Video by Sierra LaDuke
The storytelling event Entre Sueños: Voices from the Inside/Out told the stories of six storytellers who experienced Arizona’s criminal justice system Wednesday at the McKinley Club.
American Friends Service Committee Program associate Grace Gámez, who runs the Reframing Justice Project, said Wednesday’s event was designed to encourage an ethic of justice that centers around compassion.
Gámez said all of the stories told in Wednesday night’s performance and in the project serve to “write a different record for ourselves.”
“If we don’t want to deal tangibly with what leads people into the system, and talk about what leads people into the system, which is what you need in order to effectively address the issue, if we don’t want to talk about that, then we’re just going to be recreating all of the harm that already exists,” Gámez said.
Gámez created the idea for Wednesday’s performance, and said it was a way to reach more people and bring them into the Reframing Justice work.
“I’ve been working with people already in doing the digital storytelling stuff and asking them if they’d be willing to do a live storytelling event,” Gámez said.
Gámez asked Fortaleza Re-Entry Collaborative re-entry coordinator Manny Mejias to participate and tell his story.
While telling his story, Mejias said he used to have the ideology that he could not achieve his goals because he could not achieve them by himself and nobody cared. He felt he shouldn’t care because nobody else did and began drinking and doing drugs. Mejias eventually went to jail.
Since getting out of jail, Mejias started educating people on what happens when ex-convicts re-enter society.
“I always had the idea that I wanted to repair the people that the system broke,” Mejias said. “People don’t have a clear understanding of what happens when somebody’s trying to re-enter society.”
Mejias said people trying to re-enter society are looked down on as second-class citizens.
“People try to say that I’m a returning citizen. I don’t have my rights back yet. I’m not a citizen,” Mejias said. “As long as society looks down on me, look at me as a monster, look at me as a criminal, look at me as anything less than, I’m never considered a citizen, even when I do get my rights back.”
Mejias said it was brutal to tell his story, and that every time he tells his story, he has to deal emotionally with it for two to three days.
Gámez found storyteller Jesus Robles after his story was featured on NPR.
When telling his story, Robles said he enjoyed learning. His school recommended that he skip the fifth grade, but his mother denied the school’s recommendation. Robles said he learned that no matter how hard he worked, someone else could decide to pull the carpet from underneath his feet.
Robles said he resented fifth grade, and that his anger consumed him. He started to get in trouble at school, and his first fist fight was on a soccer field.
He eventually turned himself in to police and spent two years in prison for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after what he described as his “impulsive actions” against the man he says his girlfriend cheated on him with.
Robles said living in jail taught him “all we can do is share our experiences and take what we can.”
He said that as his twenties came to a close, he had nothing to show for himself. He is currently a licensed massage therapist, dance instructor, muralist and entertainer.
Robles said it was scary having his story featured on NPR.
“I thought they were going to focus on the negatives, but they really focused on the positives, and turned around story versus, you know, struggle,” Robles said. “It takes it back to my first love which was writing, creative writing.”
Contact the reporter at Holly.Bernstein@asu.edu.
