AFTER VIOLENCE PROJECT

Dear Friends, 

Today I’m excited to announce that the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) is becoming the After Violence Project (AVP). This change is the result of years of collective reflection and visioning, and our shared understanding that, to continue to meet the moment, we must embrace a more expansive, borderless mission.

Our roots will always run deep in Texas. 

TAVP was founded in 2007 as a community oral history project about the Texas death penalty. We’ve learned a lot the past eighteen years working closely with our communities in a violent state with a violent history. 

Texas prepared us for this moment. Texas taught us the power of this work to transform cultures of violence and erasure into cultures of resistance and liberation. In community archives, stories coalesce into mosaics of existence, resistance, and possibility. Community archives resist erasure. They don’t let us look the other way. They shake us awake, move us to action. They show us a way out. 

AVP is our answer to the moment. Trump 2.0 has weaponized the government to ruthlessly and relentlessly target BIPOC communities, immigrants, women, children, queer and trans people, and their allies. Working with targeted communities to safely, ethically, and effectively document, archive, and share their stories is urgent. 

This is what we do everyday. 

The day after the 2024 election, the AVP team shared a clear message: We are not scared. We refuse to look the other way. We are ready.  

Targeted communities have always fought against violence and erasure by preserving and sharing our stories, histories, cultures – our existence. AVP honors these long traditions of memory work at a time when it is all increasingly at risk and under attack. In the last few weeks alone, the Trump administration has replaced staff at the National Archives with right-wing loyalists, dismantled federal programs aimed at racial equity and justice, and attempted to eliminate nearly all federal support for libraries, museums, and archives.

I often think about the French colonial archivist who sailed into the Bay of Algiers in the final days of the Algerian Revolution to destroy police records. When it became clear that the boxes of records would not sink beneath the waves, the archivist “doused them with petrol and set fire to them.” For as long as the state has kept detailed records of its violence, it has also sought to destroy them. 

It’s no different today. 

I am also reminded of an oral history I did a few years ago with an old school Chicano activist who casually mentioned during our interview  that his garage was full of old, deteriorating boxes of writings, posters, and hand-painted protest banners from the Chicano Movement. It’s overwhelming to think about the cultural memories of survival and resistance that vanish everyday in attics, basements, storage units, in every neighborhood in every town and city.

AVP is our answer to these moments. 

Becoming AVP strengthens our capacity to directly support our communities through mutual aid, fighting for decarceration and abolition, and expanding access to mental health treatment. Becoming AVP gives us the latitude to support directly impacted people, families, and communities across the U.S. and globally to safely and effectively document and preserve endangered knowledge, and to reclaim police and prison records as powerful counter-narratives and counter-records. 

Becoming AVP grows our power to support community archives and grassroots organizations everywhere whose vital memory work is increasingly urgent and increasingly under threat. From climate disaster to attacks by rightwing extremists, from the ubiquity of mis/disinformation and the use of AI tools to increase government surveillance and undermine the integrity of archival collections, it is critical for organizations like AVP to keep up with rapidly changing ecosystems of emerging tech and state violence, and to advocate for resources to mitigate short-term and long-term threats to our work and the communities we serve.  

We know it won’t be easy. It never has been. We are not scared. We refuse to look the other way. We are ready. 

Earlier this month we shared our 2024 impact report, check it out. 

We look forward to sharing our 2025-28 strategic plan later this spring. 

This organization means the world to me. It was my first job after college, when I traveled around Texas with a Sony handycam documenting stories of survival and resistance in the aftermath of violence. It’s where I first learned the transformative power of community memory work. It’s where I met my friend and partner, Dr. Kim Ambrosini, with whom I now have two wonderful children, Sophia and Emi. I’m honored to do this work everyday and to be part of this extraordinary team and community.

Thank you, stay in touch, and if you can, please support our work and mission.

Gabriel Solís

Executive Director