, yes, you'll hear "Joey Banana Walnutmuffin," but if you Google (okay, search) for "Joseph" or "Walnutmuffin" or "Joey Zeke Banana Walnutmuffin," the fact that Mr. Walnutmuffin was at a doctor's office for an ingrown toenail won't come up..at least not with technology available to the masses today, July 8, 2011.

We don't have any ethical problem with publicizing the official actions of people who consciously enter the limelight, for instance, by participating as a lawyer in a trial, habeas, or appellate proceeding; or by acting in a public capacity, whether as an elected or appointed public official. Disclosing the personal behavior of a public official is more of a gray area, as is the distinction between "public" and "private" in the first place. But certainly anything that happens in a trial not only may, but should be publicized.

As we explore the ethics of online publication of personal narratives, we welcome your thoughts and suggestions. Write me at virginia@texasafterviolence.org

We will also hold a training & discussion of ethical issues on Friday, July 22, 2011, from 11 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. All interns, volunteers, staff, board members, and close associates of the Texas After Violence Project are invited to attend. Location to be announced. Write me if you have questions.

Welcome, Tia Leone!

2011-05-31T20:12:00.011-05:00

Even as we say "Vaya con Dios" to long-time colleagues, we welcome new friends. We're delighted to welcome Tia Leone to the Texas After Violence Project team.

Tia Rose Leone recently completed her sophomore year at the University of Texas at Austin. She is pursuing a degree in a relatively new major, International Relations & Global Studies with a focus on international security. She is part of the Bridging Disciplines Program working towards a certificate in Ethics & Leadership, specifically dealing with Social Justice, Politics & Law. It's through the Bridging Disciplines program that Tia is working with the Texas After Violence Project; her internship is one aspect of a "Connecting Experience." In the spring, Ana Laura Rivera worked with us through the same program (see blog entries for April 3 and April 22, 2011.

In addition to her academic work, Tia serves as a Freshman Interest Group Mentor, in which she guides first-year students through their first semester at the University of Texas at Austin. Tia involves herself with many causes such as the Movember initiative, in which she raised money to raise awareness for men’s health issues.

Sound busy? There's more! Tia holds a part-time job as a server at the Melting Pot where she works up to 30 hours a week. Yours truly is feeling tired just thinking about Tia's schedule.

Tia’s goals following undergraduate school are to join the Peace Corps and afterwards, attend law school. She hopes to pursue a degree in international human rights law. Her goal with this degree is to build a career within Latin America in which she lobbies for better worker conditions for Latin American workers that work with United States corporations.

Tia's efforts with us this summer focus on our survey of Texas county jails' practices and policies with respect to transgender inmates; she found our project through the online listings of research opportunities for undergraduates on the UT Austin Liberal Arts website. (Search under "Raymond" in the "Sponsor" category or under keywords such as "Texas," "social justice," "human rights," or "Texas After Violence Project."

We're so happy that Tia has joined our busy band!

Congratulations to Gabriel Daniel Solis

2011-05-22T13:01:00.018-05:00

As most friends of the Texas After Violence Project know, Gabe Solis started volunteering with the project in February 2008, thanks to the referral by Eric Bowles, advisor to the Rapoport Service Scholar program of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts. The project hired Gabe as its second employee in June 2008, following Gabe's graduation from UT with a BA in Philosophy. Gabe worked for the project until August 2009, when he returned to UT to pursue an MA in Mexican American Studies. During the summer of 2010, Gabe worked for the Texas After Violence Project again. How thrilling to see him graduate (note that his work won an award, see blog post of May 10, 2011).

Cristina Tijerina and Patrick Phillips, Gabe's mom and stepdad

Gabe's grandmother, Stella Casas, and Kim Ambrosini-Bacon

Daniel Solis, Gabe's dad, and Maryanne Solis, stepmom

The whole Solis-Tijerina entourage was smart to arrive early, because the auditorium was soon standing-room only!

Deborah Paredez, Interim Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies, and Gabe Solis

Gabe Solis, newly minted MA of Mexican American Studies!!

Christina Wright heads to Ghana

2011-05-22T11:42:00.010-05:00

Christina Wright, January 25, 2011, by Christina Wright!

Received this exciting message from Christina Wright this morning. Christina worked with the project last summer and fall as a Rapoport Service Scholar referred by Eric Bowles of the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. We miss Christina even as we're thrilled to hear of her new adventures.

As a summer service learner with Texas After Violence Project, I think the most valuable lesson that I learned is to have an open mind. Everyone has a story and though we may not always agree, we should always be able to open our ears and our hearts to listen to them without judgment. My time spent working with the amazing, hardworking staff at TAVP compelled me to further develop my skills with working with nonprofits. This summer, I will be travelling to Africa to work with a nonprofit organization called SISS, Self-Help Initiatives Support Services. Within the organization, which is located in Ghana, I will be working directly with young women from the nearby Agbogbloshie slum. Words cannot thoroughly explain my excitement! I know that my time at TAVP has molded me to be successful in this trip. I anticipate hearing the stories of these great young women, and I hope to be able to share with them my stories, as well. We also have a current website detailing our project. Feel free to check it out at utstudentsforghana.org! Thanks so much Walter, Virginia, Kim, Maurice, and the entire TAVP family for your continued support and your continued belief in social justice issues!

Love,

Christina Wright ☺

Visit from Professor Sheldon Ekland-Olson

2011-05-20T13:22:00.001-05:00

We've just been honored by a visit from Professor Sheldon Ekland-Olson, who came by the Texas After Violence Project office to hear a little more about our work.

Left to right: Maurice Chammah, Kim Ambrosini-Bacon, Sheldon Ekland-Olson, Virginia Raymond. Photograph by Mary O'Grady, Friday, May 20, 2011

Dr. Ekland-Olson was provost of the University of Texas at Austin from 1998 - 2006. His deep and abiding interest in criminal justice led to his co-authorship of Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down with Steve J. Martin (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), and The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990, with James W. Marquart and Jonathan R. Sorenson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Currently he is a professor of sociology and Director of the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation at UT Austin.

We're grateful for Professor Ekland-Olson's interest and warm encouragement.

The difference a trial makes

2011-05-18T22:06:00.003-05:00

Mary O'Grady offers her thoughts on witnessing a portion of a trial earlier today. Thank you, Mary, for sharing these meditations and insights, earned in such a difficult manner.


"Today I attended two and a half hours of the punishment phase of the capital trial of Areli Carbajal Escobar, who was convicted of capital murder at the Travis County Courthouse last week. Spectators with no direct interest in the case appeared to be few in the grey-painted, blocky eighth floor courtroom; lawyer garb, male and female, predominated along with law enforcement badges worn as pendants over neckties. During a brief recess, a television reporter confirmed that by chance I had seated myself directly behind the mother of the murder victim, seventeen-year-old Bianca Maldonado.
   "When I arrived, a psychologist was testifying for the defense that Areli Escobar is not among the worst of the worst. He was followed on the witness stand by an expert witness for the State whose specialty is prosecuting crimes committed in Texas prisons.
    "Was this the majesty of the Law? It was a trial, there was no mistaking that.
    "When my best friend was murdered in August of 1996, the culprit was quickly apprehended. The trial was to occur in early February of 1997, following a number of procedural delays occasioned by both sides, if memory serves.
    "I had made arrangements to take off work and drive the two hundred miles to attend the trial for as long as it lasted. I felt I owed that to my friend, to be present as his murderer faced justice. On a Friday I spoke to the prosecutors; they told me not to bother showing up on the following Monday as nothing meaningful to a layperson would happen that day.
    "Early that Monday afternoon I got a long distance phone call from a friend. There would be no trial. There had been a plea bargain described as a last-minute affair. My best friend’s life was worth thirty-five years in prison, with at least seventeen and a half years to serve behind bars.
    "Somehow, that hurt me badly. No trial. No weighty pronouncement of guilt. I never understood before how important it was to have public trials, to see and hear that the society we live in cares enough to enact a serious ritual about a heinous crime."

Jim Willett, Former Warden of the Walls Unit

2011-05-16T18:04:00.006-05:00

Jim Willett never expected to be the subject of countless interviews with foreign press, never expected to be asked by a publisher to release memoirs, and certainly never expected to be the public face of the death penalty in Texas. But upon retirement, the mild-mannered, grandfatherly warden found that his several years as warden of the “Walls” Unit, where he oversaw eighty-nine executions, were a constant source of interest to outsiders.

Willett, who graciously gave Celeste Henery and I a personal tour of the Texas Prison Museum and an interview two months ago, explained to us how he worked his way up slowly through the prison system, eventually promoted to the position of warden of the Walls, despite his misgivings about having to oversee executions.

The three years he held that position were unusually busy when it came to the death penalty, even for Texas. As we chatted with Willett in his small office at the back of the museum, I was curious to hear about the process through which the executions became a routine. Did he remember all of them individually? Did they blur together?

He highlighted the few that really stuck out in his mind, including the execution of Gary Graham on June 22nd, 2000, when D.P.S. officers were called in to handle the crowds of K.K.K. and New Black Panthers that mobbed Huntsville in 100+ degree heat. It was one of the only times Willett was actively worried about what might happen. “And if we hadn't had the D.P.S. riot team there,” he worried, “I think we'd have had some killings, or at least some bad scene there.”

On another occasion, Willett remembers a scene that I find almost unbearably macabre. A. man strapped to the gurney said his final words, “this really good statement,” Willett remembers, concluding soberly, "That's all Warden.” Moments later, before Willett even had the chance to signal the executioner to begin releasing the chemicals, the man broke the silence: “Oh. One more thing. How about them Dallas Cowboys?"

Willett remembers thinking “My gosh. What is somebody doing thinking about the Dallas Cowboy at this point? I mean you're seconds away from dyin'. And you know it."

I suppose a sense of humor is necessary with this kind of work,, and Willett seems like the type to have a sense of humor anyway. By the end of the interview, it was clear a rapport had been struck between Celeste, Mr. Willett, and I. We were just another interview in a clearly busy schedule, and yet he took several hours to proudly show us around the museum.

Here is a clip of the warden discussing his first execution, and the process by which the executions became a routine in his life. Another good piece on Willett appeared recently in the Texas Tribune.

Gabe Solis thesis wins prize in Texas history!

2011-05-10T00:49:00.003-05:00

Congratulations to Gabriel Daniel Solis! An excerpt from his Master's thesis in Mexican American Studies, "The Trial of Ricardo Aldape Guerra," tied for first-place in the "Professor Louis Tuffly Ellis Best Thesis Prize for Excellence in the Study of Texas History." Professor Emilio Zamora, in the Department of History, and Professor Nestor Rodríguez, in the Department of Sociology, supervised the work at the University of Texas at Austin. Solis writes in his thesis that he first became interested in Ricardo Aldape Guerra -- a Mexican immigrant wrongly convicted of capital murder of a police officer in Houston and sentenced to death -- while working for the Texas After Violence Project and hearing Gloria Rubac's interview. There's much more to the story of Guerra, which you can read in a well-argued and beautifully written volume.

And there's far more ahead for Gabe, who will graduate with his Master's degree in less than two weeks from UT Austin. Stay tuned!

Permission to speak about loss

2011-05-04T10:40:00.004-05:00

One of newest stalwart volunteers, Mary O'Grady, shares these thoughts:

"I’ve been thinking about things I remember in the medium-term aftermath of my best friend’s murder. I felt very isolated, as I recall. Good friends soon gave me signals that they did not want to talk about it, and others who were less close distanced themselves; some people seemed to fear me, as though contact with somebody close to a serious crime meant some sort of contagion. Of course, I have no idea how socially inept I may have been at that time, either; inside, I felt as though I had been rolling in broken glass and who knows how that may have affected the persona I offered to the world.

"Permission to talk about a hideous loss is, I think, one of the most valuable offerings that TAVP gives to the people who are interviewed. Make no mistake: most people who are living in that situation do not get that permission every day."

Thank you, Mary.

Community forum on violence sponsored by allgo, Thursday, April 28, 2011

2011-04-26T12:12:00.008-05:00

Here's a notice from allgo: a statewide queer people of color organization:

Forum on Community Violence

"Since the murders of Norma and Maria Hurtado in Austin last week, here at allgo, we have heard and felt our community's grief, confusion, anger, and desire to create a response that is compassionate. We have heard from people all over the state and the nation. We have been reluctant to talk about justice in the way that mainstream society often talks about it, particularly when justice is equated with criminal justice or punishment. It is not that we are not concerned with perpetrators of crimes of violence but more that we recognize that at the intersections of race, class, nationality,gender identity and expression, and sexual identity and expression it is much too complex to identify simple solutions. In this case of violence we could think of the murders of Norma and Maria as resulting from identity based violence, family violence, or gender violence. But why must we think of it as one or the other? We also must consider how the consequences of a larger culture of racial discrimination, discrimination toward immigrants, and discrimination of LGBTQ people impact the perpetration of violence.

"As a community we need to talk to each other about the realities of violence in our community. We need to explore the ways that we and the dominate culture contribute to this violence, and we need to be creative in thinking about prevention strategies and responses that will make a difference for us.

"We invite you to participate in a Community Anti-violence Discussion Forum on Thursday. allgo members, our community partners and any one who is interested in engaging in heartfelt honest conversation about the realities of violence for queer people of color are welcome and encouraged to attend. We will spend some of our time together identifying the issues, some of our time strategizing, and all of the time supporting ourselves and sitting in compassion with the differing realities that we face.

"Join us!

"Community Anti-Violence Discussion Forum
Thursday, April 28th, 2011 6:30-830pm
Location: 5604 Manor Road, Austin, TX 78723"

In other publicity about the event, allgo offers the pastoral counseling of Rev. Virginia Marie Rincón, Candace Lopez (mi tocaya), who is an ordained Episcopal priest. María Elena Martínez, a shaman/healer, will offer the closing.

allgo honored the Texas After Violence Project by inviting our organization to be one of its community partners. In the invitation, Rose Pulliam, MSW, Director of Capacity Building for allgo, wrote:

"Our goal for the Forum is to provide a space for community members to talk about their experiences, to strategize together, and support each other. We will not be promoting any particular policy agenda or political outcome. We ask that partner organizations and other organizations think of the forum as a space for facilitative listening. We would love to partner with you in this."

We so appreciate allgo's wise and compassionate leadership in planning this forum. Thank you. We look forward to seeing you Thursday.

Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon bound for graduate studies at Columbia University !!

2011-04-25T00:29:00.011-05:00

Photograph from the US Journal of Academics, USJournal.com, accessed on April 25, 2011, at 12:33 a.m. I don't see a photographer's name. - vr

With an acutely bittersweet mixture of sorrow, excitement, and pride, I encourage you all to spend some time with Kim Ambrosini-Bacon in between now and her last day at the Texas After Violence Project: Friday, May 27.

Accepted at Tulane University, the University of Washington, and the University of Texas (for which many of us were not-so-secretely rooting), Kim has decided to pursue her graduate studies in social work at the place where people have been pursuing that profession in the U.S. longer than anyone else: Columbia University. Studying at Columbia, living and interning in New York City: what a marvelous and extraordinary opportunity.

And a well-earned one.

As some of you know, Kim was one the first and almost certainly longest-lasting volunteer at the Texas After Violence Project. She found us -- scarcely more than an idea at the time -- at the beginning of her junior year in 2007, only a few months after the project had incorporated. Kim valiantly attempted to transcribe two inaudible interviews from impossible cassette tapes (yes, we experimented with cheap equipment. We learned from Kim's suffering that we needed to invest in better equipment). Kim volunteered for the project for the entire school year, 2007 - 2008. She went to California to be with her family in the summer, but returned to work with us, again as a volunteer, in the Fall of 2008. Kim was literally building the project from scratch with us. In January, 2009, we hired Kim part-time as she was finishing her senior year. After her graduation, she began to work with the project full-time, and by the end of the summer of 2009 had become the Associate Director. She will have held that position for almost two years by the time she leaves.

I'm not going to try to list Kim's accomplishments here. Oh but wait, should I pull out one of those recommendation letters?...For the moment, let me just congratulate Kim and start to get used to the idea that she soon will be sharing her ideas, experience and energy with colleagues in Morningside Heights rather than South Austin. Kim's future coworkers -- and clients -- are more fortunate than they know.

See more gorgeous photographs of Columbia University here.

Dr. Celeste Henery reports on mental illness & criminal justice to international confrence

2011-04-23T13:53:00.017-05:00

Participants at the International CURE Conference in February 2011. Dr. Henery is on the far right in a fuschia top and pink and white skirt. (As of April 23, 2011, I do not know who took this photograph but I will inquire and give the photographer credit as soon as I find out. - vr)

In February, Dr. Celeste Henery went to the International CURE conference held in Abuja, Nigeria. International CURE has just published Dr. Henery's paper on its blog; I reprint most of the presentation here.

"It is with great pleasure and honor that I am here on behalf of the Texas After Violence Project from Austin, Texas in the United States. Our organization documents the narratives of persons affected by severe violence in the state of Texas. We do so by video-taping our interviews and, with the author’s permission, we make them publicly available through our archive with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. We have interviewed family members of murder victims and executed persons, attorneys, judges, journalists, social service providers, activists, scholars, clergy, among others. Bringing this wide variety of voices into a common archive for the public record is part of our effort to complicate the conversation in the US and beyond around the effects of violence and the criminal justice system. Our interviews affirm that the impacts of violence ripple through society and that the two-sided urges of right and wrong do not advance our social conversation. Violence is a human rights issue globally and in constant need of voice.

"A large part of the ethos of our work is listening, the act of holding space for individuals whose lives have frequently been upturned, imprinted or mobilized around acts of violence.

"Narrators must give consent to make their interviews public. This process requires patience and can be disappointing when final consent is not given, yet the interview i tself encapsulates the quiet work of bearing witness to stories, perspectives and experiences that often do not make it beyond the reductive American public discourses of victim and criminal, hero and enemy.

"I am an anthropologist; I trust in the process and work of pursuing and listening to human stories. I became an interviewer for the Project because of my ethnographic research experience studying questions of mental health and race in Brazil and the US. My principal research focused on a group of older black women in an underserved urban neighborhood in Brazil who formed a singing group to improve their mental health. Almost all of the women were taking anti-anxiety medication and some had been institutionalized. Believing that drugs were not the solution, a local activist put this group together to give these women a space to talk about the stresses of their lives which were not merely chemical, but came from the complexities of being single mothers, living in economic poverty, enduring violence and drug trafficking in the neighborhood and often their children’s involvement in the trade. Their narratives of visiting their sons in prison and the humiliation and fear they experienced gave painful shape to their life stories and flowed alongside their own bouts of time spent in state run mental asylums.

"Listening to and recording these women’s accounts illuminated several realities. Of particular note was the trials of black people’s experiences, trajectories and time spent sustaining their mental health while interacting with State-run institutions that possess many of our society’s un-well.Spending time with these women also evidenced the power of giving voice to the stories of people rarely heard and whose understandings are seldom welcomed into the public record.

"Fearful of being forgotten, the women agreed to be a part of my research because it was an opportunity to have their lives and stories brought into view. For me, their testimonies complicated what it means to be healthy or well in societies fraught with gendered racism, with populations lacking an understanding of mental illness, maintaining underdeveloped ideas of mental health, while at the same time relying on institutions to hold individuals whose behaviors they do not comprehended and don’t know how to alter.

"Of the over 2 million people in state and federal custody in the US, experts believe that 500,000 are mentally ill. The statistics report that 16 to 25% of the prison population can be classified as severely mentally ill, in this case meaning they fit the psychiatric definitions of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression. Similarly, there are estimates that 70% of youth in youth detention centers suffer from mental health disorders. In Texas, of the 170,000 prisoners, approximately 10% of the prison population have a diagnosis of severe mental illness that would qualify as a “priority population” for mental health services (Texas Council on Offenders with Mental Impairments Biennial Report). Conservative estimates also reveal that 5-10% of death row inmates suffer from serious mental illness. The odds are 8 to 1 in Texas that persons with mental illness will be in prison rather than in a psychiatric hospital.

"While race is not a factor in the prevalence of mental illness – that is, mental illness occurs in the same rates across race and ethnicity – its influence in the prison system is evident. Almost 70% of the incarcerated population is comprised of black and Latinos even though they account for only 25% of the US population. There are significant gaps in the diagnosis and treatment of persons with mental illness by race. Yet, black people are more likely to receive their first diagnosis of and treatment for their mental illness through the prison system.

"The picture I paint echoes what the women’s stories evoked: a vision of the painful intersection of questions surrounding race, mental illness and the criminal justice system. Moreover they gesture to the overlapping stories, frequently silenced, of mental illness within the black community and incarcerated persons with mental illness, both black and other. All together, this silence is staggering.

"I now turn to a short case study from Austin. Sophia King was a dark-skinned 23-yearold mother of two, who was killed by a police officer on a June morning in 2002. She was shot at the public housing complex where she resided paying low-rent and struggling to hold a job in spite of her high school education. On the day of Ms. King’s death, a manager from the Housing Authority was attempting to document Sophia’s irrational and disturbing behavior, ostensibly in hopes of creating grounds for her eviction, and Ms. King was shot after she apparently went after the manager with a knife.

"The early morning blaring music and the water found running from taps throughout Sophia’s house the day she died were nuisances to her neighbors and led them to refer to and fear her as “not right,” “a bully” and of course “crazy.” Her behavior no doubt warranted a call for assistance, however the descriptions of her likeability and notably her illogical ways of being expressed in the case never advanced into a substantive discussion of this woman’s illness.

"There was no medication found in Ms. King’s bloodstream when she died; and the irony, I imagine, is that these ways of being were the iterations as well as the tools she was using, without medication, to handle all that she did not want to feel or hear –voices that may have directed her attention and rage towards the housing manager. It was a profoundly desperate and tragic morning.

"Ms. King’s life ended abruptly and in crisis. Her death at the hands of a police officer sadly reads in the US like the inevitable end to a young, poor black woman whose police file was significantly larger than her psychiatric or medical records. While her runs-in with the police, according to news report, began in 1997, her diagnosis of schizophrenia and time spent at the state hospital did not happen until 2000. We can only guess at how the early manifestations of her illness could offer another prism through which to view her complicated and short life.

"I am empathetic to the story of Ms. King because of how often stories like hers are not told, particularly if they end in incarceration rather than a public, violent death...

"Prisons can become spaces where persons receive mental health care, but they too are spaces that more often silence and simplify stories of mental illness and definitions of mental health. They are systems that sustain notions of fear, criminality and violence as dominant narratives that are privileged over the life stories of those individuals within their hold.

"My work at TAVP seeks to continue the documentation of the less heard stories specifically those of people of color and mental illness within the criminal justice system. Providing a space for grieving parents to speak of their inability to get mental health care for their child before they wound up in prison, or attorneys’ vantages on criminal insanity as a defense in US courts, or the frequent references to the quantities of persons with mental illness on death row are just some of the stories that, when made public, can help to inform, teach and most compellingly, personalize and diversify the discussions on the institutions and social problems we wish to and must address."

Celeste Henery, Ph.D., interviews for the Texas After Violence Project. This spring, she has been co-teaching a graduate course in African Diaspora Studies for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Henery has also been working as a post-doctoral researcher with Professor King Davis on a project about black people and use of mental health services.

Reflections from Ana Laura Rivera

2011-04-22T08:28:00.013-05:00

Ana Laura Rivera, a student at the University of Texas introduced in this blog on April 3, 2011, recently reflected on her experience interning with us this spring.

"As part of my connecting experience for the Bridging Disciplines Program in the Human Rights and Social Justice strand, this semester I had the opportunity to intern at Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) an independent narrative and human rights project. I was given the opportunity by Virginia Raymond (J.D., PhD) to concentrate on a specific project. I chose education. I was interested to concentrate on education as a fundamental right in Texas. I examined the role of bilingual education, finance, and immigration status in low-income public school in Texas. I researched significant cases and conducted several interviews. In the beginning, it was a little nerve racking because I did not know what to do at all. TAVP was my first internship, and I had no idea that by the end of the semester I would end up presenting my work during Undergraduate Research Week at the University of Texas at Austin. However, with the help of two wonderful professors from the University of Texas at Austin, I was able to put my all my work that I had done together and put it in a humongous poster. It was pretty amazing. Government Professor Dietz was my faculty mentor; he guided me along the way and meet almost every week to discuss my work and progress. Also, Dr. Virginia Raymond an excellent intelligent woman was there to support me and made sure I was would not get lost throughout the process. I could have not done it without them both, they were wonderful individuals that guided me to excel in my first internship and research poster presentation. It was an amazing experience and opportunity. As a result, I look forward towards working on research that pertain to social justice issues."

Before conducting interviews concerning the right to education herself, Ana Laura watched and videotaped interviews herself. She reviewed the Texas After Violence Project interview with Mr. Larry Daves, in which Daves recalls a capital murder trial in the early 1970s in East Texas and many of his several of his most significant civil rights cases. These include the constitutional challenge to a 1975 Texas law that banned undocumented immigrant children from attending public school in Texas, unless the school district admitted them on a tuition-paying basis (see Video 3 of 4). Daves filed Doe v. Plyer on behalf of undocumented immigrant children and their parents in Tyler, Texas. ("Doe" was a psuedonym and Mr. Plyler was the superintendent of schools). As many readers of this blog know, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Plyler v. Doe (1982), that all children -- regardless of immigrant status -- have a right to free public education in the United States. (Because the district and appellate courts ruled in favor of the chidren, the State of Texas and Tyler school district were appealing. The names of the "moving party" --- in other words, whoever wants something done or changed -- always goes first. That's why the case filed as "Doe v. Plyler" became "Plyler v. Doe" at the Supreme Court.)

With TAVP colleagues Emily Smith and Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon, Ana Laura interviewed Judge F. Scott McCown, now director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, who as a district court judge in Travis County ruled in Edgewood v. Kirby that the state's school finance system was unconstitutional; María Elena Martínez, perhaps most famous as the Texas Chair of La Raza Unida Party (RUP) from 1976 -1978, but more importantly for Rivera's purposes a bilingual education teacher for many years and director of bilingual education in the Austin Independent School District before her retirement; and Professor Albert Kauffman of St. Mary's Law School, formerly a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education League (MALDEF). In that capacity, Kauffman represented the plaintiffs in Edgewood v. Kirby.

Most recently, Ana Laura Rivera, with Marianna Anaya and Diana Gómez (also University of Texas at Austin students), interviewed Mr. Rogelio Nuñez in San Benito, Texas. Mr. Nuñez directs Proyecto Libertad in Harlingen and was instrumental in founding the Narciso Martínez Cultural Center in San Benito. Most important for Rivera's purposes, Mr. Nuñez, with his then-fellow-graduate student, now Professor Nestor Rodríguez, opened a school for undocumented immigrant children in the late 1970s following the Texas Legislature's statute banning undocumented immigrant children from public schools.

School financing, bilingual education, and the educational rights of undocumented immigrant children: there you have it! Austin, San Antonio, San Benito. Ana Laura covered a great deal of territory! As a result of her hard work, generations will benefit from the digital preservation and publication of these interviews. Thank you Ana Laura Rivera, Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon, Emily Smith, Bridging Disciplines staff, and Professor Dietz. Thank you, too, Mr. Daves, Judge McCown, Ms. Martínez, Mr. Kauffman, and Mr. Nuñez! What an honor to hear and learn from your experiences.

We've loved having Ana Laura work with us and look forward to further engagement with students from from all over. Our next Bridging Disciplines intern will be Tia Leone. More about Tia and her project soon!

Douglas Becker and the Responsibilities of Leadership

2011-04-13T15:17:00.004-05:00

I listened to Douglas Becker on a chilly December morning, seated behind both my camera and his massive, imposing wooden desk, originally designed for partnered lawyers--one on either side--but now comfortably placing Mr. Becker a good five to seven feet from me or, on a different day, a client. The desk was one of many features of this stately office that unpretentiously indulged many of the standard trappings of the legal profession. His wife’s darkly hued painting of the Alamo sat on one side of the room, while on the other, a stick figure version of Becker, drawn by his seven year old stepson, featured big triangular ears, a goofy little briefcase, and the words “Wolf Lawyer” scrawled across the length of the construction paper.

Mr. Becker, sporting a scruffy white beard and leaning back every so often in his big leather chair, prides himself on being wolfish in all of the right ways, “zealously” defending his clients “within the bounds of the law” and ethically doing everything in his power to sway a case. Since he went into private practice in the early 1980’s, Becker has done this for both “sides,” prosecuting and defending both individuals and the State as they confront one another. Unlike many we have interviewed in the past, Becker doesn’t always defend or always prosecute.

Prior to that, Becker worked under the authority of the Attorney General, and what struck me about his style was his particular way of talking about authority. In multiple frameworks, he expressed a certain kind of admiration for authority, while eschewing any interest in holding authority himself. “I actually was a judge for about ten years, and as community service,” he said, “but I didn’t like it.” He continues, admitting “I hated having to decide who was telling the truth. I hated having to rule in favor of one person. I like much better just to take either side and argue what you could on their side, and let someone else take that kind of heat and pressure.”

In this clip he’s talking about the offices of district attorneys and the differences between counties in terms of prosecution and defense, something we ask about often in our interviews. While he does give a nod to the demographics of a given county in shaping the culture of prosecution, he puts much more emphasis on the personalities of "who was the leader, who was the D.A." Nobody, he adds, will perfectly meet the requirements of the majority of the population of any county, and so their personal feelings and goals play a large part in everything from the fervor of the prosecution to the tightness of the evidence to the likelihood of the death penalty being sought. The prosecutors in turn influence the conduct of police officers, which then directly affects how crime is investigated, which then affects the evidence available to prosecutors in a constantly reinvigorated loop.

Although he isn't interested in being a judge, he doesn't always employ the style of the fiery advocate either. Speaking in a slow, measured tone, Becker still has a judicial tendency to attend to both sides of an issue. Addressing police misconduct, he first argues that it would be "unfair to blame" the entire Houston police department based on the actions of a "real limited number." Tilting the back of his head into the leather cushion, he then hops over to highlight the particularly shocking cases of José Campos Torres, who was found floating in a Houston bayou days after being brutally beaten and left to drown by police officers, and Calvin Sellars, whose confession was obtained with a gun at his head and a boot on his neck. "That's police misconduct," Becker chuckles matter-of-factly, and yet for him these kinds of moments are exceptions. "I still think," he concludes, "the majority of D.A.s, assistants, police officers, are motivated to acted honestly, with integrity, do their jobs the right way."

But he doesn't shirk responsibility. Becker explains that district attorneys, much like presidents, have to be "very careful" about every word they say, because "there are people hanging on that word." And indeed, Becker himself is an example. Throughout his interview, he makes multiple references to moments when the words of a superior had to be interpreted, pondered, and the result was a personal course of action influenced by those words. When one attorney general asked Becker if he thought anyone innocent had been convicted, Becker was taken aback, and realized he had never thought in those terms, though he proceeded to do so after the interaction. He in his recollection as powerfully brief.

And so Becker's understanding of prosecution and law enforcement, while it highlights the power of individuals, also put those individuals under a lens and holds them accountable for practically "every word." For the most part, he finishes, the ways that both the leaders and followers have handled themselves under such lawyerly scrutiny was, in his word, "impressive."

See the clip:

Turnabout is fair play: The Gabriel Salgado interview

2011-04-07T21:13:00.038-05:00

Gabriel Salgado, a promising oral historian and student at Kealing Middle School in Austin, interviewed me to fulfill a class assignment. I have to admit it's been a while since anyone interviewed me, especially with a tape recorder. And it feels odd to read back my own words: I wish I'd been a little more clear here or there; in some places I feel very embarrassed to be talking so much about myself. I wonder if I've revealed too much. I wonder what people will think. I feel exposed.

It seems only fair, doesn't it? I don't mean to compare myself to our narrators, the folks who reveal so much of themselves to the Texas After Violence Project, most of whom have revealed much more personal stories than I did. And my story is a happy one. But I hope that reading Gabriel's transcript of my words will make me a more sensitive interviewer.

Gabriel uses a different oral history format than we do at the Texas After Violence Project. If you've looked at our narratives, you know that we include both interview prompts and the narrators' answers. Gabriel did not transcribe his own questions, only my responses. His technique resulted in a smooth, uninterrupted transcript, although when I first read it, I wondered, why did I jump from that topic to this other one? Each approach has its strengths and limitations.

Here, with Gabriel's permission, is his Tuesday, March 15, 2011, interview of me at the Texas After Violence Project (with a few small edits by me). Thanks, Gabriel!

A friend of mine, Walter [Long] has done post conviction death penalty work for many years. He represents people already on Death Row awaiting execution. He’s done this for many years. It’s very stressful, difficult and painful to be representing somebody and try to save their life. . . . He wanted to do something that was not about the end of life. He had this idea that we would start this project to help people understand how these tragedies, the executions and the whole criminal justice system affects many, many people aside from the murdered person and the executed person and their families. Many people are affected. And to try to understand them we would listen to their stories by interviewing them.

Kind of how you’re interviewing me now but different, in the sense that we don’t come in necessarily with a bunch of questions. We’d listen to their stories to get people to; number 1, understand something in a different way than they had before, and number 2 to get people talking. Not from an ideological point of view like “I believe this or I believe that.” Or even necessarily from “this is what studies show”; “these are statistics”; but these are people’s real experiences. And what happens to our understanding if we listen to what people are actually going through?

So my friend came to me and said: “Virginia, you’ve done social justice work all your life, you’ve been a lawyer, now you’re in graduate school and are studying English, literature, narrative, and anthropology, what are you going to do when you’re done with that?” I said I hadn’t decided yet. He told me his idea, and he invited me to work with him, and be the director of this project.

I think that -- especially this is a small project and a new project -- it’s important to participate in all the different kinds of work so that I understand. Now, I don’t fully participate in all aspects of the work because I don’t know how to do the technical parts like the filming [and] the end.

The interviews are the core of our work and. . to know how to do it well and to supervise others doing it, I have to know how to do it and do it well. Otherwise it would be like the boss who has never done the work. The other part is that I really see this project as a teaching project. We have many volunteers: many of them are students, a few are high school students, college students, many are graduate students. The project is about teaching and in order to teach I need to know it myself.

We have a code of conduct. The code of conduct is really important. It is: 1. Confidentiality. We tell people we are not going to do anything with your story until you approve it. We ask you to consent to the interview but we are not going to share it outside of the office until we’ve transcribed it. You review the transcript and say “take this part out, or fix this”; you’ve reviewed the DVD and said “you may now donate this to the Texas Against Violence Project.” And I say that you may make it public on a certain day, and they say in what ways may we make it public. And some people may say it’s for library use only, or you can use it to show a certain group but not online. Other people may say it’s okay to put it online. So we only share interviews in the manner and at the time that the narrator agrees and not before. So confidentiality is very important.

The second part is against discrimination and there’s a long description of this but it means we need to examine our own biases. We know we have all different kinds of biases. If we know that we’re not going to be able to listen to somebody and put our judgments aside and listen to them empathetically, then we shouldn’t do that interview. Somebody else should do that interview.

When we first started we made some mistakes. False economy [something that appears to be less expensive at first but is actually more expensive in the long run]: "Oh, we’re driving to Houston. Oh, we’re driving to Huntsville. Since we are going anyway and we’re spending the gas, since we have to be there anyway, since we have to rent a couple of hotel rooms anyway, why don’t we interview more people? How about 3 or 4 rather than 1 or 2?"

That is what’s called "false economy" because what happens is that you get sick. You can only absorb so much pain at once without getting sick. So, I totally freaked out because one of my colleagues got sick. This has happened more than once. Now we have a rule that limits the number of interviews you can do within a certain period. It’s called a “vicarious trauma,” just getting physically ill, your stomach hurts, headaches, all kinds of problems from listening to people’s sadness too much.

We try to have fun and that may sound a little strange but we do try to have fun in our work, and there’s more to our work than listening to tragic stories.

We also have other protections for our interviewers and videographers. Number 4, is obviously no use of legally prohibited drugs, limited use of legally prescribed drugs. So, if you work with us and you were taking a new medication and you don’t know what the side effects are, I may tell you not to work on any interviews until you know.

So there are a lot of details about that. No weapons ever, work in pairs. It’s not a good idea to go alone to any interview for a lot of reasons. Remain attentive, sympathetic, non-judgmental, with any narrator before, during, and after an interview. Those are some of the basic things about our code of conduct. We tell people about how to approach interviewees.

There is a philosopher called Martin Buber, and he had this idea of “I-Thou” and “I-It.” “I-Thou” is when you have a relationship with a person and it’s an ideal that rarely happens. “I-Thou” is when you are relating to somebody fully appreciating them only as them, not using them in any way, treating them in their own right. As opposed to “I-It” in which we use people for other ends. Now that can get to an extreme level when you exploit somebody. But we all have “I- It” relationships all the time. I love my husband but we also do certain things for each other. You love your parents but they do certain things for you. They give you a home. So it‘s not a bad thing that we have “I-It” relationships inherent in most ordinary human relationships, but if you get too much over to the “I-It” side that’s exploitation.

One part of our project is the end goal of creating these conversations is: “Oh, let's get a lot of interviews, let's put them online, let's have lots of discussions.” But that in a way is treating that interviewee/narrator as an “It.” And what we need is to have an interview process that can really be okay with listening only.

So, if for instance if I were interviewing you, Gabriel, it would be okay with me if I never used it. Because I would be listening to you for your sake and trying to relate to you as you, rather than trying to use just to “Oh, let me get a good story out of Gabriel.” That would not be a bad thing in ordinary life, but when we are talking about people who’ve suffered terrible traumatic things, it’s not appropriate to use people in that way.

So there’s always this tension, a little bit of contradiction between treating the narrator as a person who I have all the time in the world to get to know and it doesn’t matter on one level if this ever turns into a video that goes online or not, or goes to a library or not. And our other purpose is we’re going to use a camera because we want to preserve this. We are going to use a consent form even though the consent form may make the process feel a little artificial and awkward.

So a lot of our procedures are about where to draw the line. So, we do consent, we explain to people what goes into it, just like you did at the beginning of this interview, and also way before this interview when you wrote to me and explained it would be tape recorded, it would be photographed, et cetera, et cetera.

We transcribe the interview, we then audit the transcription, which means somebody besides the person who has transcribed it listens to the tape and make sure it matches what’s been transcribed. We send it to people and we edit it in the way that they want.

For instance, if I’ve given this interview and then I said “You know I was always jealous of my sister because I thought she was prettier than me,” then say, “Let's take that part out, I wish I hadn’t said that," we’d take that part out. There’s only so much we can do with a DVD. We can’t take out individual words, we can take out sections, but we could take it out of the transcript. We would use ellipsis, to show that we have taken out.

So we have a lot of methods. Our main method in interviewing (and we have moved more and more towards this) is getting away from questions and answers and more towards just facilitating that person telling their story. So, if I were interviewing you for this project, I might say, “Hi Gabriel, this is what we do” and go through the whole process. And then say, “So Gabriel, tell me about yourself” rather than asking specific questions, and would try to refrain from interrupting until you made it seem like you didn’t know where to go next, and then I would try not to ask you yes or no questions, but ask you open ended questions such as “Tell me about Kealing. What has been your experience at Kealing?”

The project is trying to complicate people’s thinking. It’s exactly the opposite of most projects that work on public policy issues in the sense that they take big, huge complicated issues -- for instance, substance abuse, or child abuse which have many different causes, lots of information -- and they try to simplify it for public education into a short, memorable message or sound bite, such as “Never, never shake a baby.” Or, “Don’t drink and drive.” These are a kind of very short messages.

In a way we are doing the exact opposite because we’re trying to get people to think more deeply about what they think, and what we think, by listening to experiences different to our own. And that’s the beauty of the project and it’s also the difficulty of the project. It is also very difficult to get support for that kind of project or raise money for that kind of project because it doesn’t have a very tangible result at the end.

For some of us there’s an element of spirituality to the project in the sense that witnessing and listening is, at least for me, a kind of spiritual practice. Not everyone agrees with that. It’s a project that is scholarly because we are trying to learn, it’s about public policy, it is anthropological, it’s about narrative, but it’s also a way of being in this world which is by listening instead of by telling people what to think. And it’s very different than anything I’ve done before because I’m an activist and a loud mouth (laughs).

Our motto is “listening for a change.” Recently somebody said we shouldn’t use that motto because it makes it sound like we weren’t listening before. That’s the point. We are listening in order to create social change, to move toward social justice and as we say, “we try to work toward a more just and less violent Texas,” one in which every person is valued and respected and the dignity of every person is respected. Some of us are activists who told you what to think before: “Think this, think that,” and that’s not what we’re doing now. Instead we’re listening. Not that this is a better way, but that it is an alternative way that needs to be part of the mix in creating social change.

This project is not an advocacy organization. We do not take a position on death penalty. We all have our own opinion and we are free to express them. But as an organization we want to make sure everybody feels comfortable talking to us. So when I listen to somebody who is for the death penalty for whatever reason, I treat him or her with the same respect I would treat anybody else. Because I’m not really interested in learning about their opinion, I’m certainly not interested in fighting with them about it. I want to learn about their experiences. I want to learn about how they experience the world, how they’ve come to think the way they do, what they’ve gone through, and I want them to share their experiences with me.

I used to do advocacy work against the death penalty, not as my full time job but as a person. Sometimes people would say to me, “You would feel differently if you lost a son, and a daughter, your husband, a family member to murder. You don’t understand what it feels like.” And it’s true. I don’t know what it would be like. I have not had that tragic experience befall me. And what I would say is the only [way] that I would begin to understand is if you share it with me.

This project, as you can tell, is a complicated project. What we’re trying to do is get people to listen to each other, and to a deeper level of understanding each other. Because we think that from that deeper level of understanding, we’ll find, will become more effective, more just and more compassionate ways both to prevent violence and to respond to it when it happens.

There’s a huge range of the narrators’ behaviors and emotions. It’s hard, and I would be loathe to characterize or make generalizations on how people act and feel. Sometimes people will cry, sometime they will raise their voice. I don’t like it when people wave their finger on my face but that happens. Some people are nervous and quiet, and they would say something and wait for the next question, or because that’s how they are when emotional. Some people have been waiting a long time to tell their story and they’re very easy about talking.

We call other people that we interview and we call them sometimes “public actors” and because it’s their job to talk about these issues and so they have no trouble talking about it at all.

When I went back to do graduate school in my forties, part of my dissertation was about Chicano response to police brutality, in Chicano cultural production. So I came in suspicious of police officers and law enforcement, of sheriff departments, of immigration officials, of border patrols because I had read so much about it. So I was not really expecting to like the police officers that I interviewed. But one of the things that happen sometimes when you interview people is that you get to like them! You get to know them as people rather than as just abstract members of a category. So I was very surprised.

One of the Sheriff's Department people that I was most surprised of was Captain Arturo Cardenas, who is leaving the Sheriff's Department soon. But I learned a lot about him, such as the fact that he was in training to become a priest (which is not an image that I have with a sheriff's deputy). That he was a boxer and that boxing was very important to him. That he was very concerned about immigrants, that his own antepasados were immigrants so he felt a special responsibility to protect the immigrant community in Austin. I was surprised that I liked him so much.

There was another man, public information official at the Sheriff's Department (Roger Wade). I didn't do the interview but watched it afterwards and I was very, very moved. The interview is so vivid to me because I saw him struggling. He didn't have his mind made up, that this is the way that things should be. That was a very honest, and moving process. It wasn't like he was just trying to give us a line, "Oh yeah, I have it all figured out, this is the way it is." I was very moved by that.

I’m very proud of the project. I really believe in the work we’re doing. I think that the reasons why people act out violently are many reasons. My personal philosophy about human beings is that we don’t want to hurt other people and that if we do that is out of ignorance or that something has gone wrong in our upbringing or in our lives. I think people enjoy connecting with others and enjoy getting to know others and working with other people. There are a lot of things can go wrong. One thing is that a lot of people who commit violence were or are victims of violence or child abuse. Sometimes people have what we can [call]mental illness, illness. There are lots of ways to talk about people who are “not right on the head” or something wrong or different about them that they feel they need to hurt other people. I don’t think that’s natural.

Listening to stories of violence and the effect it has in creating more violence is very sad work, but I think it’s really important work. On the other hand, I also feel that when we work in really serious problems it’s rewarding, it’s a different kind of reward you get than doing an ordinary job that’s not so hard. I find that I meet some wonderful people, I find, that I respect and admire and like so much, so many of the people I work with. Also many of the people I interview have made it through really hard times and there’s a lot to learn about resilience and how to keep going after tragedy.

There are interviews that strike me in different ways that I think about a lot. Sometimes there are people who see the world very differently than I do. Even apart from the experiences themselves that I haven’t had, just the fact that they experience the world so differently than I do is important for me to [learn].

My ideology or my belief system holds that most people don’t wish to cause each other pain. People enjoy connecting with other human beings and being competent. But I’ve met interviewees or narrators (we call interviewees narrators)who don’t believe that at all. They believe everyone in the world is out for himself or herself, everyone wants something from you, people are ignorant, if people look altruistic there’s an ulterior motive. I find that very unpleasant.

It’s really hard to listen to listen it’s very sad to listen to some one who has witnessed an execution. One of the ones that’s public and online is of Dennis Longmire. He was requested by a person who was going to be executed to be in the witness area to watch the execution, which is something he had never done. We interviewed him the day after that. So he was able to recall in very, very great detail what exactly happened. I was very grateful that he was able to do this though it was also hard to listen to.

I have interviewed people whose a member of their family was murdered and the murderer was executed. Of the ones I’ve interviewed nobody has felt better about it. We have also interviewed family members of people who are murdered who asked and worked with the District Attorney of their jurisdiction not to pursue the death penalty because it wasn’t going to bring their loved one back, it was just going to create more pain, and they didn’t think that’s what should happen. Sometimes it’s for religious reasons.

We have not interviewed anybody on Death Row though. There are two main reasons for that. One is that we don’t want to accidentally create evidence that would potentially hurt a case that where somebody is trying to save somebody on Death Row. So say I interview a person on Death Row and he or she told me a story. Meanwhile, the law changes, or the case gets sent back for a new trial. Then, everybody gets a hold of this tape with the interview that we’ve done, and they say, look, this person lied about something. And in the new trial they use that information against him. You just don’t know how information is going to work. That is the main reason.

The second reason is that if you go into Death Row and begin to get to know somebody, it raises his or her expectation that you’re going to do something about it. And if we do that, that would be a different project. And that would be a worthy project, but all we’d do then, would be to work on that person’s case.

So it’s about knowing our limits and also trying to see ahead about how our work can be damaging to someone even if we don’t mean it to be. These are really ethical questions.

There are two categories where we don’t interview anybody. One is if it’s an open case, and the other one is that we don’t interview children or anybody under 18. For something like this that is so intrusive, and personal, and potentially loaded, we don’t want to interview someone whom has not. . fully consented.

There are different kinds of difficulty in this project. One is trying to pay the rent. (Laughs) I mean, really. Though, certainly, it’s very difficult and painful to listen to all the sad stories, and you know, I need to be very careful that I don’t sink into depression. I need to take very good care of myself. One of my responsibilities as the director is to make sure people here stay healthy and don’t get dragged down into the sadness. You may notice we have windows and paint our offices in bright colors. We try to take care of ourselves. Like I’ve said before about the “vicarious trauma.”

When I see people who are volunteers or who haven’t done interviews before, come back and I watch them do a fantastic interview (in the sense that we learn a lot from it, and the narrator seems comfortable), and we put it online at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative at the U.T. Libraries, it’s quite wonderful. You get to see the transcript and you get to realize that people really are watching these videos and are learning from them.

I think that probably the biggest impact we’ve had is on people that have come to our training and have worked with us a little bit because they are deeper involved. We have not set in place evaluation measures. This is a long-term project, and we’re still new. This is something that we have to work on for a longer period of time.

I think that people have the right to be feel secure, to not be attacked, and to be secure emotionally as well as physically. The question is what is violence? Is starving to death violence? I think that’s a form of violence, not the kind of violence we’ve talked about so far in this interview, but there can be violence by neglect. The question to me is not whether people have the right to be safe, but how do we get there. That’s the hard part. How do we create communities that are safe?

GABRIEL SALGADO: Thank you for the interview.

VIRGINIA RAYMOND: Thank you very much for asking.
--
Post script: The day that Gabriel interviewed me I wasn't at my best. It was a Tuesday and I had just returned from the memorial service of a beloved friend the night before. I was feeling very, very sad and still exhausted from the travel. The plane had gotten in after midnight.

Then during the interview a different dear friend called me, and my colleague Kim said, "She says it's an emergency." After the phone call, I returned to the interview with Gabriel. I tried to focus, but I felt troubled and hurting for her family.

Tonight, reading Gabriel's transcript, I am blown away. I appreciate the interview more than I was able to do at the time. I realized that Gabriel listened to me more carefully and for longer at one sitting than anyone had in a very, very long time. Maybe ever. And I'm a person blessed with many good friends who listen. The experience of getting to talk, uninterrupted, about this project, felt like an enormous gift. I felt very honored by his attention and respect, by the fact that he cared enough to listen.

May we be able to make our narrators feel half as valued as Gabriel made me feel.

Meta-blogging

2011-04-03T17:32:00.000-05:00

Hello friends. I'm surprised to find myself blogging about the blog....but then, I was also surprised just now to look at the statistics and map showing places where, besides the U.S., our readers are! Since last may, readers have come from Moldova, Russia, Germany, Australia, Romania, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Thailand, Canada, Iran, Switzerland, Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil. (This map is not complete, as readers from different places check in and out.)

Well, hello!

Do write and let us know how you came across our project....and if you found what you were looking for? Write to us at info@texasafterviolence.org (all staff) or to me at virginia@texasafterviolence.org

Thanks for reading, friends who I haven't met yet!

Introducing Ana Laura Rivera

2011-04-03T12:24:00.001-05:00

Emily Smith and Ana Laura Rivera in the office on Friday, March 25, 2011, shortly before they set out for their first interview. Emily began working with the Texas After Violence Project as a volunteer this spring; watch this blog for an introduction to Emily soon.

The Texas After Violence Project welcomes Ana Laura Rivera!

Ana Laura is an intern, working with us this spring via the Bridging Disciplines Program of the Undergraduate College at UT Austin. Ana Laura completed the Texas After Violence Project in Fall 2010. She shared the following biography with us.

"Ana Laura Rivera is a first-generation student at the University of Texas at Austin. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Government and Spanish. Also, she is part of the Bridging Disciplines Program pursuing an interdisciplinary study in Human Rights & Social Justice. Ana Laura is very active in service and is part of the Rapoport Service Scholars and the University of Texas at Austin Service Scholars. In addition, she is highly involved in advocacy and campus organizations. She has done a lot of volunteer work with Breakthrough Collaborative by serving as a high school application coach. She is a Safesite Advocate Representative for the University of Texas at Austin, which is part of the Great American Condom Campaign to promote reproductive and sexual health education. Also, she serves as a campus leader with the ONE Campaign, which is an organization that is in the fight for poverty and hunger in developing countries especially in Africa. In addition, Ana Laura serves as a first-yea, where she guides a group of first-year students and teaches weekly seminars. Ana Laura has also done service abroad and is an ambassador for the Miracle Foundation, which is a non-profit that focuses on empowering orphan children in India. Her goals after undergraduate school are attend law school and do a joint program to obtain her masters in public policy as well. She wants to concentrate in international human rights’ law, especially the rights of children and for education." - ALR

Ana Laura is an enormously productive intern -- transcribing, interviewing, videotaping, and translating Spanish to English. And what energy! It is such a privilege and honor to work with a bright young leader so committed to community service and social justice.

Juror in a 2009 Capital Murder Case Speaks

2011-04-01T14:11:00.003-05:00

Sean McMurrey at home with sister Kate Kelly. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Sean McMurrey, who was a juror in the capital murder trial of Albert Segura, Jr., in Travis County in 2009, sat with Texas After Violence Project interviewers a few months later to describe that intense and difficult experience. He describes in great detail what questions the jurors considered before deciding to convict Mr. Segura of capital murder, and what factors ultimately led to their sentence of life in prison without parole. Mr. McMurrey has just donated that interview to TAVP for non-commercial and educational use and released it for public use.

As sensitive and difficult as it is for us to approach family members of murder victims and family members of executed persons, finding a juror was even harder. The names and addresses of jurors are protected by law. Only if a juror comes forward, or if someone-knows-someone-who-knows-someone will we be able to approach a juror about sharing their story with us. But jurors’ perspectives are critical, and we’re so honored and grateful that Mr. McMurrey shared his careful reflections with us --- and you.

I've just posted the transcript on our own website here. Or you can always find these interviews by going to the stories section of our website. We’re posting newly released interviews all the time.

As you know, the TAVP team, principally Kim Ambrosini-Bacon and Maurice Chammah, will take it from here: processing the interview video and transcript for posting in full at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, and selecting features to post on our Youtube channel.

How soon the the full video and featured selections become publicly available depends on how long it takes for us to work through the interviews we already have waiting for such publication, and you: friends and supporters who may volunteer your own time, or may refer potential interns and volunteers to us.

This interview, combined with portions of interviews by Larry Daves, Christopher Gunter, and Andrew Forsyth (all public) provide rare insights into the workings of juries. Let us know how we can help share this material and how you use it...

Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, March 29, 2011

2011-03-29T00:38:00.001-05:00

On March 29, in the Reagan building at 15th and Congress Avenue, immediately northwest of the Texas Capitol (JHR on the attached map ), the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee chaired by Rep. Pete Gallego will take up numerous bills pertaining to the death penalty (fourteen directly pertaining to the capital cases and others that may also affect capital cases, see attached list).

To read the text of any bill, go to the Texas Legislature Online,
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Home.aspx
& look for “Search Legislation” in red in the top middle of the page. Type in the bill number (e.g., HB 819 or SB 353, no periods) and the search engine will take you to a page which will show you where a bill is in the process. You can click on the “text” file folder icon to read the bill in question. (HB 819 is Jessica Farrar’s bill to abolish the death penalty; SB 353 is the bill that will allow guns on campus.)

The meeting is not set for a definite time but upon adjournment of the House. Yes, that uncertainty is very inconvenient for anyone who is not an “insider.” It’s even inconvenient for the insiders.

You can keep track of what’s going on by watching the House online if you have a computer available to you. You can also watch hearings online if you’re not able to attend. (See the shaded column on the right of the Texas Legislature Online homepage and look for “Video Broadcasts.”) Or you can ask a friend who’s there to text you. Or tweet. Or whatever.

This particular hearing is worth attending because, like all criminal justice hearings

1) you can learn so very much about the specific bills, criminal procedure, and what kinds of testimony seem most effective and what not so much (Aquinas), at least at this juncture in history, (but feel free to make your own judgments); the ineffectiveness of sarcasm, condescension, screaming, or other forms of rudeness; and the political lay of the land;

and

2) oh! The people you'll meet. Last week, Maurice and I, in Senate and House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee meetings respectively, introduced ourselves to people with stories to tell, from whom we are now requesting interviews. If you do approach people on behalf of TAVP, please communicate with one of us (but no, you don’t need to ask first. Carpe moment!)

Please do not testify for or against any bill in the name of the Texas After Violence Project. Same applies for “signing in.” Do whatever you need to do as individuals, but do not take a position on any bill as a Texas After Violence Project representative; none of us are authorized to do so. The project does not advocate for or against any legislation.

Hearing on Moratorium, Abolition and Law of Parties Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee

2011-03-27T14:20:00.000-05:00

HB 819 Farrar | et al.
Relating to abolishing the death penalty.

HB 852 Dutton
Relating to abolishing the death penalty.

HB 3400 Walle
Relating to certain sentencing procedures in a capital case.

HB 1670 Coleman
Relating to the applicability of the death penalty to a capital offense committed by a person with mental retardation.

HB 1646 Gallego
Relating to representation of certain applicants for writs of habeas corpus in cases involving the death penalty.

HB 2511 Dutton
Relating to the joint or separate prosecution of a capital felony charged against two or more defendants and the extent of a defendant's criminal responsibility for the conduct of a coconspirator in capital felony cases.

HB 566 Christian
Relating to the murder of certain individuals protected under a court order as a capital offense.

HB 1641 Dutton
Relating to the creation of a commission to study capital punishment in Texas and to a moratorium on executions.

HB 1973 Lucio III
Relating to the admissibility of certain statements in the prosecution of murder or capital murder.

HB 689 Dutton
Relating to the admissibility of certain evidence in capital cases in which the state seeks the death penalty.

HB 543 Dutton
Relating to the admissibility of certain confessions in capital cases.

HB 2337 Gallego
Relating to the admissibility in a court proceeding of certain statements.

HB 488 Dutton
Relating to standards for judicial review of certain writs of habeas corpus in capital cases.

HB 1113 Raymond
Relating to the sentencing hearing or deferred adjudication hearing and conditions of community supervision for defendants convicted of certain offenses involving controlled substances.

HB 855 Dutton
Relating to the extent of a defendant's criminal responsibility for the conduct of a coconspirator in certain felony cases.

HB 2856 Gallego
Relating to criminal asset forfeiture, the disposition of proceeds and property from criminal asset forfeiture, and accountability for that disposition; providing civil penalties.

HB 2822 Coleman
Relating to the penalty for and certain other civil consequences of engaging in disorderly conduct for a lewd or unlawful purpose.

HB 2662 Hochberg
Relating to child abduction.

HB 748 Menendez
Relating to a criminal defendant's incompetency to stand trial, to certain related time credits, and to the maximum period allowed for restoration of the defendant to competency.

HB 3375 Murphy
Relating to certain evidence in a prosecution of fraud or theft involving Medicaid or Medicare benefits.

HB 1029 Carter
Relating to the conditions of release on bond for certain defendants charged with the offense of burglary.

HB 1918 Larson
Relating to the appointment of counsel to represent an indigent defendant in a capital case and to the reimbursement of certain expenses incurred by appointed counsel.

HB 2374 Gallego
Relating to the taking of children into custody by certain law enforcement officers.

HB 3526 Davis, Yvonne
Relating to requiring certain victim information to be attached to certain arrest warrants.

HB 1205 Turner | et al.
Relating to the establishment of certain time credits through which a defendant's period of community supervision is reduced.

HB 3346 Burnam
Relating to certain information available to the public on a central database containing information about sex offenders.

HB 168 Raymond
Relating to the requirements of a bail bond.

HB 2200 Miles
Relating to the joint or separate prosecution of a capital felony charged against two or more defendants.

HB 777 Gonzalez, Naomi | et al.
Relating to court costs imposed on conviction and deposited to the courthouse security fund.

HB 809 Darby
Relating to the use of certain fees collected for pretrial intervention programs offered in a county.

HB 17 Riddle | et al.
Relating to the creation of the offense of criminal trespass by an illegal alien and to certain procedures for arresting illegal aliens for committing that criminal offense.

HB 1043 Christian | et al.
Relating to creating an offense for engaging in certain conduct relating to cockfighting and to the criminal and civil consequences of committing that offense.

TAVP at SXSW: A Review of Incendiary: The Willingham Case

2011-03-20T17:33:00.004-05:00

I often forget in the course of the work we do that narratives surrounding the death penalty are not always the stories of those involved as direct participants. A unique set of famous cases take on a cultural life more a matter popular folklore than legal or social history. Many remember Gary Gilmore not for himself or the direct witnesses to his life, but rather for Tommy Lee Jones' depiction of him in the film The Executioner's Song. Randall Dale Adams shows up in the documentary about his wrongful conviction, Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, but in that film Adams becomes an almost fictionalized protagonist, journeying through the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, the problems associated with the investigation of murder cases, and the corruption of Dallas' law enforcement. Karla Faye Tucker's life, in the media, has become the mythic story of competing forces of Born Again mercy and distrustful retribution. The cultural phenomenon fuels the story, invents holy grails (justice, innocence, madness, the death penalty itself), and follows the persona of the convicted through their trials and tribulations.

A similar process, in which the cultural life of a case is creating a story of its own, is evident in the public attention recently paid to the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. David Grann's New Yorker story in 2009 about his possible innocence spawned a Frontline special in 2010, and now at SXSW 2011 one can see the movie version of the "story," which is now familiar; Willingham was convicted and executed for lighting the house fire that killed his three children. Shortly before his death numerous sources challenged his guilt, arguing that the investigation that made the fire seem intentional was founded on faulty, pseudoscientific techniques. Governor Rick Perry sat on his hands, and now Willingham has become the focal point of the anti-death penalty movement's attempts to find a case of an innocent man killed by the State, thus laying bare the flaws of the legal system and discrediting it forever. Before this national attention, Willingham was a huge source of controversy in the limited worlds of forensic science, capital punishment, and exoneration, but only now has it entered a space in which it is, like the cases mentioned above, about more than just itself.

In the new film Incendiary: The Willingham Case, Willingham's family members are seldom, if ever, featured narrators. They are the subject of countless shots as they come in and out of hearings, meetings, and press mobs, but aside from their public statements in these contexts, they are never the story we hear. Instead, directors Joe Bailey Jr. and Steve Mims decide to make Willingham a battle of science vs. the law, teasing out the knots that these two fields tend to make when an adversarial system, in which lawyers battle with competing possibilities for truth, tries to use modern science, a system that is simply about finding the truth.

In the Willingham case, the two competing theories are the one that originally convicted Willingham, that he intentionally set fire to his house in order to murder his three children, and the now widely believed theory that it was an accidental fire. The film's narrative is largely told by Gerald Hurst and Joe Lentini, the two fire experts who researched the case closely and deemed it accidental. Warmly lit in their offices, they make the perfect one two punch of credibility, Lentini sporting a forest-ranger mustache and a thick, almost fireman build, and Hurst, who at one point tells a judge he has been working with fire for fifty years, conveys equal parts mad scientist and prophet (see photo above).

Their account of faulty science has surprising narrative drive, interjected clips of fire, smoke, documents, and charred debris. This is all set against David Martin, Willingham's original trial lawyer, who still to this day believes in his guilt and is interviewed in his barn, with the sounds of roosters and goats chiming in to pepper his folksy ethos with a strange mix of credibility and pity.

We then get an extended account of the forensic science committee meetings in which John Bradley systematically slithers his way out of having to get anything done. It is a funny little side story, and Mims and Bailey do a great job of balancing the audience's contempt a few very funny moments, adding levity to a story that, surprisingly enough, does well without the direct comedy. Nevertheless, it comes at just the right moment in the emotional arc.

By far the most powerful part of the film is the last twenty minutes, in which Mims and Bailey cut back and forth between a hearing held in Austin at which Hurst testifies about the science that proves Willingham's innocence and an impromptu press conference on the street out front, in which Willingham's then wife and the mother of the children makes a public statement claiming he admitted guilt to her. This is followed by Martin, who gets to close the film, and claims he believes in Willingham's guilt based on conversations protected under attorney-client privilege.

At that point, Science, the protagonist of the film thus far much more than Willingham, ceases to be the beacon of credibility Mims and Bailey have set up with such seeming confidence. When it matters most, we are left with confusion, with a desire to know but an inability to trust any of the versions of the story we have been told. At this point, Lentini himself admits that while it is incredibly easy to prove arson with a concocted tale of intent, it is incredibly difficult to disprove arson because fires can start in so many different ways.

Mims and Bailey have made a penetrating narrative out of a case that has become in so many other contexts an emotionally charged, political or social commentary. Tossing away the desire to make a political statement (and even including some implicit condemnations of the anti-death penalty movement's "hijacking" of the case), they present a story that simply asks more questions laced with the kind of virtuosic editing Errol Morris made famous, and for that reason will likely stay with viewers much longer than the countless activist films that make up the bulk of cinematic work on capital punishment and the law.

Felicidades and mazel tov to our Mother Falcon violinist

2011-03-17T11:27:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Maurice Chammah, whose smiling, upside-down face you can see gracing the cover of the Friday, March 18, 2011, issue of The Austin Chronicle (Vol.30, No. 29), along with his fellow musicians in Mother Falcon, a band that describes its music as "baroque-classical-pop" or "pop: chamber pop" and itself as "a consortium of classically trained musicians led by Nick Gregg, featuring [his] vocal harmonies as well as those of Claire Puckett and Tamir Kalifa over a soundscape of strings, brass and drums with a modern sensibility." Maurice is a serious musician and writer (see immediately previous post) as well as a coordinator of technology, volunteer coordinator, researcher and interviewer for the Texas After Violence Project. Mother Falcon recently released its CD, Alhambra.

Reading Empathetically: A Review of David R. Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution

2011-03-15T10:40:00.001-05:00

Although the phrase "listening without judgment" has a noble, gentle ring to it, enacting it practically and living it physically seldom feel like "gentle" tasks. The urge to respond to a lawyer, an activist, and even at our weakest moments, a survivor of violence, and shout "That's not what I would have done!" can be more than just a nagging sensation. It can be, two hours into a harrowing narrative, all consuming.

At the same time, the sheer complexity of the death penalty system in any state, and certainly Texas, can make it similarly easy to shut down and throw one's hands up in the air in a kind of informed apathy. The process of litigation, as it unsteadily lopes through state courts, federal courts, the executive branch, and multiple other offices is so complicated and aggravating that all of the emotional aspects of the process, the fact that it is fundamentally about retribution for a murder, can get lost in the language of "evidentiary limits," "procedural requisites," hearings, briefs, stays, and a whole mess of Latin.

So reading the emotional memoirs of a capital defense lawyer is a strikingly different experience, because no matter how empathetic one tries to be as a reader, the nature of a book, especially one so confessional as this one, is to lay itself out for judgment, aesthetic, moral, and factual. Reading David R. Dow's "The Autobiography of an Execution," I could be consumed by an urge to shout back at him, but all that was in front of me was a page of text, not the living, breathing Dow. At the same time, matters of legal complexity that would normally register a shrug of "It's just too hard to understand," don't turn off the reader so easily because they are invested with meaning for Dow, and in certain cases, with matters of life and death.

Unlike Dow's earlier written work on the death penalty (Executed on a Technicality), The Autobiography is an impression-heavy, emotionally sophisticated narrative of the experience of a death penalty defense lawyer as his client nears execution. In Dow's idiosyncratic, but no less reflective prose, the story of the legal battles is woven in with disarmingly intimate accounts of his life with his wife and son. Random events from his typical middle class experience are interposed between the fever pitched moments of intensity that pervade the legal process around the death penalty. With almost no warning, the mundane jog in the early morning, the glass of whiskey, the smallest interaction with his son, become powerfully invested moments of living because they are placed so close to the shadow of death. Dow expertly guides us through his multiple worlds: a stable, though occasionally tense domestic life, a frantic law office, the crushing environment of Death Row, without relying on cheap juxtapositions. We feel the transitions, are compelled by the contradictions, and walk with Dow as he retreats to his home office at 3 a.m. to write down ideas for his appeals.

By trading in chapters for randomly lengthened anecdotes separated by dividers, Dow is able to capture his own loose, free vision for an autobiography that is only partially about himself. The clients sometimes bleed together and the legal threads of their cases sometimes become obscure, but the result is not an ocean of information so much as a tightly formed web; One can choose whether or not to trace out its complexities, while still unable to help being enveloped by Dow's synthesizing prose.

Without documentable facts to rely on, reading Dow's story is a dreamlike walk through experiences, and indeed he mentions the stories of various dreams with nearly as much detail as the real world. Following with rules of legal ethics (and an appendix by another scholar explains these rules), he cannot tell us exactly which facts go with which cases, and his archetypal death row defendants have personalities that sometimes seem all too classic. It's not so much a problem for Dow, however, because such abstraction allows him to describe his life with collage-like impressionism. Trips to the supermarket, long drives to Death Row, his son's baseball games, and laying in bed chatting with his wife all form a kind of landscape in his mind that may be imprecise, but is far more beautiful for it.

As a result of these limitations and the ways they are dealt with, Dow's work reflects much more accurately the way people actually remember things. Events are chronological only when the chronology itself has meaning, emotions and experiences are more powerful than facts, the interactions with judges and other lawyers more powerful than the facts and constitutional theories of the cases themselves. We are left less with a step by step account of Dow's life and work, and more with an overall feeling for how harrowing that work must be. I'm waiting for a prosecutor to publish something similar.

TAVP on Facebook

2011-03-11T15:36:00.001-06:00

As the Texas After Violence Project trainings take a two week Spring Break, the proverbial crock-pot is still teeming with projects. As we all know, a great way to stay posted is Facebook, and the TAVP Facebook page is coated in exciting events.

Check out the link for more information on the project as well as upcoming goings on including the April 23rd event, "!Sustenance!", and the "54 Reasons to support the Texas After Violence Project" party scheduled for June 12th.

Photo taken by Diana Claitor in May 2010: "A Memorial To Nineteen Immigrants"

Celeste Henery and Gabriel Solis back from Nigeria

2011-03-10T02:02:00.000-06:00

Dr. Celeste Henery, lead interviewer for the Texas After Violence Project, and Gabriel Daniel Solis, former associate director of the project and currently a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, have recently returned from Abuja, Nigeria, where they participated in a conference sponsored by International CURE. CURE, which stands for "Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants," is a grass-roots, membership, non-profit group started in San Antonio in 1971, grew throughout Texas, and became a national organization in 1985. CURE is also now an international organization. We're looking forward to hearing about what Celeste and Gabe learned in Abuja.....waiting, that is, until they've recovered from jet lag.

This photograph by Alan Pogue, and I'll request his permission (retroactively) as soon as he returns to the U.S. We think Alan is still traveling....

Salon on the Death Penalty and Religion

2011-03-03T18:07:00.000-06:00

The Southwestern University chapter of Amnesty International Presents: The Identities of Faith Salon Series. This event seeks to provide an opportunity for meaningful conversations on themes and topics related to belief, faith and practice. The Salons are designed to engage multi-faith perspectives and experiences as a way of deepening participants' understanding of themselves, each other and the evening's theme or topic.

The upcoming Salon on March 7 is on the death penalty, but deeper than... that, we hope the conversation will explore how faith motivates, enables and disables social justice change. The salon "conversants" will open the conversation after the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) presentation. The conversation will be set up "in the round." After about 30 minutes of introduction and opening conversation, the dynamics of the conversation will shift to include respondents and then all who are in the room. Refreshments will be included.

Monday March 7, 7-9 pm. Mood Bridwell Atrium at Southwestern University. See the Facebook event for more information.

Victim Services Director William Petty on Police Officer Stress, Violence, and Mental Health

2011-02-07T17:17:00.000-06:00

In this fascinating clip from his TAVP interview, William Petty of the Austin Police Department discusses the stresses in the working lives of police officers.

"Affirming the Ideal of the Polis in the Wake of Tucson’s Tragedy"

2011-01-14T17:51:00.001-06:00

Jim Crosby, our friend and a member of the board of the Texas After Violence Project, teaches at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin. He shared with us a message by Jonathan Martin of St. Gregory's Prep in Tuscon that came to him via Bob Kirkpatrick of St. Stephen's.

Remarks delivered by Jonathan Martin on Wednesday, January 12, 2011, after a moment of silence

"On Saturday, our hometown Tucson was struck hard by an individual acting without conscience, without reason, and possibly without sanity.   This terrible strike hit us at our community’s most sensitive place: not only did it harm and kill many fine, fine people, it hit us in the heart of our body politic.

"Since the ancient Athenians conceived of and built the polis, a democratic state composed of citizens governing themselves in the open air by way of free and spirited discourse and debate, this idea of the body politic has been our civilization’s ideal, our shining city on a hill.

"Saturday morning, in front of a Tucson Safeway at which many of us shop regularly, an elected official and her staff came to talk in the open air with Tucson citizens, acting out our nation’s and our civilization’s ideals.   In a scene that ancient Athenians would have immediately recognized, a diverse set of Tucsonans came together to discuss their views, argue their opinions, and express their hopes for our nation– in other words, to talk politics. Senior citizens came to discuss their social security, a federal judge to discuss the future of the judiciary in Arizona, and a young child who had recently been elected to her student council to meet her role model, preparing herself to join the body politic as an adult.

"When this terrible attack came, it came at a moment when they were, all of them, together, acting out our nation’s highest political ideals: to discuss and debate ideas about our society respectfully—and this is why the strike, was so especially devastating even also to those of us who were not immediately present and did not necessarily know anyone hurt.

"This was not only a group of people attacked– and let’s be clear, it was a very fine group of people attacked, truly wonderful people– it was also our ideal of the polis, the acting out and practice of true democracy—politicians, judges, and citizens, adults and children, gathered together in a public square, in an event called Congress on Your Corner– which was attacked.

"Because of that, I think that we all have, as citizens and as people concerned and committed to that ideal, a special responsibility to respond with a renewed commitment to live and fulfill that ideal.

"Jon Stewart spoke passionately on this topic Monday evening:

I refuse to give in to that feeling of despair.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t take this opportunity, and the loss of these incredible people and the pain that their loved ones are going through right now, wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t take this moment to make sure that the world we are creating now isn’t better than the one we previously lost.

"Where do we begin? I think we must begin where every act of reform and improvement begins: we must begin with ourselves, we must become the change we seek.

"I read this response to Saturday on a blog I admire, by a fellow Arizonan educator, Jeff Delp:

All too frequently, we live in a world of one– concerned with our own well being and giving only fleeting thought to how our actions impact others. The interactions we have with others–on a daily basis–do make a difference, for better or for worse.

Instead of living in a “world of one,” let’s all be certain that our daily actions reflect the civility and kindness we want to see in the world.

"So let us begin by seeking to be kind, gentle, and compassionate to all those with whom we share our hometown of Tucson. I am delighted to hear that some St. Gregory advisory groups are taking the initiative to collect cans for our Food Bank, in exactly this spirit.

"But beyond that, we must seek to strengthen our polis– as Jon Stewart, says, we must make it a better one than the one it was before this shattering event. We must not withdraw but go out into our community and be ourselves participants in it: we must talk politics, take action and work to make our community stronger.

"The work of our diversity club this fall in organizing a downtown rally is a shining example, not necessarily because your views were the correct ones but because you exercised your democratic voices and democratic privileges so beautifully, speaking your mind, passionately voicing strong criticism, in a way that was peaceful, civil, and respectful: the ideal of the polis. Ancient Athenians would have been proud to witness it. Whether it be through the diversity club, or Mock Trial, or student government, or so many other vehicles available to you, the right response to an attack on our civil society is to work harder and do more to contribute to our civil society.

"This may still be primarily a moment for reflection, for repose, for prayers, mourning, and grieving.   But we must take care to ensure that our subsequent moments be different; they mustn’t be times for silence or indifference, for if it they are, this terrible and terrifying attack on our civil society shall have too lasting and damaging an effect. In our schools, we must work harder to promote and develop the active practice of political talk: argumentation that is both passionate and respectful.

"If we are to use this moment as the spur it should be to affirm, perpetuate, and uplift our ideal of the polis, we should heed the words of a distinguished practitioner of civil society, the type of public official who holds regularly events like Congress on Your Corner. I share with you now, in closing, the words of Representative Gabrielle Giffords:

We know that silence equals consent when atrocities are committed against innocent men, women, and children.   We know that indifference equals complicity when bigotry, hatred and intolerance are allowed to take root.   And we know that education and hope are the most effective ways to combat ignorance and despair."

Celeste Henery and Gabe Solis plan for conference in Nigeria

2011-01-14T17:48:00.000-06:00

Dr. Celeste Henery and Mr. Gabriel Solis are making plans to attend the CURE International Prison Reform Conference in Abuja, Nigeria, in February.

For information about CURE, see its national website, here: http://www.curenational.org/cms/index.php or international website,
here: http://www.internationalcure.org// You might also want to look at the interviews of Alan Pogue or Brother Richard Daly here: http://www.texasafterviolence.org/stories or here: http://rmedia.lib.utexas.edu/index.php/Category:Texas_After_Violence_Project .

The Texas After Violence Project will be extraordinarily well represented by Celeste and Gabe, and I’m absolutely thrilled. This conference will mark the first time that the Texas After Violence Project has participated in an international conversation on the substantive issues that we study: questions of punishment, rehabilitation, reintegration into the community, incarceration, executions.

Kim Ambrosini-Bacon’s presentation in November to the Oral History Society in London brought our methodology -- digital, audiovisual recording of narratives -- to an audience outside of the U.S. for the first time. The project’s relationship with Abir Qazilbash, who visited and worked with us last summer, made Kim’s visit especially pleasant. (And since Kim was staying with Abir’s wonderful family, this mama rested easier than if Kim had been staying alone in a hotel.)

The project is going to be four years old in April, if you count incorporation is our birthday. Together we make up the little project that could: working locally, but already taking part in much broader, now global, conversations. I am so proud of everyone. Thank you all for your support.

Happy Erev Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday!

Now we know their names. . .

2010-12-19T21:35:00.001-06:00

Photograph of Convicts Dressing Stone for the Texas Capitol Building, Courtesy of the Texas State Library & Archives Commission. Thank you especially to John Anderson, Preservation Officer, Archives & Information Services Division and Laura Saegart, Assistant Director for Archives.

"Who Built the Texas Capitol? And What Keeps Us from Remembering Them?" is a special project of the Texas After Violence Project coordinated by Tamara Goheen. She writes:

All the following laborers were on the Convict Roll and the Capitol Pay Rolls (CPR). Year and position are copied from card catalog files located in the TX State Archives.

BOX 109, A - B

A

• Allen, Julius, Stone-cutter. Capitol Pay Rolls, 1887.
• Antonia, Charles, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Arcarita, Antonio, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Arredondo, William, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Arrington, William, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Ashworth, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Auganti, Christian, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.

B

• Bandatta, Juan, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Bass, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Blackwell [no first name given], laborer, CPR, 1886.
• Blackwell, R. [same as above?], laborer, CPR, 1887.
• Blincii, Joe, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Blue, William, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1886. (also listed as laborer, 1885 and stone-cutter, 1886 not on convict rolls. Same person?)
• Bogress, H., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887
• Boldinghouse, William, Stonecutter. CPR, 1887.
• Bolinger, C., Stone-cutter, CPR, 1887
• Braun, S. P., Laborer. CPR, 1887.
• Brewer, J.P., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Brewer, J.S., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Brewer, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Brooking, F., Engineer. CPR, 1886. *
• Brown, H.F., Stonecutter. CPR, 1887.
• Brown, H.L., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Brown, P.S., Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Brown, S.P., Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Burnet, Frank, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

BOX 110, C - E

C

• Carini, Jack, Laborer. CPR. 1886.
• Carita, Jack, Section Work. CPR, 1886.
• Carsena, Veto, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Carter, Hugh, Guard. CPR, 1887.
• Carver, H., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Cavado, R., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Colbertson, B.R., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Conkling, R.E., Engineer. CPR, 1886. *
• Corner, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Corona, Jack, Section Hand. CPR, 1886.
• Cox, A.B., Stonecutter. CPR, 1887.
• Cragen, Con, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Crawford, J.E., Guard. CPR, 1887.
• Crawford, W.D., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Crook, P.E., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Cullers, George, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

D

• Daunton, Charles, Engineer. CPR, 1887. *
• Davis, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Desken, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Deskew, Tom, Stonecutter. CPR, 1887.
• Donley, John, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Dowlen, John, Section Work. CPR, 1886.
• Dunman, D., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Dwyer, James, Stonecutter. CPR, 1886.
• Dwyer, William, Stonecutter. CPR, 1887.

E

• Epperson, Ben, Guard. CPR, 1886

BOX 111, F – H

F

• Faber, H., Engineer. CPR, 1886. *
• Farreris, S., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Flores, S., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Forrest, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Fraizer, W., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Frey, John, Foreman. CPR, 1886. *

G

• Galindo, R., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Galisia, Antonio, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Garcia, A., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Gordon, Ed, Engineer. CPR, 1887. *
• Gregg, Allen, Laborer. CPR, 1887.
• Griffin, Tom, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Griffin, W.G., Guard. CPR, 1886.
• Guetler, J., Laborer. CPR, 1887.
• Gutler, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

H

• Haines, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Hainey, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Hansard, C.T., Superintendent. CPR, 1886. *
• Harris, R., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Hendricks, J.E., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Henry, John, Laborer. CPR, 1887.
• Henry, Otto, Blacksmith. CPR, 1886. *
• Hernandez, R., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Hobbs, S.B., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Holsinger, S., Section Hand, Laborer, CPR, 1886-1887.
• Honer, Henry, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Hoods, H., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Hutchinson, Z., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

J.

• Jacobs, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Jerome, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Johnson, T., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Jones, A., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Jones, Felix, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Jones, Steve, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Jones, T., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

K.

• Kennedy, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Kilgore, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Killingworth, W.D., Guard. CPR, 1887.
• Kincado, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

L.

• Leonica, Angie, Section Hand. CPR, 1885-1886.
• Lindell, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1886.
• Lindsey, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Lumpkins, P.E., Guard. CPR, 1886.
• Luna, B.F., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Luttrell, A.J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1886.
• Luttrell, C.A., Blacksmith. CPR, 1886. *

Mc

• McCray, M.A., Guard. CPR, 1886.
• McCullough, A.M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• McGee, Hugh, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1886.
• McSween, Guard. CPR, 1886.

M.

• Maddox, Dan, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Marglin, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Marglin, S.M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Marglin, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR. 1887.
• Marshall, Frank, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Martin, G.W., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Martin, J.B., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Martin, Peter, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Martin, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Martinez, A., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Martinez, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Massoletti, Ben, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Matthews, Frank, Traveller Gang. CPR, 1887. *
• May, John, Stone-cutter. CPR. 1887.
• Merlock, George, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Merlow, Lewis, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Mickey, James, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Miller, A.C., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Monahan, John, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Montolvo, George, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Morcati, Virgil, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Morrell, Frank, Section Hand. CPR, 1886.
• Morris, George, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Mulfrady, Antonio, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Murlocki, George, Section Work. CPR, 1886.
• Murrey, Barney, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1886.

N.

• Nelms, J.A., Laborer; Engineer. CPR, 1886. *• Nelms, John, Engineer. CPR, 1887. *
• Nolan, Thomas, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.

O.

• Osa, Juan de, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Owens, Sam, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

P.

• Painter, A.R., Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Painter, J.A., Section Work. CPR, 1886.
• Painter, J.W., Trainmaster; Foreman; Section Hand. CPR 1885-1886. *
• Parnell, Tom, Engineer. CPR, 1887. *
• Perdue, A.N., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Pitts, Henry, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Plunket, Harrie, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.

R.

• Ramus, V., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Rayes, M., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Richardson, R.L., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Ricketson, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Ricketson, Tom, Stonecutter. CPR, 1886.
• Ricketson, Tom, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Robertson, Ran, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Rosa, C., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

S.

• Scherman, Floyd, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Scott, Dan, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Searcy, Jeff, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Self, William, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Shepperdson, J.B., Engineer. CPR, 1886-1887. *
• Shuford, J.C., Guard. CPR, 1887.
• Skay, John, Blacksmith. CPR, 1886.
• Slaughter, F., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Slaughter, T., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Smith, Charles, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Smoot, J.H., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Smith, John, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Smith, W.F., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Smither’s Hoisting, Mules. CPR, 1886. ?
• Sorrels, Zeb, Foreman. CPR, 1886. *
• Speers, J.F., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Stafum, Prechen, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Stanton, William, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Sulkerson, Thomas, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Swartz, John, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.

T.

• Thornton, J., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Turner, George, Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Turner, James, Section Gang. CPR, 1887.
V.

• Vaughn, C., Stone-cutter. CPR, 1887.
• Vicentini, Domenico, Laborer. CPR, 1886.
• Viciante, Dommene, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Viciante, Leo, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Viciante, Pierre, Section Hand. CPR, 1885.
• Vizentine, Pio, Laborer. CPR, 1887.

Thank you, Tamara, for this great work! Want to join Tamara Goheen, Justine Rife, Ana Rivera, and yours truly (Virginia) in working on this project? Please write to Tamara, tamara@texasafterviolence.org .

Who Built the Texas Capitol? And What Keeps Us from Remembering Them?

2010-12-19T21:26:00.000-06:00

Historians have pointed out the continuity between slavery and exploitation of Black people’s labor in other ways, especially convict leasing. Official documents reveal that African Americans were (then as now) grossly overrepresented in prisons relative to their numbers in Texas. See “The 1880s: Convict Lease,” part of “1880s: Repression,” an online exhibit of the Texas State Library & Archives Commission, http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/forever/repression/page5.html ; and “Capitol Boycott,” http://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/oec01.

Tamara Goheen is coordinating an historical project, conducted by volunteers (including Tamara) under the auspices of the Texas After Violence Project. She has already identified specific individual people in a largely unacknowledged group who helped build the Texas Capitol by cutting stone and transporting it to the site of the Capitol. Tamara went through the listings of people on the payrolls for building the Texas Capitol and noted the names of every person listed as a convict.* I will post those names separately.

Our next step is to look at the prison ledgers to find names of the convicts listed in the payroll. The ledgers are on microfilm in the Texas State Archives. The prison ledgers should give us information about the county in which each person was sentenced, whether he or she was sent to Huntsville or Rusk Prison, the prisoner number, and sometimes information about discharge.

Later in this research project, once we find out as much basic information as we can about each of the people listed in the Convict payroll, we will select a few and try to learn as much as we can about their lives.

Thus, our major research goal is to identify the specific people who built the Texas Capitol, without reimbursement, as prisoners, and to learn as much as we can about their lives.

Our public history goals include the following:

1) To work towards a plaque, or a historical marker, commemorating the work of these people, by name, located in or near the Texas Capitol.

2) Using newspaper articles, court records, and genealogical tools, find out as much as we can about at least some of these people.

3) Create and publish, at least online, a document that will summarize our findings, including the names of each person; aggregated data about what counties people were from and what kind of work they performed; and more detailed profiles about at least a few people.

4) Invite others to research the lives of other convicts who built the Texas Capitol, and provide a guide for how to start.

Vision On: Oral History at the Museum of London

2010-12-03T15:05:00.000-06:00

On November 20, 2010, I had the honor of representing the Texas After Violence Project at the Oral History Society’s Vision On Study Day at the Museum of London. Our friend Abir Qazilbash and her family were kind enough to let me stay with them. Abir even let me practice my presentation in front of her the night before the conference and I was humbled by the support she and her family gave me.

I arrived in London Friday morning and spent the afternoon orienting myself with the city. The Vision On Study Day was Saturday from 10AM-5PM and consisted of three main plenary presentations followed by three “breakout” sessions that included two additional speakers each.

The first plenary speaker, Dr. Linda Sardino, discussed the pros and cons of conducting audio-only interviews. Audio versus video was a huge point of controversy throughout the conference and the number of people conducting audio-only interviews surprised me. After Dr. Sardino’s presentation, we were offered three breakout sessions from which to choose.

I attended Colin Francis’ presentation about his organization of 11 to 19 year-olds who conduct oral history interviews with Caribbean and African immigrants in Enfield, England. What I found especially interesting about their project was that their narrators sit in front of a green screen during their interview, then in post-production, students add archival footage in the background.

After the first breakout session, we filed back into the theater to listen to Mark Aiken speak about his documentary film work. While not a traditional oral historian, Mark focused his presentation on the importance of establishing trust with your subject and remaining transparent about the goals of your project.

I spoke in the following breakout session and had about 15 minutes to present. I briefly introduced the project and spoke about the kinds of interviews we do and why. I talked about our consent process, methodology, and the importance of looking at human rights violations within our own borders. I showed about three and a half minutes of Lee Greenwood’s interview where she talks about the impact her son’s incarceration had on her and her other children. I also went through some still shots to demonstrate Glifos and talked about our work with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. I then quickly discussed why video is critical in our project and the effect video has on the makers, narrators, and audiences.

Perhaps I covered too much at once because the audience of about 20 people did not respond as I expected. My co-presenter was from an organization called Catch 22 that works with juveniles who have been caught up in England’s criminal justice system. The speaker was not an oral historian and the clip he showed was of two young men discussing their criminal records. The clip was filmed and produced at a very high quality and the Q&A session focused much more on the quality of videography than the content of the clips. While I was disappointed by the direction the Q&A session took, several people approached me after the presentation and expressed their excitement about our project. They were impressed and curious to learn more about our work and thanked me for coming such a long way.

Kulip Powar was the third plenary speaker and he focused on the use of poetry as a form of oral history. He showed a brief film, which showed archival footage and abstract images over a recording of him and his grandfather reading a poem about a young man asking his grandfather to tell him about his experience in the Indian military.

The third and final breakout session reflected on the issues discussed throughout the day and proposed changes to the Oral History Society’s statement about the use of video. To my surprise, much of the conversation focused on our project. I was a strong advocate for using video and was able to speak more about our project to a second, different group of people.

My experience at the Vision On Study Day has helped me contextualize our project’s work. We are uniquely situated between people doing similar types of interviews with audio recordings on the one hand and documentary filmmakers on the other.

I learned about people using oral history to preserve stories about immigration, craft and trade techniques, and as a basis for poetry, but none of the organizations I had the opportunity to listen to are thinking about oral history as a way to raise public awareness and build consciousness about the effects of violent systems endemic to society. Perhaps that is an overstatement, but I nevertheless felt extremely proud to represent the Texas After Violence Project and even more excited about the work we’ve done and the project's endless potential.

Open letter to an assailant

2010-11-27T14:33:00.000-06:00

A close friend of mine sent this note today, which I share with his permission, in sadness and in hope.

"To the young man who hit my nephew in the head with a baseball bat and took his wallet at 2:00am in West Campus [Austin] on November 21st:

"Unlike some other friends and family of my nephew, I don’t want to swing the same baseball bat with all my strength into your head and feel the same dull thud you must have felt that night. Unlike some others, I don’t want to see you die by lethal injection in Huntsville. I don’t even want to see you confined in a solitary confinement cell until you die of old age.

"What I want is for you to feel genuine revulsion that your values led you to a place where you thought it was justified and OK for you to assault another human being with potentially deadly force. I want you to feel shame and remorse for treating another member of your community with such contempt.

"I hope you are caught by the police and found guilty. No matter the length of incarceration you are given, any punishment you get will have the effect of a life sentence. When you try to rent an apartment and fill out an application, you will have to answer the question, 'Have you ever been convicted of a felony?' When you apply for a job, you will be faced with the same question. Many people will refuse to rent an apartment to you or to give you a job solely on the basis of your answer to that question. Maybe, hopefully, you can convince a kind potential landlord or potential employer that you are not the same person who struck a defenseless pedestrian in the head with a bat, and that you have fundamentally changed and that you and the community would be a better place if you were allowed a chance to live and work and contribute and give back to the community.

"It is probably more likely that you will never get caught. This event will go into the police records as a minor assault. The victim spent two days in the hospital, a bit of facial reconstruction surgery, nothing that makes the newspaper these days.

"I’m more troubled by this outcome since I’ll never know what happens to you. Will you come to feel remorse? Maybe you’ve already forgotten about 'nameless victim #N,' otherwise known to me as a beloved family member. Maybe you’ll live the rest of your life and never think twice about someone whose life you disrupted and almost ruined. It’s been a week since this attack; maybe you’ve already assaulted a new victim since then. I pity you if life for you is so cold that you’re not able to feel compassion for a stranger. I am sad for all of us that the basic, simple act of walking down the sidewalk carries a danger that no one should have to face.

"So I can only hope that the feeling in your hands and arms as the bat hit my nephew’s head stays with you as a reminder of your brutality on that night. I hope there comes a time that you cringe every time you see a baseball player or a tennis player hit the ball with all their power. I hope that someday, hopefully someday soon, you find a way suitable way to apologize to your community and work to make this community the kind of place where you would want to raise a child."

27 November 2010

Capital Clemency for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 20th Century United States: Consular Action, Catholicism, & Community?

2010-11-09T11:56:00.000-06:00

Between forty-six to forty-nine* Mexicans or Mexican Americans sentenced to death spent time on Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, between 1923 and 1973. Over half of these men received clemency: a higher proportion of clemency petitions granted than for either Anglos or African Americans.

(* TDC classified forty-six of these men as “Hispanic.” I am making a leap by calling them Mexican or Mexican Americans, but to date the newspapers I’ve read about these men confirm my assumption. To this number I added Carlos Fernandez and Robert Miers, both of whom were sentenced to death in Bexar County, both whom were classified as “white,” and both of whose sentences were commuted in 1938 and 1953, respectively. I also tentatively included Red Wing, who was sentenced to death in Comal County, and who was executed in 1931.)

The racial and racist hierarchy in Texas has worked both to more readily sentence to death and execute Black men than Anglos or Mexicans/Mexican Americans, and also to sentence convicted people more harshly when their victims have been white than when they have been Black or Mexican/Mexican American. Sentencing and commutation of Mexicans/Mexican Americans in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century might help us understand the interactions of both of these factors as well as others. There are at least four possible reasons why more, and a higher percentage, of death sentences of ethnic Mexican convicts were commuted, than sentences of condemned Black or Anglo men.

First, the Mexican Consulate often advocated for condemned Mexicans; second, the dominant Anglo hierarchy may not have cared as much about the death of Mexicans or Mexican Americans, and thus was not as eager to electrocute the perpetrators of such crime; third, Catholicism, the predominant religion of ethnic Mexicans may have played a role in dampening Mexican communities desire for electrocutions; and fourth, ethnic Mexican families and communities actively advocated for the condemned. There is evidence to support each of these theories. Mexican consular intervention seems to have been effective, and so has community activism, but not always. Texas executed Nicando Muñoz and Victor Rodríguez, convicted of slaying of the presumably Anglo Bert Ellison, a customs officer, near Edinburg (Hidalgo County), in 1931. Still, the full story has yet to be discovered.

Studying commutations sought, granted, and denied in the 20th century promises to be an effective way to understand the roles of region, religion, community activism, racism, diplomatic relations, and Mexican American political engagement. Why this particular historical period? We start in 1923 because that is the date that the Texas Legislature, seeking to be progressive and modern, and to signal a difference between legal hangings and lynchings, stipulated that the State (rather than individual counties) would conduct all executions, that all executions would take place in Huntsville, and that electrocutions would replace hangings. Commutations as they existed during the period between 1923 - and 1973 are no longer part of the capital punishment apparatus in Texas.

You are invited to work with the Texas After Violence Project to scour the historical record, read about each of these forty-nine men, as well as Anglo and Black Death Row convicts, to untangle the threads of racism in different forms, community activism, consular intervention, region, and religion. Write to info@texasafterviolence.org

Kim Ambrosini-Bacon is going to London!

2010-11-03T11:31:00.000-05:00

Exciting! Kim will make a presentation about the work of the Texas After Violence Project at a Study Day later this month in London. The Study Day is sponsored by the Oral History Society and the Museum of London, and the theme is "Uses of Oral History." Although we have welcomed several international visitors to our office, Kim's trip will be the project's first foray outside of the U.S. We are so thrilled about this opportunity and so proud of Kim for seizing it!

Congratulations, Kim! May the Force Be With You!

"Best Texas Archive of Survival" 2010

2010-09-05T18:00:00.001-05:00

Thank you to the Austin Chronicle for naming the Texas After Violence Project the "Best Texas Archive of Survival" in its "Best of Austin 2010" awards. The Chronicle wrote:

Oral history is the people's history: a view of a time through the voices of the humble, individual humans who lived it. Outside of the mainstream media matrix of power, wealth, and privilege, history is taking place every day, and oral history is its record. The Texas After Violence Project is an exemplary narrative and human rights project created to document the stories of people "touched by serious violence or other serious human rights violations, the criminal justice system, incarceration, and executions in Texas." In the words of the project: "We encourage people to speak their own truths. We encourage communities to practice listening." Our world is a more honest one for it.
611 S. Congress #350, 916-1600 www.texasafterviolence.org

See "Best of Austin" 2010, Critics Picks, Media

Wow, thanks!

Support translations of our interviews with online donations

2010-08-16T15:40:00.000-05:00

My last few blog posts have made clear how rich we are: rich in brilliant, energetic, dedicated, and thoughtful volunteers and interns.

As far as money in the bank. . . No. Not rich.

Please consider supporting our project financially. We like small donations once a month. We like big donations once in a while. And guess what, we really like all donations.

Here's an idea: Go to the Texas After Violence Page on the Razoo.com website and donate $10.00 or more to support translation of interviews from English to Spanish and vice versa:
http://www.razoo.com/story/Bilingual-Oral-Histories-About-Violence-And-Criminal-Justice-In-Texas

The nice thing about the Razoo website, a project of Network for Good in Bethesda, Maryland, is that they don't take a penny out of your contributions. We set up the account a while ago, but I did not test it until July 14, 2010, when I made a $15.00 donation to the project, through Razoo, using my own credit card. Then I waited.

Sure enough, just a month later, a check from Network for Good has arrived. It lists the donor as Virginia Raymond and the purpose "Translation Fund." The check is dated August 13, 2010, and it's for the full $15.00, to deposited only to the Texas After Violence Project. Our IRS employer ID number is in the note section --- a nice touch.

It's safe to dive in, folks!! Who will step up with $10.00?

Alexa Torres Skillicorn -- another fantastic volunteer!

2010-08-10T14:56:00.000-05:00

Alexa Torres Skillicorn is currently finishing her senior year at Huntington Surrey High school. Prior to moving to Texas in the spring of 2009, Alexa completed her first two years of high school at the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts -- an arts school with a graduate, undergraduate, and small high school program. Here, she lived in the dorms and studied violin under the direction of Kevin Lawrence. After hearing of the project, Alexa went through the volunteer training in the spring of 2010. She is also a volunteer with Proyecto Defensa Laboral (workers defense project), a non-profit organization that promotes workers rights and lobbies for fair wages for low-income workers in Austin.

Christina Wright brings brains and passion to TAVP....

2010-08-09T16:51:00.000-05:00

Christina Wright is an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin majoring in Government and Communication Studies. Born and raised in New Orleans, she developed an interest in human rights at a young age. Her mother constantly preached to her the importance of giving back to the community. Christina frequently credits her mother for instilling in her the desire to help other people, and she often quotes one of her mother's favorite sayings—"Don't you ever forget where you came from." Christina joined the Texas After Violence Project during the summer of 2010, as a Rapoport Scholar. In addition to volunteering, Christina is an officer in two student organizations—Minority Women Pursuing Law and Student Leaders Pursuing Law. She is also a member of the pre-law fraternity Phi Alpha Delta. Christina ideally wishes to participate in the Teach For America program in New Orleans upon graduation. After, she plans to attend law school and focus on human rights, particularly juvenile justice and/or children’s human rights.

Left to right, Abir Qazilbash, Christina Wright, and Samantha Archer, at the Terrazas Branch of the Austin Public Library

Rachel Gounder!

2010-07-27T16:55:00.001-05:00

Another wonderful summer intern....

Rachel Gounder is a student at The University of Texas at Austin majoring in Asian American Studies and Anthropology. Rachel loves everything burnt orange and is a member of the Longhorn Honeys. She recently started working with the project where her interest in human rights and equality are able to thrive.

Lest you think I'm playing favorites, I'm asking each intern to write her own biography in her own way....."short and to the point" or more informative. Just like our narrators: all biographies and stories are good

Welcome, Sam Archer!

2010-07-27T14:37:00.000-05:00

Samantha Archer is currently a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is a Religious Studies major. She is originally from Houston, Texas, and graduated from Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart in May 2009. At school, she is involved in the Student Events Center, where she is a member of the Madrigal Dinner and Distinguished Speakers Committees, the Liberal Arts Council, and Peers for Pride. She currently works for the University as an Ambassador at the Freshman Admissions Office. This past summer, she proudly served as an Orientation Advisor, welcoming the incoming freshman and acquainting them with the University.

Her specific human rights interests include LGBTQ issues and freedom of religious expression. She is currently a student of Arabic in the high hopes that one day she will work in Middle Eastern human rights policy.

Sam comes to Texas After Violence Project after being awarded the Rapoport Service Scholarship in May 2010.

We're so lucky that Sam is working with us this summer.....it's fantastically inspiring to be around all these energetic and brilliant young people :)

Welcome Abir Qazilbash!

2010-07-22T10:57:00.000-05:00

Abir Qazilbash, top left, visiting St. Teresa’s School, Western Uganda, earlier this summer

We're so honored to have a delightful young woman, Abir Qazilbash, visiting the project this week and next. She immediately plunged into the work, to our great benefit! Here is Abir's self-introduction.

My name is Abir Qazilbash. I’m 17 years old, and currently a student at St. Dominic’s Sixth Form College (a high school solely for Juniors and Seniors) in London, UK. The subjects I’m taking - English Literature, French, Maths, Chemistry and Biology cover a broad range of disciplines, from the Arts to the Sciences. In my spare time, I enjoy doing art, I play the keyboard in a band and am working towards a Grade 8 (i.e. the final level) in piano.

I initially discovered the Texas After Violence Project through a family-friend, Professor Kamran Asdar Ali, who teaches at UT. Having clicked on your website, it was love at first sight! :) I was intrigued by TAVP’s unique approach in the use of Oral Histories to enhance the understanding of cases - in particular, it was eye-opening and touching to see Ireland Beazley's recount of his son's arrest.

Throughout my life, I have always found myself drawn to issues of injustice in our world, in all its shapes and forms – from supporting the less-favoured team in a football (a.k.a soccer!) match, to unjust conviction sentences. I’ve just come back from a trip to Uganda, to a girl’s convent school which is located in the rural village of Kihihi, very close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.Having also visited some of the schools set up by a charitable organisation called “The Citizen’s Foundation” in some of the most deprived communities of urban Karachi, Pakistan, it was saddening to see the inequality and social divisions within the societies in both countries. The students’ determination to overcome poverty through education has inspired me to try and contribute what I can to help this be achieved globally. By undertaking a course which looks at aspects of sociology, psychology and politics, I will be able to develop my passion further and make a real difference for those who do not share the same privileges and resources that we have living in a “developed” country.

Having attended Amnesty International's annual conference as a member of the youth wing, I was inspired by the campaigning they did relating to capital punishment, incidents of state violence, as well as immigration issues within the UK and "extraordinary renditions" worldwide. Moreover, it would be great to discover the impact of these issues within a wider global perspective, and see how they affect communities and individuals within the US.

I am already putting my analytical and writing skills, as well as the complex intricacies of studing English grammar to good use, by helping out with writing chapters, abstracts and hopefully eventually transcribing during my 2 weeks with Texas After Violence. It was a great opportunity to go to the TCJC’s Prison Reform Symposium, in particular hearing the experiences of people who may have been incarcerated at some stage, or had family/friends who were, and discussing ideas for reforming several aspects of prison life. I’m really liking Austin (as well as Houston!) in the short time I’ve been here, everyone is really friendly and not to mention the food and weather are great!

Abir

Crowded, productive, exciting. . .

2010-07-14T16:22:00.001-05:00

What a lot of work we're getting done this summer. In the last couple of weeks, about five narrators have agreed to make their digitally recorded stories and transcripts fully available to the public. Major Darren Long, of the Travis County Sheriff's Department, talks about the late Deputy Keith Ruíz, the circumstances of Deputy Ruíz's death, and about SWAT teams generally. Major Long's story complements the testimonies of Travis County Sheriff Captain Art Cárdenas and Public Information Officer Roger Wade. Ms. Lee Greenwood of Houston talks about her son, Joseph Bennard Nichols, a nineteen-year old laborer at the time of the crime for which he was convicted of capital murder and executed. Lawyer Andrew Forsyth describes his representation of James Carl Lee Davis and Kenneth McDuff in their respective capital punishment trials; his friend and co-counsel in both of those cases was Mr. Christopher Gunter, who has also described his experiences during these trials and donated the stories for public education. Ms. Ruth Marin-Eason remembers her son, Raúl Marin, who was murdered in 1998. Finally, Professor Roger Barnes of the University of Incarnate Word (UIW), a sociologist who has spent his professional life studying and teaching about the death penalty, has also released his interview.

Our office was crowded -- and a little bit crazy -- today, as the building management sent in workers to replace the window treatments . . .

. . but Christina Maria Wright, Jesse Scanlan, Sabina Eva María Hinz-Foley, Courtney Siegel Landes, Rachel Gounder, and Kim Bacon stayed focussed. So did Gabe Solis, although he fled to our neighboring coffee shop to concentrate.

Thank you to all!

It's summer!

2010-07-01T23:41:00.000-05:00

What a summer! We're working very hard, with some stalwarts -- Kim Bacon, Sabina Hinz-Foley, Gabe Solis, Rebecca Lorins, Shane Cruz, Meghan Currey & board member Ellen Sweets -- and we are also thrilled to be learning with relative newcomers Claudia Carretta-Beltrán, Celeste Henery and Adam Mehis; friends we've known in other contexts who've been coming on Friday afternoons such as Gwendolyn Ferrati Manjarrez, Matt Richardson, Joy James, Surabhi Kukke, and Elvia Mendoza; and some brand-new friends including Christina Wright, Rachel Gounder, Seneca Savoie, Amanda Gray, Kendra Kreider, Timmy Huynh, and Courtney Siegel Landes. And there are returnees dropping in as their schedules allow and new people calling to ask if it's too late to join us (that's easy: no! it's never too late!)

It is a thrilling time!

Gwendolyn Ferreti Manjarrez (on the right) and Seneca Savoie (center) listen intently to Matt Richardson (left) during the June 18 training session. "Training" is an awkward and inaccurate term to describe the intense atmosphere of mutual learning, questioning, and rethinking that's been going on this summer.

Left - right against the wall are Adam Mehis, Elvia Mendoza, Rachel Gounder, Timmy Huynh, and Kendra Kreider (in red). Seated on the floor with faces in photograph are Claudia Carretta-Beltrán (in background) and Celeste Henery (middle with blue top). This photograph is from June 18, a provocative and productive Friday afternoon of thinking hard together.

Shane Cruz, who volunteered all spring, continues to be an invaluable resource to the project. Shane, who is an undergraduate at UT, has been transcribing for us and also has started to videotape interviews. Courtney Siegel Landes is a new friend. More about these and other fabulous friends coming. Here Shane and Courtney react to a clip of a videotaped interview they've just watched.

New contributors Rachel Gounder and Timmy Huynh at our training, 18 June 2010. Rachel is an undergraduate anthropology and Asian American Studies major at UT. Timmy just graduated from UT in geography. He will be headed to the University of Chicago in the fall for graduate school, but first will head to Boston for a month-long summer institute in LGBT Population Health at Boston University.

Facing the formidable adversaries within

2010-05-12T19:17:00.002-05:00

Below I am reprinting the eulogy that Greg Nudd read at the memorial service for Kelly Severin on May 21, 2005.

Eulogy for Kelly Severin - by Greg Nudd

"Last night, Fiona asked me if Mommy could be her teacher. That’s not as simple a question as it seems to be when you first hear it. At first I answered that 'no, Mommy can’t be your teacher. She’s dead and she can’t do anything.' But, I thought about it some more and I think that Kelly can still be our teacher. My second, more thoughtful answer to Fiona was 'Mommy can still teach us. We can learn how to be better people by thinking about how she lived her life.' So, I think that Kelly can still be our teacher, there’s a lot to learn from her life and from her death.

"I’m going to start off by talking about why Kelly is gone. A lot of people are having a hard time understanding this and I hope that having some insight into Kelly’s daily struggle will help folks to understand why this happened. Kelly has been suffering from depression for a long time, probably her whole adult life. This disease may not be as talked about as cancer, but that doesn’t make it any less fatal if not properly treated. Kelly’s sickness made her believe things that a rational person would know were not true. She thought she was a bad mother – anybody who has spent time with Jake and Fiona knows that was a lie. She thought that she was a bad teacher – but I know from all the students and parents that loved her that she was a great teacher. Kelly thought that she was a bad wife – I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Kelly thought that she was a selfish person – this is the same Kelly I would yell at for cutting across 2 lanes of traffic to give some change to a panhandler. When she was properly treating her depression, she could keep these thoughts under control. When she was drinking, the thoughts were magnified. And it was that cycle of irrational negativity, the depression and the alcoholism reinforcing each other, that took her away from us.

"So, it’s easy for me to preach about this. I don’t have a gene that causes my brain chemistry to tend toward mental illness. I don’t have the gene that makes me crave alcohol – even when I know it is destroying my life. I’ll preach anyway, because I want some good to come of this. If you are depressed, get treatment. This disease can destroy your life or take it from you. If you have a drinking problem, or think you have a drinking problem – find a sobriety program that works for you and stick with it. And most of all, if you are depressed – don’t drink it will only make the negative feelings much worse. Like I said, it’s easy for me to preach. You don’t have to listen to me. But listen to Kelly and learn from her example. Don’t go down that same road. There are people who love you, and the world needs your unique talents. Get yourself on the road to good mental health.

"But, what about me? What can I learn from Kelly? I’m not clinically depressed – sure I get bummed out when the Chicago Cubs lose, but I’m sadly accustomed to that. I’m not an alcoholic, in spite of being at least 1/2 Irish. So, what can I learn from Kelly’s life? The main thing that I’m learning from Kelly’s life is that Karma is real. When you spend your life as a positive person – that positivity comes back to you.

"Raise your kids to be loving and people will love them. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to all the folks I have never met who have pulled together to help Jake and Fiona with the grieving process.

"Spend your working life helping people and that loves comes back to you. I consider myself pretty successful in my chosen field, but nobody ever makes me homemade flautas, or sends me heartfelt notes about what a wonderful person I am.

"Be a good neighbor and your neighbors will be good to you. I mentioned off-hand to my brother that our old house on French Place needed to be cleaned and a crew of 15 neighbors turned up the next morning and scrubbed the place spotless. Just like they pulled together for us the times that Jake was in the hospital.

"There’s something to be learned from Kelly’s death and from Kelly’s life. Her life was lived selflessly and was full of love and positivity. She loved and was beloved. But her sickness was such that she could convince herself that she was worthless. If you share either of Kelly’s diseases, please learn from example and get some help and stay sober. And all of us can learn from Kelly’s life, give of yourself, love others and that will come back to you tenfold. Kelly can still be our teacher. She has left us, but she can still teach us."

Greg Nudd – May 21, 2005

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
and these are my own (Virginia's) thoughts

Kelly Severin was an activist against racism, in defense of children, and for people with disabilities, women, queer people, and immigrants. Her activism took many forms. We met around the time that she and other anti-apartheid activists were planning protests of University of Texas investments in South Africa; one of the protests involved occupying the President's office in October 1986, for which she and other members of the "UT 16" were arrested, tried, and convicted in a flamboyant Travis County trial. We shared many adventures and mighty gales of unstoppable laughter. Injustice --- whether it was an adult speaking unkindly to a child or exclusion of people with disabilities or poor people, or limiting expectations of women or flat-out racism -- outraged Kelly. She did not "let things go." She did not accept what was wrong. Kelly was feisty and fearlessly outspoken, which might sound like great fun but comes at great cost. She couldn't help questioning authority; it was part of her makeup.

And Kelly was a loving teacher, friend, and partner.

Most of all, above and beyond and below everything else, Kelly was a devoted mother to Jake and Fiona, who gave her so much pleasure, of whom she was so proud, and for whom she had infinite love.

Kelly's death five years ago -- the night of May 12 to the early morning of May 13, 2005 -- was, and remains, difficult to understand, although far more difficult to accept. But I am convinced that my friend Kelly took her own life because (as Greg explains above) she had come to believe not only that she was a "bad mother," but also that, because of her drinking, she was a danger to her children. I think that, in her despair, she believed she was acting to protect her children.

Sometimes I've felt, and sometimes I do still feel, angry towards people who commit suicide. Of course I've sometimes felt angry especially at people I've loved who have taken their own lives. I am mad. It's not easy for me to forgive. But I don't always feel anger, and that's made me question when and with whom and under what circumstances and why I'm angry or not.

I've not ever been able to feel anger towards Kelly. That's because, however heartbreakingly misguided she may have been, my heart tells me that Kelly believed that she was doing the best thing she could do for her children.

I have circulated Greg Nudd's brilliant, important, and urgent eulogy since late May 2005, after asking for and receiving Greg's permission. I post it today because depression and alcoholism are forms of violence that live within many of us, that lead to further violence, and that are the most formidable adversaries many of us will ever know. Also, it is hard to imagine anyone who would not benefit from Greg's wise insights and emotional generosity.

Kelly Severin - Presente!

Appreciating our volunteers, interns, & friends

2010-04-23T20:02:00.001-05:00

We took some time today to honor and thank Austin volunteers, interns, and friends of the Texas After Violence Project. Volunteers from spring 2010 present this afternoon at Mi Madre's restaurant included Shane Cruz (grey t-shirt), Megan Currey (short-sleeved V-neck purply blouse), Bonnie Herrman (yellow sweater), Sabina Hinz-Foley (spaghetti-strap top but not in this first photo), and Jen Morris (white woman with blonde hair wearing all white). Shane and Sabina are undergraduate UT Austin students in the College of Liberal Arts and Bonnie is an undergraduate in the School of Social Work. Also at UT Austin, Jen is working towards her MA in Women's and Gender Studies and Megan about to complete her MLIS at the School of Information (what people like me still slip and call the library school).

Don't look for everyone in this any single photo; people came and went although as you can see we had a lovely critical mass the whole time!

Several good friends of the project also joined us. They included Antony Cherian of Seed Documentary Collective (navy guayabera with white stripes) and Diana Claitor of the Texas Jail Project (green top with squarish neckline, pretty design).

You'll also notice a group of people four of whom are wearing white. Yes, they are very elegant. Also -- here in Austin it is already what people in other parts of the U.S. would consider summer.

From left to right, Jen Morris with a big smile (in white), Priscilla Hale (navy-blue button down with print that you can see in the close up); your correspondent standing, concentrating while saying something to Priscilla, who knows what!; Priscilla's mom Ms. Gladys Hale (short hair, wearing all white); Rose Pulliam (wearing mostly white, but you can see teal-blue also, plus Rose has braids); Eric Lenz, (young man with white t-shirt); and finally Bonnie Herrmann (yellow sweater).

Priscilla and Rose are our friends and collaborators from ALLGO: a queer people of color organization.

We were happy, as always, to greet T-Kay Sangwand, Human Rights Archivist for the UT Libraries, just back from El Salvador (wearing a red and white sleeveless top -- I am beginning to feel like a fashion editor!! I'm only resorting to these descriptions because I haven't figured out how to line captions up with photos on this blog.)

You'll notice that Danielle Dirks brings smiles to the faces of Sabina and Kim. Danielle is getting close to finishing her dissertation in sociology at UT Austin (grey sweater over black top).

And it was quite wonderful to welcome Rebecca Lorins back into our midst. Rebecca teaches in the Department of Religion & Philosophy, Southwestern University (print top with purple, lavender, blue, orange and white design). Also, the young man in a white t-shirt is Eric Lenz, our friend through Bonnie.

Lydia Crafts and Parish Jefferson (grey button-down shirt) have been on our staff since January and August, 2009, respectively. They've done great work and we've enjoyed working with them. You can see Parish in the pictures (grey button-down shirt) but Lydia was not able to make the reception. Lydia is getting married in May in her hometown in Massachusetts, spending the summer in Boston, and then returning to Austin to begin the MA program in Women's and Gender Studies at UT Austin. Parish, on the other hand, will graduate from the UT School of Social Work next month. We hope that we're saying "hasta luego" and not goodbye. We share many common interests and would love to work with each of them again in the future.

With the help of Texas After Violence Project board member Jim Crosby (bearded, maroon top and khakis), Kim (young), and I (not) made a small ceremony of thanking each volunteer who was present, as well as presenting them with certificates and small presents for the summer: beach towels.

Although I am recklessly undertaking a very dangerous task, I will attempt to acknowledge and thank other volunteers from 2009-2010 who were not able to come today: Mara Benenson, Michelle Dokken, Anne-Marie Huff, Nancy Semin Lingo, Ellen Morrissey, Jane Peddicord, Alexa Torres-Skillicorn, and Eileen Walsh. We appreciate all of you very, very much!!!

As always, we thank the Torres family and everyone who works at Mi Madre's for making us so welcome on their lovely patio. Mi Madre's is at 2201 Manor Road in Austin :)

THANK YOU!!!

Interviews that are now public

2010-04-04T04:19:00.000-05:00

We've listened to a bit over eighty people tell their stories, and some of these people have donated their interviews to the project and granted us permission to share them with the public for non-commercial, educational use. Our primary means of distribution will be through libraries and educational institutions. Currently, we are working with the University of Texas, as I have written before, and will be posting interviews, usually with their transcripts, via the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) of the UT Libraries. We're working hard to get those materials ready -- it's a very labor intensive process (volunteers are welcome!).

Not all interviews will be available online, however. Nothing will go online without the interview narrator's express, explicit, written consent; when narrators want to restrict their interviews to library use only, we will of course follow those instructions.

I do not anticipate that the project will provide any interview tapes, DVDs, or transcripts to any individuals. If you want to see or listen to an interview that is public but that is not going to be available on the web, then we will work with you to make the material available to a public library or non-commercial educational institution near you, on the condition that the library or school does not give or sell or "deaccession" any materials to any individual person or commercial entity. We haven't worked those details out, yet.

Thank you to everyone who has granted us interviews thus far, and donated her or his story for public use:

Mr. Ireland Beazley, father of Mr. Napoleon Beazley
Mr. Jamaal Beazley, brother of Mr. Napoleon Beazley
Captain Arthur Cárdenas, Travis County Sheriff's Department, Austin
Mr. David Atwood, Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Houston
Mr. Larry Daves, lawyer, Colorado but formerly of West Texas, East Texas, and San Antonio
Ms. Tina Duroy, sister of Mr. James Colburn, Conroe
Mr. Vic Feazell, lawyer, former McClennan County District Attorney, now in Austin
Mr. Leon Grizzard, lawyer, Austin
Mr. Christopher Gunter, lawyer, Austin
Mr. Steve Hall, lawyer and public advocate with StandDown Texas
Mr. James C. Harrington, lawyer, Texas Civil Rights Project, Austin office, also formerly of the Río Grande Valley
Ms. Iliana López, friend of Brandon Shank, San Antonio
Mr. Sam Millsap, lawyer, former Bexar County District Attorney
Ms. Carolyn Mosley, mother of Ortralla Mosley, Austin
Mr. Alan Pogue, documentary photographer, Austin
Ms. Gloria Rubac, activist, Houston
Mr. Bob Van Steenburg, Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Austin
Mr. Roger Wade, Travis County Sheriff's Department, Austin

Those who have donated their interviews already, and who have also consented to web publication, are not representative of the full group of interview narrators. Relatively few family members have approved and donated their interviews thus far.

Two interview narrators have approved their interviews, donated them to the project, and have approved their public use as of the date of donation, but did not consent to web publication. These interviews are only available for use in a library.

Interviews are co-created by the interview narrators and the Texas After Violence Project staff, volunteers, interns, and students who work on a particular interview. The rights to the interview belong to the interview narrator and the Texas After Violence Project, as a non-profit corporation. Individual members of the Texas After Violence Project, whether they've worked on a particular interview or not, do not own any rights to any interviews.

The rights owned by the interview narrators and the Texas After Violence Project are not the same. An individual interview narrator can do anything she or he wants with her or his own interview. (Things get a little more complicated when two or more narrators participate in an interview, which is only one of several reasons why we prefer not to interview more than one person at a time.) The Texas After Violence Project, by virtue of its agreement with the interview narrator, however, cannot do just anything with any interview. The project may only use the interview for non-commercial, educational purposes.

More to come. . .
If you know anyone with a story to tell, please have them write to us at info@texasafterviolence.org

People....

2010-04-04T02:35:00.001-05:00

Bonnie Herrmann (brown sweater, on the right) is an undergraduate social work student at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of our most reliable interns this spring. Our friend Jorge Antonio Renaud visited the office; Jorge is also a student at the School of Social Work, a brand-new graduate student in the MSW program. Kim Bacon (grey hoodie) is to the left of Jorge. Then there are photographs are of Kim Bacon and Jim Harrington at the Montopolis office of the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), which Harrington founded in 1990 and still directs. Finally, you'll see our neighbor and friend Diana Claitor of the Texas Jail Project, in her office with friends. We call it the Queso Room.

Our stalwart crew at the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW), in San Antonio, on April 1 (no kidding)

2010-04-04T00:30:00.000-05:00

Lydia Crafts and I have had the great good fortune to work with three outstanding students -- Megan Brodie, Rose Caldwell, and Sonia Ramírez -- this spring at the University of the Incarnate Word. Thank you to all of them and to their sponsoring professor in the Department of Sociology, Dr. Roger Barnes.

This lovely spot on campus adjoins the office of UIW President, Dr. Louis Agnese, Jr. Apparently it's a favorite place for him to smoke a cigar, read the newspaper, and relax. You can see why. We borrowed a table and so when President Agnese emerged thought it only right to invite him to sit with us for a moment. . . and a photo-op.

Sonia Ramírez, in the white t-shirt, is Vice President of the Incarnate Word Ethics Society, which debates in national and regional competitions and has had an astounding year.

The Harvard Divinity School made a smart decision in accepting Rosemarie Caldwell. Rosey (green shirt with navy stripes) will study feminist theology at Harvard beginning this fall.

Megan Brodie, in pink, delivered her first paper (at least I think it was her first) at an academic conference a week ago. Congratulations, Megan!

Megan Brodie is ready to videotape the interview.

Sonia Ramirez has explained the interview process to Justin Burklow, student activist, before, but goes over it one more time as they prepare to begin.

More photos from March 2010

2010-04-04T00:15:00.000-05:00

More photos of the visit from the United World College students....These are from Tuesday, March 16. You'll also notice Texas After Violence Project coordinator Lydia Crafts in one photograph. Lydia's got longish blond hair and is wearing a sweater over a green top; she's sitting by a desk in front of a window with a bottle branded "Fiji."

United World College students visit the Texas After Violence Project office over spring break (March 16 and 17)

2010-04-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Students from the U.S. campus of United World College (located in Montezuma, New Mexico) visited the Texas After Violence Project office for two (very!) full days during spring break. The visit happened at the most fortunate of times (so few people were around that we almost had enough room for everyone); and the least fortunate of times (so few people were around that...well, it was a challenging if thrilling couple of days). The students hailed from Ethiopia, Senegal, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Jamacia, the Bahamas, India, Iran, Israel, Portugal, and, in the U.S., Kansas and West Virginia.

Some students watched videotapes of interviews that donors have already consent to make public. They listened carefully for slang, legal jargon, local references and other specialized words or phrases that not even people with English dictionaries handy would find easy to understand. As a former lawyer, the phrase, "the decision came down.." has either never seemed weird to me, or seemed strange to me so long ago that I'd forgotten how odd it sounds. The metaphor of courts and law being "above" and people being "under" is something to ponder.

Other students translated a portion of an interview into a few different languages.... A task awfully similar to the first, if you think about it, and central to our mission of attempting to communicate experiences.

People can not live by work alone. . . While we were waiting for lunch (tacos on day 1, Vietnamese food on day 2), I remembered the introductions. I'd asked students to let me know what about themselves made them proud. No one said the same thing: Honesty. Being a woman. Writing. The likelihood of being the first person in one's family to attend or finish college. And then the artists... I remembered that Aminata said she could sing and asked her for a song. What a voice! And then Aminata turned to her friends, who called, African Chorus! African Chorus! What an enchanting, moving, and marvelous treat. . .

.

We all worked hard, but what you're seeing is not the most intense part. . .

You can't see the really heated discussions because everyone is participating and we were too busy. . .

Even UWC students had to work to find some places on the map... Maldives, anyone? Azerbaijan?

Visitors: Cheikh Badiane, Senegal (teacher, UWC); Laish Zane Boyd, Bahamas; Ronald Parris (Parris) Bushong, Oklahoma, U.S. (teacher); Lizzie Cuevas, West Virginia, U.S.; Aminata Deme, Dakar, Senegal; Paran, Iran; Mariana Galamba de Oliveira Nunes de Carvalho, Lisbon, Portugal; Nofar Hamrany, Israel; Kathryn Rachal Maha, Kansas, U.S.; Nabukeera Martha, Kampala, Uganda; Tendai Shirley Masansomai, Harare, Zimbabwe; Shel Mehta, India; Ashlee Simone Reynolds, Manchester, Jamaica; Bereket Zekarais, Ethiopia. You'll notice Parish Jefferson, Texas After Violence Project team member, standing up near the door of the green room in one photograph. He's wearing a green jacket with white stripes, white pants, and tennies.

Interviews so far

2010-03-01T22:18:00.000-06:00

Since 2007, we've conducted seventy-nine interviews. Twenty-one of these interviews, or slightly over 25%, are now open to the public. The largest number of interviews are with family members and friends of murder victims and executed persons; the second largest number of interviews are with lawyers or others experienced in juvenile or criminal justice processes. Our interview narrators, thus far, are disproportionately male, white/Anglo, and Austin residents.

For the full information, please see our website at http://www.texasafterviolence.org/interviews.conducted.

Digital Witnessing: A Record of Human Rights and Wrongs

2010-02-24T01:08:00.000-06:00

The Ethnic & Third World Literature concentration of the UT Austin English department has organized an event called Digital Witnessing: A Record of Human Rights and Wrongs tp take place on Tuesday, March 2, 2010, from 5 - 7 p.m., in the Rare Books Room of the Benson Latin American Collection. T-Kay Sangwand, Human Rights Archivist at UT Austin, will make a presentation; she will be joined by Nicholas Rejack of the Free Burma Rangers and yours truly, Virginia Raymond.

We're so honored and grateful to be part of this event!

UT Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP) asks questions about service learning, internships, and community engagement

2010-02-21T18:14:00.000-06:00

'Tis the season, it seems, for talking about "service learning" in higher education.

Charlotte Nunes is a teaching assistant (TA) at UT Austin for an undergraduate seminar called "Bridging Disciplines (BDP) 101: Human Rights and Social Justice." Taught by Professor Karen Engle, the course (according to Nunes) "is an introductory seminar for students interested in earning a Human Rights and Social Justice interdisciplinary certificate through a course of study that integrates classroom, research, and internship experiences." Ms. Nunes recently invited me to take place on a panel called "Human Rights in Practice" in which several organizations will make presentations to about sixteen BDP students.

In preparation for the panel (which will take place on Tuesday), Ms. Nunes has asked participants to think about a number of questions. Here I share some of her questions and my current thoughts.... I'm interested to hear what others think.

BDP: What about your work makes it "human rights" work?

VR: The Texas After Violence Project documents human rights violations, especially serious violence, and the conditions that give rise to the these violations. These conditions often constitute human rights violations in themselves.

BDP: What role you think internships/community engagement plays in students' education?

VR: First, a word about terminology. The word “internship” – to me –has a much more specific meaning than does the phrase “community engagement.” “Community engagement” can cover much more ground, anything from a minimum requirement that students attend or participate in a couple of “community” events (variously described, but usually off-campus) to full-throttle work in a “community” setting or with a “community organization.”

Internship, to me, has always meant that a person worked somewhere for close to full-time for several months, a semester, or a year or two.

In practice, however, we have modified our “internship” to align with the UT College of Liberal Arts definition of “internship courses” or “internships” (terms that it seems to be using interchangeably, see http://www.utexas.edu/cola/academic-affairs/academic-policies/course-related.php#Internships).

In effect, we have modified the term “internship” to imply a time commitment that is not even close to full-time, but roughly equivalent to one course, usually structured as a “conference course” or an “independent study” or a “special topics” course, depending on the department and institution.

The roles these forms, and other forms, of “community engagement” actually play varies from the trivial to important to formative.

BDP: What is your past experience hosting student interns and/or facilitating students' community engagement?

Again, “community engagement” is a broad term. It’s hard to generalize about our experience, both because it has taken so many different forms, and because these have ranged from the wonderful to the extremely time-consuming and negative.

Thus far, our most successful internship experience has been with Papa Diallo, at the time a Huston-Tillotson undergraduate, and who is now an LBJ Public Affairs graduate student. He remains a trusted friend of the project. Our worst experience was with a student who was disruptive in a number of ways, expected everything to be done for her (to the extent of expecting us to bring her pen and paper to take notes), and needed to be babysat.

This semester, we have two interns, one a graduate student at UT in Women’s and Gender Studies, and one an undergraduate social work student, both of whom are already outstanding. (We also have a number of promising volunteers!) We have three wonderful students at the University of the Incarnate Word who are working with us under the auspices of Professor Roger Barnes of the Sociology Department; their work with us fulfills the requirements of a Sociology “Special Topics” course.

I think of service learning as something less than an "internship course" as UT COLA describes it. As the UT Provost's Office defines it, "service learning" takes place as part of a course; service learning itself does not constitute an entire course. See: http://www.utexas.edu/provost/academicservicelearning/criteria.html

So, given this definition, we have had very successful service-learning students from UT who worked with Professors Eric Tang and Shannon Speed in a double-course they co-taught in Spring 2009. That class began with some common sessions; then students picked a community organization to work with. Three of them chose to work with us, with excellent results. These students really knew what they were getting into, however. Two of them had attended our training in Fall 2008. One – Eliana Díaz -- had volunteered with us in the fall, having been referred by Gabe Solis. Eliana and Gabe were both Rapoport Service Scholars in the College of Liberal Arts at UT. Another, Mark Evans, knew about the project because he had taken two Mexican American Studies classes with me (Mexican American legal history and an introduction to policy studies). Both of theses students knew a lot about the project and were able to intelligently commit to working with us. The result: significant and splendid contributions! (A third student also seemed promising but had to drop out mid-semester.)

Our wonderful friend, Danielle Dirks, a PhD candidate and accomplished scholar whose own work is on capital punishment, taught an undergraduate sociology course last spring on capital punishment. She offered her students the opportunity to perform service learning with the Texas After Violence Project, but she did not require them to do so. Several of her students came to parts of our training to check us out -- and some students took to us while others did not. A few did some volunteer work with us; the largest number expressed interest initially but never came through; and one – Megan Sissom -- was outstanding. We wish we could have hired her, and I could kick myself for not figuring out a way to make that happen. Unique about that experience was that Danielle Dirks attended the training and participated in our project, too. It was a wonderful experience for us, not because a huge number of people worked with us, but because the small number who did made invaluable contributions and became cherished friends.

We've also had some very bad experiences with student interns.

The negative experiences cast a pall and made me wonder if we should advertise "service learning" opportunities at all, beyond the faculty and students who we already know. Perhaps we should limit these opportunities to students who will work with the small number of faculty who understand the project, are willing to work with us closely, and who will reinforce (rather than undermine) our ethical standards. It may be that we should stop listing the Texas After Violence Project on volunteer/service learning websites, and instead only work through specific faculty members who "get" what we are trying to do. What do you think?

Thus far, faculty with whom we've had significant conversations and whose students we'd be very comfortable hosting include Christen Smith, Shannon Speed, Eric Tang, José Limón, Domino Pérez, Sue Heinzelman, and Sandy Stone at UT; Janet Armitage at St. Mary's University; Roger Barnes at Incarnate Word; and Lorraine Samuels and Michael Hirsch at Huston-Tillotson University. We're also learning a lot right now from Meghan Currey, whose supervisor is T-Kay Sangwand, Human Rights Archivist for the UT Austin Libraries.

In addition to service learning and internships, we've also benefited from the contributions of many volunteers, many of whom are students. These have worked out very well! When volunteers lose interest or find that they don't have enough time, they just leave. There's no drama about unfinished coursework.

Finally, we have also provided training of several days each to visiting students, e.g. from Williams College in Austin on a mini-semester with Joy James, and from the United World College with Cheikh Badiane. We enjoyed these interactions but they were very time-consuming; the amount of time needed to train the students precluded them performing any “service.” And that’s the hard part about service-learning. With limited time, it’s hard for students to both “serve” and “learn.” For one thing, we can’t entrust confidential material to strangers: to do so would be an irresponsible betrayal of the promise we make to interview narrators. So right away, we are limited in the kinds of tasks we can assign to students we are just getting to know.

We do have a number of tasks that don’t take a great deal of training – but then what are students learning? For service learning to be meaningful for students and a help to organizations, everyone must commit to some minimum amount of time together. What is that minimum? What do you think?

So what kind of internship and service learning experiences have we had? In general, what matters is clarity of communication; mutually-agreed upon expectations; and students’ level of commitment. The worst experiences have been when faculty signed off on projects without ever having spoken to us first and without ever having understood our ethical responsibilities to interview narrators. The best experiences have been when we’ve all been clear and students have thought about the commitment and known what they were getting into before they plunged in.

BDP: What should students do to prepare themselves for internships? What should they understand about a given community before starting an internship in that community?

VR: I’ve made a list, see: http://texasafterviolence.org/tavp_ftp/BridgingCommunityAbriendoBrecha19Feb2010.pdf

BDP: What can program directors and teachers do to prepare students for community engagement?

VR: Familiarize yourself with the program, the history, the expectations, confidentiality requirements -- and do not let students seek money for projects without ever having spoken to the ostensible hosts!

BDP: What kind of knowledge or skills do you think students get from internships that they don't get from the classroom?

VR: What students will learn varies, but at best, what certain kinds of work are like in practice.

For instance, a student may care a lot about immigrants and refugees, find immigration law fascinating or enraging, and immigration policy terribly important, and as a result may wish to become an immigration lawyer. Yellow light!.....An internship may show her that much of the time, an immigration law practice means filling out forms.....and the student may experience those tasks as absolutely deadly.... She may decide that she longs for the action of trial work.

Students will find that ethical questions are not abstract at all!!

Students will discover that ideologies, theories, and models are no substitute for lived experience, which is far richer and more complex. As the Prince of Denmark told his compañero de clase, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, 159-167).

Students will gain self-knowledge: A student may discover that she is happiest and most effective under certain conditions and not under others. Working in a big room with other people or working alone; collaborating on projects or assuming sole responsibility for projects; learning a particular skill and becoming expert at it or always learning something new; working with children or adults; working inside or outside; traveling or staying in one place, and so forth…..

A discussion to be continued. I'm interested in your thoughts. Write me at virginia@texasafterviolence.org . Thanks!

Bridging community & academia.....

2010-02-19T13:19:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my friend and colleague, Professor Roberta Villalón of St. John's University in New York, NY, I will participate in a panel in about two hours. The panel is called "Bridging community & academia in the struggle to end violence against Latin@s," and the conference is "Abriendo Brecha VII" a conference held at UT Austin that brings together scholars and activists. The third presenter on our panel this afternoon is Laura Zarate, of Arte Sana, http://www.arte-sana.com/. The motto of Arté Sana is "healing hearts through the arts," and I am very much looking forward to hearing about that work!

When Roberta approached me about presenting, she asked me to talk about "core initiatives that worked..and lessons learned from what did not work. Also, how have you linked activism and scholarship, and what do you think can be done to further this link?"

In preparation for this panel -- which is designed to be interactive -- I prepared a list of things I've learned over the last 35 years as I have worked, as a student, volunteer, lawyer, administrator, and intern working with a heterogenous host of community organizations. Over the years, such interactions have gone under a number of labels: community engagement, activist scholarship, service learning, internships, and others....all connoting different politics and goals. "Service learning" is currently the rage. But the basic idea is that students can learn something from the community work while providing assistance to community or non-profit or social change or social service organizations.

None of these ideas is original! But, slow as I am, it wasn't enough for me to hear these warnings and suggestions.....I had to live them. So for each of the thirty-one points, I can provide glorious and disastrous examples! You can find the outline by going to our website here:
http://texasafterviolence.org/tavp_ftp/BridgingCommunityHandoutForAbriendoBrecha19Feb2010.pdf

Young men....

2010-02-15T19:41:00.000-06:00

This photograph shows Papa Diallo, Gabriel Solis, and Jamaal Beazley in Chili's, on April 4, 2008, in Huntsville. It was a rainnnny day. Gabe, Papa, and I had driven through the sheets of rain (well, Gabe had driven & I hoped for the best), thinking that our plan to meet Jamaal outside and interview him in front of the TDCJ Walls Unit might not work so well. It was still pouring when we arrived at the designated Sam Houston State University parking lot, so we decided to have lunch and decide what to do next. You can tell these young men cleaned their plates! Afterwards, Papa interviewed Jamaal, while Gabe videotaped the interview, in the Huntsville Public Library.....where the staff provided a quiet place for us on no notice at all.

Have I mentioned how much I love librarians?

A sweet day...

Seven

2010-02-12T12:56:00.001-06:00

Kim just turned to me and quietly announced, "we're up to seventy-seven (77) interviews. And we have two more scheduled." And there are seven interview clips on the DVD that we're about to show our new group of volunteers and interns in the oral history training that will start in about half an hour. Seven and seventy-nine: prime numbers. We've come a long way. On the other hand, we have yet to finish transcribing many of those interviews....and many are out, with their narrators, awaiting approval and donation.

A good day. As Kim said earlier: "Poetry, paychecks, and cookies. And it's not even noon." Poetry by an interview narrator; we look forward to sharing this with the world once we've transcribed the interview and the poet has approved, donated, and released the interview for publication. Paychecks --- the very small paid staff of the project (Kim Bacon, Lydia Crafts, Parish Jefferson, and yours truly) arrived from Wells Fargo, where we recently started banking. And cookies, which Bonnie Herrmann baked and brought to the office. Bonnie is a new volunteer; she was a student in Introduction to Policy Studies, MAS* 308, that I had the honor to teach in the fall.

The skies are gray. The stories are sad. The work is infinite. But we have reason to hope.

* Mexican American Studies

Human Rights Documentation Initiative at UT Libraries

2009-11-21T17:15:00.000-06:00

We have many people to thank. First, as always, we thank the people who allow us into their lives, sharing important experiences with us and ultimately, with you. We will not ever disclose anyone's name before she or he is completely ready for us to release their names and stories to the public, so I will not identify people individually here. But we appreciate you deeply.

Over the last few months, we have been working with T-Kay Sangwand, archivist for the new Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) of the University of Texas Libraries. The HRDI website went online earlier this week, and you will notice our name under current projects. We are currently processing interviews -- those that narrators have reviewed, donated to us, and agreed to make fully public via the internet -- for HRDI. This development means that anyone in the world with access to the internet can watch and listen to the testimonies of people in Texas who been directly affected by violent tragedies, and who want the rest of us to learn from their experiences.

Of course, not everyone is ready to share her story, or to share the story with the public, or to share the story via the internet. People have individual circumstances and differing needs for privacy. You can still share your story with us and we will keep in private for as many years or decades as you specify, or, as others have done, you can share your story and donate it to the project for public education --- but not for dissemination on the internet. The value of the internet, however, means that we will be able to reach millions of people all over Texas, the United States, and around the globe, who would have not access to these experiences otherwise.

Thank you to T-Kay Sangwand, human rights archivist and Christian Kelleher, human rights project manager, and their colleagues! Many other people helped this collaboration come about, including Margo Gutiérrez, the interim director of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the UT Libraries and Virginia Burnett Garrard, our board president and a professor of history, religious studies, and Latin American Studies at UT Austin. Antony Cherian, our consultant and a doctoral candidate at the UT School of Information, first told us about the innovative software that the HRDI project would be using: software developed by the Guatemalan company, Glifos. Once Tony told us about the GLIFOS software, we knew what to dream! Shawn Quinn Stewart (Quinn), manager of computing services at the UT Austin School of Information told us more about GLIFOS, showing Gabe Solis, Kim Bacon, and Sabina Hinz-Foley how it worked. This fall, our assistant director, Kim Bacon, has primarily been responsible for readying the first batch of public interviews that will go to HRDI.

You can find out more about the HRDI at its website, lib.utexas.edu/hrdi, and you'll see the Texas After Violence Project listed as one of HRDI's "current projects" on its "About the HRDI" page. Also see the Documentalist, a blog about archiving, for more information about GLIFOS.

We also appreciate Melissa Pan's Daily Texan article of November 19, 2009, "Librarians document activists' research." Note, however, that the article exaggerates my status. I am SOOOOOO not a professor at UT! (Of course I am honored and happy to lecture there whenever I have a gig, but these have never been on more than a one-semester-at-a-time-no-promises-about-the-future basis. Living in the moment, for better and worse.) More importantly, I did not start of the Texas After Violence Project....For the idea of the project, and for putting the pieces in place, all credit belongs to our founder, friend, and colleague....a modest person who is bit by bit revealing himself at selected times in selected places to selected persons. It's not for me to out him until I get permission to do so..... soon. Meanwhile, thank you, friend.

And thank you to everyone -- including the many people whose names I haven't listed -- for transcribing and preparing these interviews for inclusion in the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. You're making history.

David Mamet on "Closure"

2009-10-04T20:15:00.003-05:00

Playwright David Mamet and Rabbi Lawrence Kushner published a book, Five Cities of Refugenow six years old, which they subtitle "Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy." The subtitle itself is an olive branch, or at least I see it as one, because the other names that the books go by are contested: Old Testament, Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch... Rather than pick any one of the names that would immediately attract certain audiences and repel others, Kushner and Mamet tried for wide appeal. Did they succeed? I don't know, but I would like to hear what others think of the first entry by David Mamet. It's on "closure."

" 'Closure'. . . is an overwhelmingly secular, modern, and arrogant idea -- that one, by an act of will, manipulation, or aggression can 'complete' a disturbing experience.

"This mythical mechanical completion means triumph over: fate, chance, anger, grief, or injustice, and is achievable only through oblivion or repression.

"The struggle to deal with an unjust, confusing, incomprehensible world does not impede our life; it is our life."

(The bold emphasis is mine)
Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, New York: Random House/Schocken Books, 2003, pp.5-6

What do you think?

Rejecting Violence, Imagining Alternatives

2009-10-04T19:34:00.000-05:00

Our series of community conversations on violence, to take place on Wednesday evenings from 6 - 8 p.m. at the UT Austin Community Engagement Center (CEC), 1009 East 11th Street, 78702, is sponsored by these friends:
allgo: a queer people of color organization
La Voz de Austin
Otralla Mosely Foundation:
Texas Civil Rights Project
Texas Inmate Families' Association
Texas Jail Project
as well as the
Center for Mexican American Studies
John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies
Center for Women's & Gender Studies
and Center for Community Engagement
at the University of Texas at Austin

& here's our schedule....stay tuned for updates...

October 7: Violence in our communities, with Gabe Padilla on violence against youth; Rose Pulliam on violence against queer people of color; Carolyn Mosely Samuels, on teen dating violence; and Yazmin Turk, on domestic violence. Parish Jefferson will moderate. This conversation will serve as an important prelude to National Teen Dating Voilence Awareness and Prevention Week.

October 14: Juvenile justice?
October 21: Policing
October 28: Incarceration

October....

2009-10-04T18:51:00.000-05:00

Last month flew by and I didn't touch this blog. How did that happen? Hmmm. At the Texas After Violence Project, we were busy

....preparing for what turned about to be a reception with a wonderful turn-out. The dining room, patio, and sparkling new room (designed for meetings or parties) at Mi Madre's, 2201 Manor Road, Austin, 78722, were all packed. Frankly, we were not expecting such a large crowd and were a bit taken aback (although happily so). Our hosts scrambled to keep everyone happy and adequately nourished and the crowds blocked many people from seeing or hearing the program, but everyone was so helpful and kind. Thank you to all who spoke the-- Honorable Elliott Naishtat, Parish Jefferson, Kimberly Bacon, Papa Diallo, Kimberly Bacon, Gabe Solis, Lydia Crafts, Sabina Hinz-Foley, & Walter Long -- or attended, and thank you very much to the Torres family.

...listening to oral histories....Of course we will never talk about specific interviews until after narrators have released these stories to the public, but we can say that we are learning more all the time, hearing different perspectives, and hearing from many different parts of our communities....

...welcoming a new colleague, Parish Jefferson, a second-year Master's student in the UT School of Social Work. You can read more about Parish in the "who we are" section of our website..

...working with others to prepare a series of community conversations about violence: what we experience now, and what alternatives we'd like to imagine. Our colleagues in this enterprise include the Texas Inmate Families Association, the Texas Jail Project, allgo: a queer people of color organization, La Voz de Austin, the Texas Civil Rights Project, as well as several centers at UT Austin: the Community Engagement Center, Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), and the Center for Women's & Gender Studies (CWGS). On each Wednesday evening in October (October 7, 14, 21, & 28), from 6 - 8 p.m., we will meet at Community Engagement Center in the Rev. Marvin Griffin Building, 1009 East 11th Street, Austin 78702. After brief presentations by invited guests, we will move to a conversation among everyone present. The open part will not be Q & A, but a real conversation, and we'd like to hear your voices there.

The first conversation will be this week. Our speakers will include Yasmin Turk, who will speak about domestic violence; Gabe Padilla, who will talk about violence against youth; Rose Pulliam of allgo: a queer people of color organization; and Carolyn Mosely Samuel, who created the Ortralla Mosely Foundation in memory of her daughter. Those of you who are in Austin might remember that Ortralla was stabbed to death at her high school by her former boyfriend, a deeply troubled and violent young man for whom Carolyn, and the young man's mother, had sought help. Carolyn will talk about dating violence (which she distinguishes from domestic violence) and the work of the foundation. Refreshments for participants will be provided this week and next courtesy of the Center for Mexican American Studies; Lisa Le, student worker at the Center for Women's & Gender Studies, created the poster for the event, which is also advertised in La Voz.

...conducting our annual meeting entirely by phone conference, due to the flu. Ben Kuipers recently resigned from the board. Ben moved with his wife Laura Lein to Michigan, where she directs the School of Social Work and he teaches computer science. The distance has proven too great for Ben to be fully involved in the project. We miss him and our grateful for his many significant contributions. Thankfully, Virginia Garrard Burnett, board president, signed on for a second term. With Jim Crosby, Pedro Cruz, Christen Smith, and Ellen Sweets, Ginny continues to provide solid leadership.

...meeting with archivists at the University of Texas on a project that will describe fully in the next month or two....

...thinking about San Antonio. On Friday, a small but focussed group met at the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) to talk about an oral history & violence project that will begin in San Antonio in January. More to come on that front...

and, well, struggling to pay the rent and looking for money to buy another camcorder.... Thank you to all who have contributed financially already. It's a hard time for most people. Those of us fortunate enough to be employed at all may have reason to wonder if we will be employed in the weeks or months to come, so we do not take for granted anyone's donation of any size. We appreciate everyone's generosity -- financial or otherwise.

Finally, one other bit of not-so-new news. Dialogue is the newsletter of the Oral History Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Because the SAA met in Austin this year, the editors of Dialogue chose to devote the issue to oral history projects in Austin, including ours. You can read Dialogue, Volume 5, Issue 2, August 2009, online at this address: http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/oralhist/august%2009%20newsletter.pdf Our article is at pages 7-8.

take care

IRS determination letter arrives

2009-08-18T17:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a bit of nerdy news that may be boring to most people, but makes my little director's heart jump happily. We've just received our "Letter 947," an inauspicious-sounding name for a missive from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) letting us know that the agency has determined that the Texas After Violence Project is a public charity and thus exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. What this also means is that your contributions to the Texas After Violence Project are tax deductible.

In truth, your contributions always were tax deductible, if made to the Austin Community Foundation, which has acted as the fiscal sponsor for our project. The difference is that the foundation was responsible for making sure that all the money went solely for proper purposes. The foundation provides a necessary service for small, start-up organizations such as our own, and we're grateful for the help of all the kind people who set up the foundation and work there today. On the other hand, the arrangement is not ideal: every time we needed to buy something -- a camera, a computer, a package of tapes -- we had to spend money out of our pockets and then submit a reimbursement request to the foundation. As you can imagine, that's been a hardship for most members of our team.

The 501(c)(3) status also means that the project should be able to apply for grant monies that were not available to us in the past, because we were not a free-standing 501(c)(3) organization.

Now, I'm happy, but don't take my sentiments to mean that I'm ignorant about the ups and downs of the non-profit corporate structure. Lots of very, very smart people -- my friend Luz Guerra, for instance -- have long written critiques about the ways in which the non-profit corporate structure constrains and distorts movements for social change. I've lived long enough to see one social change organization after another morph from horizontally-organized mobilizations for justice morph into nice, but fundamentally nonthreatening social service agencies that leave the causes of problems untouched (you could say the same for the Texas After Violence Project, but that's another argument....) The non-profit corporate structure is, after all, a kind of weakened corporate structure that inhibits innovative and especially non-hierarchical ways of operating. Two wonderful books that I highly recommend that critique the non-profit model are The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston: South End Press, 2007) and Miranda Joseph's absolutely brilliant Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

There you have it. I agree with the critiques, but the determination letter has made my day... My internal contradictions call to mind the old joke about the guy who tells his psychiatrist, "My brother thinks he's a chicken!" and the psychiatrist asks why the guy doesn't help his brother realize that he's not. The answer is plenty clear to me: "Cause I need the eggs!"

I don't "believe" that non-profit organizations can change the world. To echo the second amendment loyalists (who argue that guns don't kill people): people do.

On the other hand, we need another camera. Another license for Office: mac 2008. And to pay the rent.

May the universe be kind to you this week.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2009-08-18T00:26:00.000-05:00

It's the middle of August, a time for transitions for many of us who are connected one way or another to the business of formal education. I have a stack of papers to finish grading by the morning, and I'm feeling a little discombobulated with the comings and goings both at the Texas After Violence Project and at my home (my daughter is leaving the nest...).

Gabe Solis has left the project to begin an MA program in Mexican American Studies at UT Austin. We've known that was coming. In one of the photos above you can see Norma Cantu, law and education professor, Gabe, Dr. José Limón in the striped shirt in the background, and me at the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) "ice cream social" last year at about this time. Since CMAS has been my primary home at UT for about ten years, it does not feel that Gabe is going far....but still, he's not here at the project where we need him!

Emmanuel (Manny) Tomes is also gone; he will be pursuing his interests in business, and applying to MBA programs for next year. We wish Manny only the best.

Sabina Hinz-Foley will be starting at UT Austin next week, as well. Although she won't be going far, either, we'll miss her terribly, as well. Sabina hopes to continue to work on death penalty-related issues, and has registered for a seminar with Rob Owen of the UT Law School's Capital Punishment Clinic.

Kim Bacon, Lydia Crafts, Walter Long, and wonderful volunteers -- including Rebecca Lorins and Mark Evans -- and I remain holding down the fort. (Mark Evans is in the green shirt in the photo at our office, above, sitting between Gabe and Manny). Our phone has been ringing and the e-mails keep coming: incredibly wonderful, dedicated, and extremely qualified people want to volunteer with our project. This influx of talent is tremendously encouraging.

What I really wish I could tell you about is what we're learning from the interviews, but of course these will remain confidential until narrators review the DVDs and transcripts, request changes, and make the material public. Suffice to say that we have been on the road a lot, between Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, to listen to rich stories of sorrow, injustice, outrage -- and resilience.

Field notes

2009-07-31T08:47:00.000-05:00

It's Friday, and the Texas After Violence Project crew finishes an especially busy and productive week. On Sunday, Kim and Gabe conducted an interview in Houston. Lydia and Manny left early Monday morning to conduct a second interview in Houston; Sabina drove to Houston on Tuesday to join them. Lydia and Sabina conducted a third interview on Tuesday. Lydia and Manny came back to Austin while Sabina stayed in Houston to interview with me on Wednesday (our fourth interview of the week). Kim and I drove to San Antonio yesterday (Thursday) for an interview, the project's fifth interview in as many days.

Each person we interviewed this week had lost a family member - spouse, parent, child, sibling - to murder or execution. We haven't even had a chance to process all the things we have heard and learned, but we already feel more seasoned than a week ago.

You might be wondering about logistics: Why all the coming and going? Why didn't the same two people conduct all four interviews in Houston, just switching roles of interviewer and recorder? Aren't we making this far too complicated?

Experience has taught us that it is not a good idea for any one person to conduct too many interviews without a break. It may seem logical, once we've spent the time and money to travel outside of Austin, to interview as many people as we can line up, but we've learned that to do so is false economy. When we've interviewed without breaks, we've paid: stomach-aches, nightmares, helplessness, headaches, dizziness, anxiety, depression. Or, we might risk shutting down emotionally, and not being fully present as we listen. These stories are too painful and disturbing to absorb all at once, and we need to respect the narrators, their experiences, and our own limits. So, no one participates in more than two interviews within any seven-day period.

Yesterday, taking a break after an interview may have literally saved Kim and me from a complete disaster. After our interview in San Antonio, we had lunch at El Mirador on South St. Mary's Street (just south of Durango Boulevard), a wonderful place that I always find comforting not only because of the caldo but also the happy, busy, buzz, and chances that I'll run into someone I know (or spot someone who I don't know but wish I did!) El Mirador is an important part of my personal history, as well. In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked with Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States, and so I made many trips to the immigration court in San Antonio from my home in Austin. I made it a practice to go to El Mirador after court, and I have many bittersweet memories of those days. My clients were always with me and my then-babies often were too, although not in the courtroom itself (my clients would often take turns holding a baby, or walking them up and down, in the hallway). El Mirador was the safe place we retreated in between the dangers of immigration court and IH35 (remember IH35 under construction for a decade or so? That narrow, deathly passageway through New Braunfels?)

Corn soup for both Kim and me, yum, and yes, far more nourishing to our souls than the quick stop at a Taco Cabana in Houston the day before. After lunch, I still couldn't bear to get back on IH35 just yet, so I listened to the still, small voice that told me to do something fun. Kim said she wasn't in a hurry, so we decided to go by the San Angel gallery in the Blue Star complex. We chatted with Leigh Ann Lester (an artist in her own right, Leigh Ann currently is showing her work at the Institute of Texas Cultures) and Hank Lee. (Hank's partner and co-owner, and my former compañero de clase, Paul Bonin-Rodríguez, was in Santa Fe.) I don't know how long we were in the gallery, but when we came out reluctantly and got in the car, it became immediately obvious that we weren't going anywhere. My left front tire was flat - a slight inconvenience in the parking lot that would have put us in grave danger on IH35. It's always been my experience in San Antonio that car trouble brings out the best in people and the best people: no sooner do I stand outside looking mournfully at a car than do kind people appear, offering to help. Yesterday was no exception.

Thank you, team -- Gabe, Kim, Lydia, Manny, and Sabina -- for your discipline, empathy, creativity and dedication this week, and thank you, San Antonio, for being kind. Most of all, thank you to the five people who trusted us with their stories. We've grown because of you: our "truth" is bigger, richer, and more complicated.

Maurice's Music - this week and next in Austin

2009-07-28T22:53:00.001-05:00

And now for something completely different....

Our friend and volunteer Maurice Chammah is an extraordinarily talented musician. He will be playing with his band, Oikos, on Thursday, July 30, at Lambert', 401 West 2nd Street, Austin. The show begins promptly at 10:30 p.m.

Maurice will also be playing as part of another band, Mother Falcon, several times the first week of August. The following times are all approximate because they represent when the shows open, not necessarily when Mother Falcon plays. You might want to call the clubs.

Sunday, August 2nd at The Mohawk, 912 Red River, Austin, 78701
512.482.8404
7:30 p.m. (approximate)

Wednesday, August 5th at Trailer Space, 1401-A Rosewood, Austin 78702
512.542.9001
7:00 p.m. (approximate)

Saturday, August 8th at Stubb's BBQ, 801 Red River, Austin, 78701
512.480.8431
9:00 p.m. (approximate)

Maurice will, too soon, have to return to Ithaca, New York, for his senior year at Cornell University. So you'd do well to catch listen to his music while you can -- you will not be disappointed!

Václav Havel on hope

2009-07-28T13:01:00.000-05:00

Not new, but worth repeating!

"The kind of hope I often think about. . I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out...The deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimensions of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere.' It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem. . hopeless. ."

Václev Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, "Orientation of the Heart," Disturbing the Peace: A conversation with Karel Hvizdala. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Heartbreaking news

2009-07-26T23:31:00.000-05:00

Our friend and board member, Pedro Cruz, shared heartbreaking news. He and his wife, Hilda, lost their thirteen-year-old nephew, Manuel, in a house fire. Manuel's two sisters and parents survived the fire, which also destroyed their home in Bluetown, Cameron County. (Bluetown is south of La Fería.) Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers are with their entire extended family. May Manuel's memory be for a blessing, and may his family be comforted at this awful time by the love and support of each other and their community.

Congratulations, Lydia!

2009-07-26T17:46:00.000-05:00

Lydia Crafts, journalist and Texas After Violence Project team member, has been following a group of young Muslim musicians in Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Austin for several months. Yesterday, her story aired on National Public Radio (NPR). It's really interesting as an example of life imitating fiction and as an example of people adopting and adapting disparate forms of cultural production to express their own realities. Read and listen to "Taqwacore: The Real Muslim Punk Underground" by following this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=107010536
And join us in congratulating Lydia!

Where we are

2009-07-23T20:30:00.000-05:00

Time to reflect on where we are in terms of what we have set out to do.

The Texas After Violence Project works toward a more just and less violent Texas. Our mission is threefold: 1) we listen to narratives of lived experience of people most closely touched by serious violence; 2) we share our findings as widely as possible consistent with the desires of our interview narrators; and 3) we seek to promote collective, critical, and constructive dialogue about effective ways to both prevent and respond to violence.

For much of the project's first year (April 2007, when we incorporated, until April 2008, when we conducted the interviews with Ireland and Napoleon Beazley) we consultedwith family members of murder victims and executed persons, archivists, oral historians, other scholars and community groups. We spent a lot of time figuring out what approach to take in our interviews, and how to fashion a consent process that fully respected the people who entrust their life stories to us. We started out using inexpensive audio-only recorders, to disappointing results – two important but inaudible interviews.

This slow, cautious start and our early mistakes paved the way for a more obviously productive second year. In the last 14 months or so, we've interviewed over sixty (60) people: family members and loved ones of murder victims and executed persons, law enforcement officials, media witnesses to executions, lawyers, clergy, and others. For a while, I was concerned that we had interviewed too few family members of murder victims, but Kim, Lydia, and Sabina have taken care of that concern with their mighty work in the last couple of months.

Despite our exhaustive and time-consuming consent process, about seventeen (17) people have already given us permission to post their interviews online. Segments of a few of these interviews at http://www.texasafterviolence.org/watch.and.listen.

We're working out the glitches of posting the interviews online at our own website. We also hope to persuade the powers that be at a nearby major Texas public institution to allow us to post full interviews and transcripts online on that institution’s mighty server.

In terms of our mission, then, we are off to a strong start listening and we are just beginning to share the narratives via the web and a few presentations to high school and university students (see http://www.texasafterviolence.org.past.presentations). We have yet to begin the dialogue process in a serious way, although in the next few weeks I will be meeting with representatives of local organizations with which we hope to co-sponsor community discussions. We are going about fulfilling our mission in a careful, logical, and responsible way. The progress may seem awfully slow at times -- and if you have ever transcribed an oral interview you know what I mean! -- I am very proud of the accomplishments that our dedicated team has achieved in such a short time.

Six people currently govern the board: Virginia Garrard Burnett, James Crosby, Pedro S. Cruz, Christen Smith, and Ellen Sweets. I am very proud to know and work with each one of them. Their biographies are posted online. Our by-laws provide for a board of seven directors, so we would like to find an additional person. Of our current members, four are educators, one is a journalist, and one is a lawyer; five are over fifty; three are Anglo, two are Black, and one is Chicano; four are in Austin, one is in the Río Grande Valley, and one moved to Michigan since joining the board; four are men and three are women; the majority either are or started out as Protestants, one is Catholic; three are native Texans and three are (or were) transplants. Why attend to these bits of demographic data? If we want to listen to as many different Texas experiences as possible, wide representation on our staff and board might serve us well. If you know of anyone (including yourself) who would be interested in serving, please contact me directly: virginia@texasafterviolence.org or 512.916.1600.

Our request for 501(c)(3) status with the IRS is pending; in the meantime we are funded through the Austin Community Foundation. We thank the modest people who are the organization’s initial and still primary funders, even as we seek to expand our donor base.

Thanks to everyone for your interest and support.

Prosecutors' conference

2009-07-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

Last week, Kim Bacon, Gabe Solis, and I attended the annual Capital Punishment Conference sponsored by the Texas District & County Attorneys Association (TDCAA) and held in Kerrville this year on June 23, 24, and 25. Although I've listened to prosecutors' arguments and read many of these arguments in trial transcripts, I have never really thought about the death penalty from a prosecutorial point of view: What is the greatest threat to the death penalty in Texas, and how can prosecutors help Texas keep the death penalty? How do you ask a jury to sentence someone to death? How do you respond to claims of mental retardation or ineffective assistance of counsel? Workshops in Kerrville addressed each of these topics. The conference challenged me profoundly. It will take me some time to process the experience intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. In the meantime, I will be asking some of the people we met to allow me to interview them. Deeply immersing ourselves in some one else's reality is the essence of our work.

It's hard.

The well dressed oral historian....

2009-07-05T00:06:00.000-05:00

wears a Texas After Violence Project t-shirt with our logo on front. On back, the t-shirt reads

we listen.

From left to right, that's Emmanuel (Manny) Tomes in blue, Maurice Chammah in green, Gabe Solis in the navy V-neck, and Kim Bacon in purple. Lydia Crafts took this photograph yesterday in what we variously call the green room or the big room. (Sabina has also called it the treehouse.)

The t-shirts feature the logo designed by J.J. Campbell of Rural Rooster after a mockingbird and olive branch drawing by Walter Long. J.J. printed the design on American Apparel t-shirts. They come in various sizes and colors, but not all colors in all sizes. Write info@texasafterviolence.org or call 512.916.1600 if you'd like one.

our new colleagues

2009-07-04T16:21:00.001-05:00

We're very excited about four new colleagues joining us.

Carlos Loredo, Ph.D., and Benita Rubinett, LCSW, have agreed to serve as consultants to the project for three critical purposes. First, they will help us understand the emotional dynamics that may be at play when we interview people who have suffered great trauma. As interviewers, our first responsibility is to the people who entrust their stories to us; of course we must avoid inflicting more pain.

Second, Dr. Loredo and Ms. Rubinett will help us understand the importance of taking care of ourselves as we absorb some of this pain as interviewers, videographers, and transcribers, and they'll give us some advice about how to do so.

Third, Ms. Rubinett and Dr. Loredo will be available to any Texas After Violence Project volunteer, intern, or staff member who needs or wants to debrief.

Emmanuel Tomes, St. Edward's University Class of 2009, joined the project as a researcher on June l, 2009.

Maurice Chammah, musician, anthropologist, and native Austinite, will work with us this summer, until it is time for him to return to Cornell University for his senior year.

Forrest A. Novy Visits TAVP

2009-07-03T15:36:00.000-05:00

Today we were fortunate to have Forrest A. Novy, a professor in the School of Social Work at UT Austin and the Director of the Inter-American Institute for Youth Justice http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/yji/,visit us to talk about issues in the juvenile justice system in Texas and Latin America and to brainstorm possible ways to use our project as a teaching tool for juvenile offenders.

Novy talked about some environmental factors and conditions that lead kids to commit crimes, such as poverty, learning disabilities, mental health issues and social isolation. He showed us some fairly disturbing pictures from his recent trip to Brazil where he toured youth prisons (he said 80,000 12-18-year-olds are in some form of detention in Brazil). Novy also touched on issues in the juvenile justice system in Texas, where there is a recent push to place non-violent offenders in community based programs that keep kids near their families, rather than in large Texas Youth Commission facilities (he noted that sometimes it's not helpful to put kids in programs near their homes).

During the last part of our visit with Novy, we talked about the possibility of using our oral history interviews to foster dialogue with juveniles about the long-term consequences of their actions. We also think our videos could help initiate conversations about a number of other issues facing kids in prison. In the future, we hope to use focus groups to study the effect our oral history interviews could have on at-risk youth.

"Mother Jones" Interview with Dave Eggers

2009-06-29T11:35:00.000-05:00

Novelist Dave Eggers gave an insightful interview www.motherjones.com/interview/2009/02/mojo-interview-dave-eggers about oral history and his project called Voice of Witness www.voiceofwitness.com, which is a collection of oral histories, to "Mother Jones" (magazine) earlier this month. The Voice of Witness project has collected stories on a number of important human rights issues — Eggers and his team have interviewed people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes, undocumented workers in the United States and people who have been affected by the civil war in Sudan.

I appreciated Eggers' comment that one of worst crimes is when people’s traumatic experiences are silenced. One of my favorite moments of the interview is when Eggers talks about a Sudanese woman named Achol, who was forced into slavery during civil war. After Eggers interviewed Achol about her experiences, he made a special trip to deliver a book to her that contained her story. For me, the description of Achol’s reaction when she received the book indicates how important telling stories is to surviving the past.

Meta-data!

2009-06-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

With my new camera -- a birthday gift from my husband and kids -- I took this photograph of Danielle Dirks and Emmanuel Tomes, working in what we call "the queso room" earlier this week. Manny and Danielle are talking meta-data. I don't think I even knew this term until attending the Baylor University workshop on oral history in the digital age a few months ago, but it was a term I was looking for.

Margo Gutiérrez was the first person to emphasize to me that it was important to think not just about amassing information, but also how people would find and use it. At the time of this conversation with Margo, I was trying to cram so much into my head that I probably only heard only a fraction of what she said. But the gist of it was: people aren't going to listen to hundreds of hours of interviews to find what they need. You have to index the information.

Right!

Well, we've now conducted something like sixty (60!) interviews with all kinds of people. I don't know how many hours that adds up to -- but our shortest interviews have been on the order of forty-five minutes long, and the longest have been up to five hours or so. That's a lot of listening. Great, proof that yes, we've been working hard, but also a daunting number.

We can't predict everything that people will want to look for, but we can start with the basics: dates, places, people's names, kinds of relationships. And we can speculate about what questions people will ask. What did mothers have to say? What is the history of my county? There's the matter of resilience and recreation: how is it that some people put their lives together again after immeasurable loss, what made the difference for them? Did religion help? How so or how not?

Danielle, who is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UT Austin, already a published author of several peer-reviewed scholarly articles about the death penalty, and teacher of a course on capital punishment, knows a lot about how to manipulate data. When she came by the office on Tuesday, she met Manny, a recent graduate of St. Edward's University. Learning that Manny was creating an Excel spread-sheet for meta-data, Danielle immediately sat herself down with him, laptop in lap, and they started talking. I was thrilled. A new phase of our work begins.

So many people have shared their stories with us. It's not easy to revisit terrible times, bare open wounds, and speak about devastating losses. The generosity of our narrators humbles all of us at the project. Danielle's and Manny's efforts will ensure that others will be able to find the information they most need in these interviews.

The last two weeks have been momentous for the project in other ways as well. We have published video segments of two of our interviews on our website. Ireland Beazley is the father of three grown children, including Napoleon Beazley. Roger Wade is Public Information Officer for the Travis County Sheriff and was a friend of Deputy Keith Ruíz. The narratives of Ireland Beazley and Roger Wade, while very different, are both deep and thoughtful accounts of terrible loss. I have watched these videos over and over again and am still learning from them. Perhaps you will be as challenged, provoked, and moved by these stories, too. take care

Human rights panel, March 28, 2009

2009-05-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

From left: Sabina Hinz-Foley, Kim Bacon, Papa Diallo, Tony Cherian, Walter Long, and Eric Tang

Here's Papa Diallo, talking about his reactions to the death penalty in Texas when he first came from Senegal, when he noticed and followed every execution story closely, and his reactions today, when the events in Huntsville fade into the background, part of ordinary life. Papa asked, "How did I become a Texan?"

Big smiles. Gabe and Tony are genuinely excited about oral histories and about making material available to broad audiences....

2009-05-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

From left to right: Papa Diallo, student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs; Sabina Hinz-Foley, project coordinator; Gabriel Daniel Solis, associate director, Texas After Violence Project; Kimberly Bacon, project coordinator; Antony Cherian, consultant and friend, Ph.D. candidate, UT School of Information, co-founder, Seed Documentary Co-op; Professor Eric Tang, friend and panel moderator, visiting professor, John L. Warfield Center for African & African Studies, UT Austin. March 28, 2009

Texas After Violence Project in March 2009

2009-05-29T22:13:00.000-05:00

Texas After Violence Project team members and friends spoke at a human rights conference at the University of Texas at Austin on March 28, 2009. Here are Sabina Hinz-Foley, Gabe Solis, and Kimberly Bacon, in the Chicano Culture Room at the Texas Union.