Texas After Violence Project Interview with Mr. Jorge Antonio Renaud - part one of thirteen

COPYRIGHT 2010 JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD AND TEXAS AFTER VIOLENCE PROJECT

Dates of interview: January 8, 2010 and February 12, 2010

Place of interview: Austin, Texas

Description: Texas After Violence Project Office

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder Sennheiser external microphone

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV cassette tapes

Interviewer: Virginia Raymond

Videographer: Celeste Henery on January 8, 2010; Kimberly Bacon on February 12, 2010

Transcription: Bonnie Herrmann, Virginia Raymond, Maurice Chammah

Reviewed & Edited: Maurice Chammah, Virginia Raymond

Date of this version: September 20, 2010

RAYMOND: Ah, that's nice. Really nice. Okay. Thank you, Celeste. Okay so now we're officially starting and it is January 8th, 2010.

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: Ten, yes, not nine.

RAYMOND: We're here at the Texas After Violence Project office to interview Mr. Jorge Antonio Renaud. Celeste Henery is behind the camera, thank you Celeste.

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: Does this - I'm sorry - Does this bother you if I move back and forth?

HENERY: No.

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: Okay.

RAYMOND: The voice, the disembodied voice, is Virginia Raymond and Jorge, we talked before the camera was on, about the consent. I explained the process, that we're gonna, we asked you just for permission to interview you. We won't publicize anything until you have viewed the D.V.D. or have had a chance to review the transcript, have okayed it, and then said that you donate it to us and okayed publicity, okayed when we can make it public and all of that. You understand all of that?

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: Right.

RAYMOND: And you signed the consent form. You understand that the risks are basically that, you know, we would accidentally violate the confidentiality agreement.

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: Right.

RAYMOND: There's no benefits, nobody's exchanging money. Do you have any questions? [Camera feedback noise]

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: No.

RAYMOND: Okay. We have until about noon today but we might ask you to continue cause I may have a lot to-to say.

JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD: I don't know, I don't know, but to be honest, I was, I was and I still am a bit, confused as to having been a part of this project for a little while where I transcribed some of the tapes and I know the history. I was - I was under the impression that the people who were interviewed for this project were the people who were involved, in some way, in some form, with capital punishment, and I am not. And I never have been.

I can see how perhaps I have things to contribute, as a long-term convict, as perhaps someone who's been incarcerated, for, you know, twenty-six years. Maybe that will - I don't know, maybe that will help give some insight to whoever comes after me or whoever else you - or whoever else you get behind the camera, or get involved in this project. But I don't know, so I don't know how much I'd have to say.

You asked me to begin, I guess, at the beginning. With most people that's family, whatever. I grew up in Texas, I was born in New Mexico and we lived there for I wanna say a month. My mother was pregnant, and went over there doing something, and she just happened- I happened to be born over there, and we came back so, I'm the only one in my family who can say that he's not a Texan. So a lot of this you can't blame on me.

But we were migrant workers. My mother was born in Mexico and moved to Texas and married my father, who was French, kind of Cajun descent, I think, and they grew up - we grew up poor, very poor. We were- I grew up, probably, first eight, nine years in Olton, Texas, in West Texas, and then we ended up moving to Beeville, to Dimmitt, to Cactus, just all over Texas, and we followed the crops every year.

And as a result we would end up, you know, as the typical migrant kids do. You know, you'd always show up at a school late so you'd only be shunted off into classes, into the remedial classes, into the vocational classes, to these classes. And as I grew older I kind of snapped that wasn't necessarily that I didn't really belong in a lot of that, because I saw some of the stuff that these guys were doing, I mean "scholastically speaking." And I knew that this was - that I was pretty well beyond a lot of that. And it didn't make a difference at the time.

I grew up - well it was the sixties, the late sixties, and you know you couldn't speak Spanish in schools, I got run off from school a couple times for speaking Spanish and I got paddled a lot. I was the first boy in a Chicano family, the Mexican family. I was the third of nine kids and, uh, a lot of this you can probably see in the roman à clef form in Barbara's novel, Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? I haven't read it but I hear it's a lot in it.

But anyway, and ended up - I wasn't so much a rebel, you know, I was -- I was a good kid. You know, I worked in the fields and took care of my little brothers and sisters, but somehow at about fifteen, in Beeville, I started drifting.

You know, I was - I was in that culture, man. I was doing well in class, I was playing sports, but I started getting off into drugs. And I started doing what the other kids were doing- gasoline, and all this crap. Sniffing gas and I ended up going to the Army, at seventeen.

Part of the story of my life is that wherever I have been, and this may sound very self-aggrandizing, but I excel. But it's like, I don't push myself to go to any place other than where I find myself. And I find myself, "Okay, I'm here. What do I need to do to excel?" But I don't really seek out places.

And some of that, I don't know, I didn't have a mentor, I didn't have- my older sister went off to college. She finished high school and went to college, Pan American. And she left and didn't look back. She wasn’t trying to get anyone else, "Okay, here's what you need to succeed." I admire her immensely for having done what she did, but she never looked back.

And I went in the Army and they wanted me to go to USMAPS after basic training, which was United States Military Academy Preparatory School, but I didn't anyway. And I ended up in Germany and anyway I got out of the Army. I asked for and received what's called an Expeditious Discharge, because they had promised me one thing and I didn't get it, and after, like, two and a half years - I had a three-year enlistment - after two and a half years I saw that I was getting off to the drug scene in Germany. There'd be a lot of vets rotating out of 'Nam, going into Germany.

And they were coming in - there was some heavy heroin habits, some heavy hash habits, and a lot of the young kids, we looked up to them, so we ended up doing a lot of what they did. So I asked for and got an Expedition Discharge, got out, came back to Beeville.

I ended up doing a burglary. This will -- I'll return back to this later- but, you ask yourself after, after about my eighth, tenth, eleventh - let me add them up- after I got into about my twentieth, maybe eighteenth year in prison, my third trip down. You tell yourself either you're going to die in here or you ask yourself, "What the hell is it that keeps bringing you back?"

Well you know what it is, it's the crime, it's being convicted of a crime, it’s committing the crime. But what psychological forces compel you into committing the crime? And not everyone, I think, has the- and even though I don't necessarily believe that you need to have a profundity of thought in order to get to that point, you just have to be willing to ask yourself honestly.

And I understood how much the psychology of my family, and the psychology of the relationship between myself and my mother, had to do with the deficiencies that I saw within myself, that I perceived within myself, that were not actually there. But that I thought I had and how I related them to my relationships with women. And how since I was deficient, I felt that I needed superficial things. So I felt that it was okay to go out and burglarize and rob to get these things to impress women who - they cared for me anyway but I felt that it was not enough. And I was on this conquest thing - you get one woman, you get another woman, you get another woman - because you never felt- or I never felt that these women really cared for me. How could they care for me?

And it stemmed from my relationship with my mom. My mom was old-school Mexican. She loved us to death but she was very quick to pick up a whip. She was very quick to throw things at us. She was very quick -- and it was mostly me, cause I was the oldest boy. So, and, I didn't deserve it - and I knew it. There's nothing a six or seven year-old kid can deserve a mother picking up a whip and hitting him. But, that happens to you and you wonder, "I must be a terrible person" because this woman who I love more than anybody else in the world is doing this to me. And I didn't understand that ‘til later. You know, I'm just going through life.

And I didn't-not only use that as an excuse for what I did but use that as an excuse to finally explain the psychological motivation behind what it was that made me think that I could dehumanize people to the extent that I could pick up a pistol and put it upside their head and take their money to buy shirts, to buy clothes, to buy a new car.

So anyway, I do these burglaries, I do a couple of robberies - and again it's for money to buy stuff and I go to prison for the first time. This was in 1977. I get a five-year sentence. I had a burglary and robbery conviction. And a friend of mine from Beeville, who’s now dead, God bless him -- had done a robbery in Beeville and he came to me and said, "Look, man, I got this robbery, you're going to prison.”

They were kind of sniffing after him, but they didn't really have any evidence on him so I went ahead and confessed to his robbery too, not knowing that that would make me do more time in prison. But anyway. And so I went down for that, had a five-year sentence. I did three years of it.

This was back before Ruíz. Which, you know the whole Ruíz thing. You had a lot of building tenders still in the system. The brutality was -- you know, you don't know any prison, if you don't know any Texas prison history, but I'm sure a lot of people who see this maybe might. But it was - it was ugly. But I was in what was called a gladiator unit. The Ferguson Unit was a gladiator unit back then. And there wasn't that much killing, so much of it was fighting, every day, every day, every day, just fought all the time.

And this was before segregation, so you had the whites and Chicanos on one wing and the Blacks on other wings. And halfway through my sentence they integrated the blocks. And they put the Blacks with the Chicanos and the whites and the results were pretty – integration riots – they were awful. But we came to a rough accommodation, especially the Chicanos and the Blacks. They always-they eye each other warily. They tend to look at disdain-they disdained the whites, but they look at each other warily, the other two minority groups. At least in Texas, because they know each other's capacities, what they can do.

So, anyway I'm- while I'm down, I'm going to college. I'm one of the only Chicanos, I'm one of the only guys on the unit, actually, who was going to college. I went to prison, I was twenty and I was older than the average guy - most guys were seventeen, eighteen. So I was a little bit more, I don't know, aware, a little bit more willing to look at circumstances under what had been tradition in prison. And I have a friend who laughs at me because she says that when I got to prison I was telling her-

The Chicanos had this habit where when you went to work in the fields, no Chicano wore a coat. It was just a Chicano thing. So I’m going, of course the first day that it's really cold we go out in the fields and we come back and we're standing there. And in Texas prisons when you come in from the back gate, you stand there in your squad and you get undressed and your officer shakes you down, and you wait until it's your turn to go into the shower. So we're standing there- about two hundred men -- all of us naked. And the rest of the guys have coats. You know you put the coat on, because you can slip the coat off and go in the water.

All Chicanos standing there shivering without wearing jackets and I said, "What's up with this?"

And they said, "Well, we don't wear coats."

I said, "Why not?"

"The Chicano just doesn't do that."

"Man, fuck you, I'm not doing it. You're crazy, man."

So I wore my jacket the next day. So they wanted to come down on me and say, "Man you can't - "

"Tell me I can't. You wouldn't tell me that I can't wear this coat cause y'all have never done this."

It's just stupid, the kind of traditions that evolve in prison around, you know, Chicanos. And, sure enough, they all started wearing them after that.

It was just - but I could do that because I was a little older, because I had fought enough, and I had made a little reputation, and they could say, "Well, Renaud thinks this is okay." So that was kind of something that followed me throughout the whole prison -- the way that I was willing to step outside the boundaries of what the convict code said you should be. The way Chicanos say you should be.

continue to part two

COPYRIGHT 2010 JORGE ANTONIO RENAUD AND TEXAS AFTER VIOLENCE PROJECT