AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

This week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave is back. It’s starting its second season, following up on the story of the release of former juvenile lifer David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez from prison. Since season one, Suave has started a relationship and a career, and season two looks at how his freedom is complicated by the long shadow of prison. This is the trailer.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Suave, so, this is the first time that you’ve been back in the studio. How are you feeling?

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Let’s get it done.

JULIETA MARTINELLI: It’s been seven years since David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez was released from prison, after being sentenced to serve life without parole as a teenager.

MARIA HINOJOSA: We’re driving away!

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Yes!

MARIA HINOJOSA: Suave, we’re driving away from prison!

JULIETA MARTINELLI: And it was his unexpected friendship with journalist Maria Hinojosa that brought this story to a national spotlight.

SHAWNETTE WILSON: Luis “Suave” Gonzalez is working hard to give back.

SUPPORTER: Suave!

MARIA HINOJOSA: Do you like it when people call you “Mr. Pulitzer”?

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Listen, I ain’t gonna lie. That [bleep] plays with my ego.

JULIETA MARTINELLI: But not everything is what it seems.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Being free is not what everybody think it is. It’s really not. Everybody hype it up like, “All your pains and misery are gone.” That’s bull [bleep], man. My miseries and pains are just starting.

JULIETA MARTINELLI: Because life on the outside means a whole new set of problems from dealing with lifetime parole.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: I can’t drink. I cannot smoke a little bit of weed. I can’t travel. I’m like, “Damn, damn near everybody here got a gun,” and I’m like, “I gotta get out of here.”

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for season two of Suave. As we reported in 2021, the podcast came after Maria Hinojosa met Suave while she was giving a talk at the Graterford State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. In fact, Suave was sort of the inspiration for her talk there. He was pushing people to get that great Latina journalist into the prison. They stayed in touch after they met, through letters, visits and phone calls that Maria recorded.

Season one included dramatic exchanges like this one, when the Supreme Court ruled it’s unconstitutional to impose mandatory sentences of life without parole on juveniles. The ruling was retroactive and gave thousands of people, including Suave, a chance at freedom. This is a clip of the call. This is Suave’s call to Maria to announce the good news.

RECORDING: Thank you for using Securus. You may start the conversation now.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Hello? Hello?

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Hello, Maria. How are you doing this morning?

MARIA HINOJOSA: Suave, it is Friday, June 9th, at 10:44 in the morning. What’s going on? I thought we were going to talk at 2:00. What happened?

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: I wanted to let you know that the judge told the lawyer this morning we don’t have to wait no longer. June 26, 17 days from today, we bring it in to court, so he could go seek parole in July.

MARIA HINOJOSA: What? So, it’s like — it’s like totally not a normal day for you in prison after 30 years. Today is —

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: No. And last night — you wouldn’t even imagine — I had a dream, like, that I was eating Chinese food.

MARIA HINOJOSA: What? What were you eating?

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Eggrolls and some pork fried rice. And then I woke up, and I went to the head.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez in season one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave. I mean, it’s more than being in a podcast, that incredible moment when he learns, after 31 years, he could be free. As season two begins this week and Suave is now an artist and author of a new book, just out, titled From Prison to the Pulitzer Prizes, he’s joining us in our studio for more, along with Maria Hinojosa, co-executive producer of Suave, founder of Futuro Media, host of Latino USA.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize once again, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. Suave, in season one, I mean, this fact that we’re following you for decades in prison, and then you’re free. But it hasn’t been so easy. Talk about what freedom means to you.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Freedom means to me being off parole. Currently I’m on parole for the rest of my life. That’s not freedom. That’s reporting to somebody. My moves are being monitored by the DOC. That’s not freedom. A lot of people think, “You’re home. You’ve got a good job. You’ve got good friends.” Yes, but I’m not really free.

You know, there was this thing that Maria used to tell me when I was in prison: “You’re in the big present and the little prison.” I was in the little prison when I was inside, because I expected to have all my phone calls monitored. I expected to have every move monitored. But I come home, I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting to report to somebody. “I need to go across city lines. Can I go? I need to go shopping this place. Can I go? I need to travel. Can I go?” And if they feel like they don’t want to give me permission, they can say no. You know, so that’s not freedom.

To me, freedom means totally free, being able to do what I want to do in life. If I want to drink, being able to have a beer if I want to have a beer. Being able to smoke a joint if I want to smoke a joint, even though I don’t. But if I wanted to, I can’t, because I could get violated and get put back in prison. If somebody makes a false phone call and says, “Well, he looked at me wrong, I feel a threat,” I could go back to prison. That’s not freedom. When the United States Supreme Court said that it was unconstitutional to keep a juvenile in prison for life, then it should be unconstitutional to keep that same juvenile in parole for life.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another aspect of being out of prison, to a clip from season two, with Suave exploring how to build friendships after being incarcerated for over three decades.

JULIETA MARTINELLI: After years trying to decipher their relationship — penpals, interviewer/interviewee, creative collaborators — Maria and Suave have been saying the F-word openly now: “friendship.” Although, what does it actually mean? I recently asked both Suave and Maria to give me their own definitions of “friendship.”

MARIA HINOJOSA: Friends are basically someone who you would be prepared to take a bullet for. A friend is somebody who you have deep communication with on multiple layers of your life, and where there is deep love and respect.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: First of all, I can’t describe it, because I don’t know what friendship is. I really don’t. I have a lot of people that I associate with. But when it comes to friends, I don’t even know that is not, because I come from a place where there is no friends.

JULIETA MARTINELLI: In this friendship in particular between Maria and Suave, it’s had some highs, but also it’s had some really rough spots.

MARIA HINOJOSA: I wasn’t thinking about —

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Well, Maria, Maria, hold on, hold on.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Hold on. You’ve got to let me talk, Maria, because I don’t think I need to [inaudible] —

MARIA HINOJOSA: Please. Hold on. If you want to go there, you want to know what? [bleep] you that you didn’t call me!

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: “You’re going to apologize to me. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Nobody gropes me. And remember that.”

MARIA HINOJOSA: And that’s when I said to him — I was like, “No one treats me this way, Suave. No one.”

JULIETA MARTINELLI: Friendship, or intimacy, in general, for that matter, has been one of the biggest challenges for Suave since getting out of prison — how to connect with someone, how to be vulnerable, how to be open — all of these things that he never really had to think about, because in prison, it was so important to protect himself, to close himself off from other people.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Someone that’s been in prison for decades, it’s going to take a long time to gain their trust, because in the back of my mind always going to be, “If I ever get locked up, will you stick by me?”

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Suave. It’s the second season. That voice also, Julieta Martinelli, who is the host of this series. Maria, you did the first series. You both won the Pulitzer Prize. So, why the second series? And at the end of it, Suave’s free — freed.

MARIA HINOJOSA: So, we didn’t know that there was going to be a season two to Suave, and we never — I mean, I didn’t expect to win the Pulitzer Prize and an IDA Award. Suave and I have this strange thing, which is that we record every single phone call that we make. It’s just part of who we are, that is part of our relationship — journalist, source and friends. We’re like —

AMY GOODMAN: Maria FBI Hinojosa.

MARIA HINOJOSA: That’s really funny! But so, we didn’t know there was going to be a season two. Thanks to the Mellon Foundation and the president, Elizabeth Alexander, the great poet, they believed in the project, and they said, “We want a season two.”

And we actually — season two, Amy, is so dramatic. And as soon as I finished binging on season two, I called up Suave, and I said, “Thank you. Thank you for telling your story for everyone to hear.” It is incredibly dramatic. Suave is incredibly vulnerable. And we are asking that question about what is freedom, what is happiness, and what 31 years behind bars, seven of them in solitary confinement — what it looks like when you get on the outside.

AMY GOODMAN: Seven of the 31 in solitary confinement.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You get out. You are free. People are saying, “How does it feel to be free?” You don’t feel free. And you have a mental breakdown.

DAVID LUIS ”SUAVE” GONZALEZ: Yes. Y’all are gonna hear that in season two. Yeah, because I really never had treatment. I never really went to therapy after incarceration to deal with the trauma. So, I come home. You know, I’m living to other people’s expectations, not my expectation. I want to fit in. And this is the problem of people that serve a lot of years in prison. They come home, they want to fit in, they say yes to everything, and not knowing that what we’re doing is retraumatizing ourselves.

A lot of ways, I’m not ready to fit in to normal society. We need treatment. The DOC, the Department of Corrections, needs to at least take ownership. They need to take ownership for a lot of people coming home untreated. And trauma is real. And you’re going to hear that in season two, when my car was stolen, that I was just triggered to a space that nobody want to be in. And I realized then: I need help.

And I went to therapy, because it was affecting my life. It was affecting my family’s life, the people that love me. And then I started getting phone calls from people. It’s like, “I’m going through the same thing.” But they’re ashamed to speak about it, because I don’t want you to think I’m crazy because I’m going through a crisis. You know, I wanted to live up to their expectation. I’m a Pulitzer Prize winner. I’m this. But at the end of the day, I’m human, and I’m a person that served 31 years incarcerated without ever seeing a therapist.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to do Part 2 and post it online at democracynow.org. We’re also going to do an interview in Spanish, where you can go to our Spanish website, link to it at democracynow.org. David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez, subject and co-executive producer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave, his new book, From Prison to the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning producer and journalist Maria Hinojosa.