Archiving for Abolition: An Interview with Gabriel Daniel Solís of After Violence Project

by Sophia Haid

Collage by J. Charlz

a contributor to the Keepsakes Project at Travis County Correctional Complex

(https://www.afterviolencearchive.org/collection/keepsakes)

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Originally from Seguin, Texas, Gabriel Daniel Solís is the Executive Director of After Violence Project, where he has spent the past ten years building the group into a national organization dedicated to the abolition of prisons and state-sponsored violence. Alongside his work at After Violence Project, Gabriel is also an educator and writer and recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction. 

After Violence was founded in Texas, the state that has carried out the greatest number of executions since the 1973 reinstatement of capital punishment. 59% of those who have received the death penalty in Texas are people of color. In 2025 alone, the state carried out five executions, joining Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina as the four states responsible for nearly 75% of U.S. executions that year. Excluding ICE detention, there are currently 248,000 people incarcerated in Texas. 

Earlier this May, we discussed the rich history of After Violence, the current landscape of community archives, and the rising challenges of abolitionist work. 

SH: How did After Violence Project begin?

GDS: I was involved with this organization when it was called the Texas After Violence Project when I was finishing up my undergraduate degree way back in 2008. At that time, it was a very small community oral history project. We were focused specifically on doing oral history interviews with people who were directly impacted by the murder and death penalty. 

TAVP was founded by a lawyer who had been representing people who had death sentences. He was working on the cases right up until the execution. He lost many, many clients, and he was seeing the widespread impacts of not just the execution, but the years and years of legal hearings and investigations, of visiting your loved one in prison—just the toll that that takes on a family and on a community. He wanted to document that because he felt that the public really didn't understand that part of it. They knew someone did something bad…and then they're punished for it. It’s this overly simplistic view of extreme violence and counter-violence. 

A lot of the people who were involved in the early days were scholars and academics and researchers, documentarians and filmmakers…. It was like, a little bit oral history, a little bit investigative journalism, a little bit ethnography, a little bit filmmaking, and then there's this archival component as well, where we wanted these testimonies and records to be accessible to the public forever. We did not just take a media or scholarly approach, but brought these approaches together. 

I wrote an essay about those early years: doing the work, traveling around in the car and visiting people's homes, taking our little camera and bearing witness to these incredible stories of violence and brutality and loss and healing. I mean, the first interview I did changed my life. That should give you a sense of the power of the work, the power of storytelling, and the power of testimony to really transform people. 

I went to graduate school, went to New York and did very similar work, focused on Guantanamo Bay, coordinating an oral history project about everybody from former detainees who had been tortured and abused all the way up through admin officials in the George W. Bush administration—the post-9/11 so-called “Global War on Terror” and Guantanamo as its most infamous site of confinement and torture. 

I came back to TAVP in 2015, and at that time, it had still been focused on Texas and the death penalty. When I came back, we decided to broaden the scope of the mission. We felt like we had to responsibly look at the death penalty within a broader system of state violence. 

We were also having some frustrations with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative at UT Austin. We had a post-custodial arrangement with that initiative: we would go out into  communities and do  documentation work, and then they would archive our materials and make them publicly accessible. The problem with that dynamic is once the grant funding ran out for that initiative at the university, they were no longer staffing it. 

We worked with  survivors of police violence. We started doing a lot of work around mass incarceration, particularly with people coming out of jails and prisons, and training them to do documentation and archival work. We did a collaborative project on in-custody deaths, always using this oral history, investigative, journalistic, archival approach. That never changed. That's always been the core of the mission. 

That was a really interesting shift around 2017/2018: less of, "Let's create a record for future researchers and scholars about this issue”…to, "Let's create a publicly accessible archive of really important testimonies and other records so that activists and advocates and loved ones and educators and journalists can use it right now, today, to abolish the death penalty, [and] to assist broader abolition movements around policing and prisons." 

SH: That’s great. 

GDS: Right around this time, the Mellon Foundation started showing  interest in community archives. I remember meeting with staff from Mellon at the [Architecting Sustainable Futures gathering] which was all about community archives and how to sustain them…. It was convened by this incredible group called Shift Collective. 

That’s when I started talking with Mellon about the need for us to create an independent digital repository. Because I was saying that we can no longer rely on institutional archives in a  post-custodial partnership. A lot of community-based organizations are very underfunded, and maybe don't have staff. They may not  have the technical expertise or the technical infrastructure to have an independent digital repository. That's why they often rely on these post-custodial partnerships. We know the problem with post-custodial partnerships: they're often inequitable; they're often extractive. Often universities use community collections for fundraising. To Mellon's credit, they jumped on to this idea of building more independent, community-controlled archival infrastructure. And so we built our own digital archive around 2020 or 2021, and that’s the After Violence Archive. 

More importantly, though, we started to be a resource for other groups and organizations that wanted to take similar approaches to documentation and archival work [in a way] that was community-based, that was careful, that would take into account risks and threats…. We were really focused on building out the field of community archives, and that's been a focus for us ever since in addition to our core work. 

So where we are today: the last six years have been crazy, as you can imagine, for an archive focused on state violence. We’ve been refining our practices and our approaches to the work and trying to put out resources for the field. Our model is to create [or] co-design a project where we can test a specific approach to something, and then share our findings with the field through zines,  reports,  workshops. People  constantly come  to us requesting guidance, and we're happy to do that, of course.

Funding is really difficult right now, especially for this kind of work, and especially since Trump's come back into power. 

We’ve really been focused on educating funders. There's an assumption about preservation in philanthropy that assumes that universities and institutions will play that role—[even] today, when universities and institutions are being attacked by executive orders on threat of law to get rid of anything DEI, anything that says BIPOC, anything. 

Independent, community-controlled repositories are so important, and funders frankly just don't yet understand that. Mellon gets it because they've been invested in this space for a decade. But other funders…will talk about the importance of long-term, intergenerational transfer of knowledge in communities. And I'm like, well, how do you think you actually do that? [Laughs] What are the actual mechanics behind making that happen? Because you can say it all day. 

So that has been a lot of my focus this year and last year, trying to get in front of funders and say, "Let's talk about how this actually happens and what the needs are in targeted communities to do this documentation and archival work in their own way, on their own terms, in a way that's safe and effective and doesn't put people under risk of harm or worse." 

SH: It’s always interesting to see the realities of where you actually have to focus your attention as an organization—the amount of energy that is expended just to keep the basic things running.

GDS: You know, I was talking to my board recently and just saying, at the very least, we have to make sure that our archive stays alive. We must have operational funding [for] the materials archived over the years, including partner collections…. We'll try to help out other groups who don't have access to storage to make sure they stay accessible in a way that's responsible and safe. 

SH: You’re talking about these communications with funders—communicating what it is that you do, and what it is to have this model that comes out of community archiving. But I’m also curious how it’s been for you in terms of communicating concepts and theories around abolition and transformative justice on a community level. What have been some of the challenges there, and if you’ve noticed a shift, how have you seen things change over these ten years, especially with everything that's been happening? 

GDS: So, there’s what we all believe in as individuals—like, as workers within this organization: our own worldviews, our own understandings of abolition, how we get there, and different strategies and approaches. We all have different and sometimes conflicting strategies. Occasionally they come up within the context of our work.

How do we articulate the role of a community-controlled archive in these broader movements around abolition and transformative justice? 

Another challenge is that a lot of our community members are not abolitionists. And that's okay.  As long as they understand that as an organization, this is our vision for the world that we're trying to create.

We weren't founded as an abolitionist archive. We evolved into an abolition archive in the right way—in a way that was thoughtful and really tried to be consistent with our worldview and our values as an organization. 

In terms of how things have changed, we're worried about now being targeted by the state government of Texas. They put out a press release saying that they were going to cancel nonprofit status of groups that they thought were extreme left. We’re doing things behind the scenes to try to make sure that if that happens, we have a plan so that the work doesn't become interrupted. 

I don't think any of us were surprised he won, but he did.  We've been in threat mitigation mode ever since then, because the risks and threats to the work aren't stopping—they’re growing. Not to mention other risks and threats to the work that were already there way before Trump. 

We are really coalescing around protecting the org, our staff, and more importantly, our community members that we serve in doing this work. That's been a massive change in the past couple years for sure. 

The uncertainty and the chaos—[that’s] intentional by these guys, 'cause all they really know how to do is destroy; they don't know how to create anything…. Just this year, I’ve seen several adjacent organizations shutting their doors because of the uncertainty and the chaos and volatility.

SH: Maybe it’s too soon to say, but are there any other models that you're interested in and looking towards—models from other contexts, perhaps outside of the US, or historical models that have been or can be inspiration for whatever model has to come next? 

GDS: That’s a great question. We have been talking to partners outside the US about what it would look like for a long-term collaboration so that we can make sure this work continues no matter what happens to this particular organization in the US. We've had some interesting and productive conversations around that. 

I mentioned earned revenue strategies before. We know we can't rely on foundations. We've known that for a long time. There are people who have been in resistance movements generations ago, warning us about this. I get that. So how do you run a “small business” when none of us are business-oriented people? [Laughs] I've never worked in a for-profit context except for Dairy Queen.

What we've realized is that we have to earn our own money to sustain the work. One of the federal grants we had was specifically to research and experiment with earned revenue strategies for community archives. We have to figure it out, because this work not only has to continue, but it needs to expand all over the US. We need [sustainable] independent community archival repositories everywhere, and that's what we're working towards. 

SH: I also saw that After Violence Project produced a short film recently. How do you as an organization think about your relationship to media or media production?

GDS: I would love to talk about the film. We did some strategic planning a couple years ago…. Out of that planning, one thing that emerged was a deep interest and consensus around doing more media-related work, particularly short and feature-length documentary films. So we had an opportunity to do that for the first time last year. 

I love the story of how the film came to be, because it originated in a historical collection of records. Essentially, we’re engaging with really difficult ethical questions about what to do with some of the records in this collection, because they include personal information, psychological evaluations, photos. We can lean on researchers and academic approaches of how to grapple with these difficult archival questions. But we also wanted to bring in the voices and the perspectives of descendants of the people who were represented in the records. 

So we started working with Clifford Fuggett, whose father was executed in Texas in the '80s. [He told us] he never found his father's gravesite, and so he asked us if we would film his process of finding it…. We went out and got some funding and worked with a filmmaker, Esteban Padilla. Our colleague, Hannah Whelan, oversaw the entire project [as a producer]. It's a beautiful film—but more important has been the connection with Clifford and his family. 

There was a time in the organization where stewarding the story or the record to the archive marked the end of our work with the story—where it's in the archives, it's transcribed, the video's edited, it looks good; now it's out there for people to use.

That has changed where the archival part of the work is in the middle. We want to work with these materials in interesting ways. So we created an artist and writer residency program so that people who are directly impacted by state violence can come into our organization for a year, work with our archival materials, and create. We don't tell them anything. We're just like, "Do what you want. Here's a stipend. Here's some money for supplies. We'd love you to make something public." 

We also created what's called our Visions After Violence Community Fellowship for  people to do documentation and archival work with us. Those have been really cool programs because we're working with our materials in real-time. 

I hope we have a budget line every year just for media and filmmaking, because that’s where we're going next in terms of how we get the public to engage with these really difficult and complex questions about violence and its aftermath. 

SH: Absolutely. And given the shrinking public media space, the urgency is very real. 

GDS: I don't know what's gonna happen, but I know that my job is to try to keep this work going forward….especially as I've seen really great organizations doing similar work shutting their doors. It's hard. 

SH: Yeah. I mean, I've always been maybe too critical of nonprofit culture in the US, but I understand the conditions that it comes out of. What struck me since I first found out about After Violence was the very clear messaging about abolitionism—it’s something that could be so watered down in another context, especially in Texas.

GDS: The day after the election we put out a statement that  said, ”We're not scared of this guy. We're gonna keep doing this work no matter what, and we'll find a way."  In the introduction to the 2025 impact report, I say something like, organizations close, and grants are canceled, but communities have always done this memory work.

Community memory work within targeted communities has always happened. That's never  changed.  That gives me some inspiration knowing that I will come and go as an executive director of this organization. This organization may close its doors one day, but the work is gonna continue no matter what. 

This photo is of Gabriel’s tío Carlos and tía Mary Sylvia in Seguin, Texas ~early 1970s.

It was shared by their daughter, Claudia.

I have a picture of my aunt and uncle, probably sometime in the '70s, and they're standing outside an organization they founded called The Mexican American Information Center. It was where they could help their community have access to information. And I look at that picture, 'cause I'm like, "You know, they got it." 

I’ve been really interested in thinking about where community-controlled preservation and access to information fits within broader information infrastructures.

SH: Before we close, is there anything you’d like to offer in terms of what helps you keep doing the work despite everything?

GDS: I do believe in the power of cultural memory, and also recognize how much communities that have been targeted for destruction and erasure—how much  our cultural memory has been lost. I think about it all the time. 

And I'm angry at what's happening, the cruelty behind it. That’s what gets me out of bed in the mornings, and that's what gets me writing another grant proposal every day, because I'm angry at these guys about the power they have, and how they use the power to hurt people and communities. That is why I'm in this job ten years in…. I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure that they don't win.

That is the honest answer. But I love this organization. I love this work. I will always do this work no matter what.