The riot at Soledad in 1968 — in which Trejo threw a rock at a guard — was not an isolated incident. The Soledad prison of the late 1960s was a specific kind of institutional pressure cooker: overcrowded, racially tense, with political organizing happening alongside gang organizing and drug trafficking. The riot was an expression of that pressure, and Trejo’s participation in it was the participation of someone who was embedded in the institutional culture rather than standing apart from it.
What happened after — the solitary cell, the charges against him, the decision in that cell — was not a simple story of a man finding God and being transformed. It was the story of someone who was already exhausted by his own life, who had survived things he should not have survived (the childhood overdose, years of violence, prison itself), and who made a decision about how to use the remaining time. The decision was not guaranteed to work. He has acknowledged, in his memoir and interviews, that getting out of prison in 1969 and adjusting to civilian life was genuinely difficult. The structured world of the institution had become more familiar than the unstructured outside world. The recovery was not instant and it was not simple.
But it held. More than fifty years later, it is still holding.
## The Runaway Train Connection: How the Career Began
The story of how Danny Trejo became an actor is the story of the recovery in miniature: the helping producing the good thing.
Runaway Train was in production in 1984-1985. It was a serious film — an adaptation of a Kurosawa screenplay that had been in development for years — about two escaped prisoners on a runaway locomotive in the Alaskan wilderness. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts played the prisoners; the film required performers who could convincingly inhabit the physical and psychological world of maximum-security prison.