Grieving Texan town of Uvalde, traumatized by worst US child massacre in ten years, tries to regain faith
In the rest of the world they are the headlines. In Uvalde, Texas, the worst infanticide of the last ten years will be recorded with sound in memory of the inhabitants. First there was the screeching of yantas, as the killer slipped out of his grandmother’s van, who couldn’t drive. Then the rumble of the station wagon hitting a concrete dam. Then, and more disturbingly, gunshots echoed through the quiet neighborhood for over half an hour. All hidden in their homes, disturbed by the police sirens and the fear of finding the killer on their porch. And finally the screams and heartrending cries of the mothers.
The news has given them names. “Often we didn’t know the children, we later found out who the parents are, and we do know about them, we adults all know each other, even if it’s hearsay,” explains Laura Zavala, sitting in her mother’s chair. . porch. He didn’t have to go far.
The neighbor has lost his oldest daughter, ten-year-old Amerie Joe Garza. The car is in front of the door, but the house is dead quiet. No one has dared to interrupt her pain. Some youths who have come from San Antonio have left flowers at the door of the unknown couple they want to comfort. The neighbors mumble from a distance and look at the house with bloodshot eyes.
“Oh Mom, don’t listen to the news, it’s getting worse,” Ana tells her mother, another neighbor. “It’s that if you’re a mother too, it breaks your heart just thinking about it,” she replies between sobs.
Uvalde is a traumatized city that will never be the same. Salvador Ramos, the murderer, took with him the innocence of a rural life. The simple and friendly people live with their doors open, smile at strangers and continue to answer resigned questions from the press, which has fallen on them like a plague. For what it’s any consolation, all those cameras and microphones that come from halfway around the world will disappear just as quickly as they arrived and will be forgotten. The residents will be left alone with their traumas and fear in their bodies.
“What would you say to the Texans?” a local journalist asks Beto Gallegos, an 82-year-old man who witnessed the start of the massacre when he lived right across from Ramos’ grandmother. “Let them put away their weapons,” he replies without hesitation. “We don’t need them. This has been going on for a long time, we don’t need weapons anymore. What is needed is Jesus Christ.”
That’s why evangelical preachers came from all over the state to comfort them and assure them that “God loves them” and will welcome all those “little souls” who have left. With the religious ceremony taking place Wednesday night at the town’s rodeo, they came to tell them that “God is the refuge and the strength” to move forward. “If you feel like you can’t take it anymore, His grace will sustain you,” they promised, Bible in hand.
There were many Christians and Catholics in the stands, but also a few Siks and even Muslims. This Thursday it didn’t matter where the faith came from because the most important thing is to get the faith back in that community that they always thought was safe.
“It’s like the rug has been pulled from under our feet, everything we trusted now scares us,” confesses Mika Menchuaca, a mother and administrator at a hospital in San Antonio. “We have a lot of psychological help here now, but soon they will leave and we will be left alone.” That’s what those who left the room were looking for with eyes as red as the maroon schoolshirt they were wearing. “Leave us alone, we have to cry without being caught by the cameras and spend our grief alone,” asked Ignacio Castillo, a 17-year-old who knew Ramos and refuses to believe he was the demon that everyone paints.
His girlfriend Alison García used to play with him in her house as a child and remembers him as “a normal kid”, who spoke and laughed like everyone else. Only “in the past two or three years did he change and become more withdrawn,” he says in response to being bullied. She was a victim of bullying. “There should be more people to talk to, not just school counselors. He was alone and had no friends.”
There’s also not much to escape to in this dry, dusty town of 16,000 on the coyote trail. Most are engaged in agriculture (cotton, onion, watermelon, cucumber, cabbage). The most common name of the women is Maria and almost all of them offer their services to clean houses and care for the elderly. Only a few fast food restaurants and chain hotels dotted along the main street, such as the ‘Wendy’ where Ramos worked for a while. There’s nowhere to go, Uvalde is the largest city for miles around, an hour from the border and an hour and a half from San Antonio. “Obviously, if you want to earn more, you have to go elsewhere,” admits María.
His great-grandson was in another class at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday that bloodstained Ramos, where his four children also attended. Now she wakes up at night crying and says she doesn’t want to go to school anymore. And not all the locks and security doors that the authorities plan to put in place will be able to banish the fear that has invaded his soul, for no one can turn back the jukebox of memory to the screeching of the brakes and the sobbing of the mothers.
Perhaps, yes, the evangelicals who have come to fish for souls in this troubled river will manage to restore a little more faith in God and in their own neighbors. After holding hands and praying together at the cattle market, Mika feels safer. “I’ve realized there are more good people than bad people,” he reasons. And only then can he trust his neighbors again, even though his son Joziah’s graduation, scheduled for next Friday, has been canceled.
Ramos’ failure and frustration turned into a stroke of hatred against all who lived in peace around him, oblivious to his existential crisis. “What had these kids done to him?” sobs Mika. “What was our fault? You never know what happens in people’s lives, it’s not our fault,” he laments.
By the time Gilberto Gallegos (Beto) arrived in Uvalde 45 years ago, Celia Martínez was already living there with her family. Salvador Ramos’ grandmother taught as a substitute at Robb Elementary School, where her grandson was shot Tuesday and committed the second-largest infanticide in US history. The 82-year-old man was a direct witness to that bloody stampede because me on the porch at that moment, -“where you are”, he said pointing to this reporter-. So close to her neighbor’s house across the street that she heard the gunshot that slammed Santos into her face.
Then he saw a bag of ammunition fly out the door that would stay where the chickens are now pecking, and behind it the 18-year-old boy like a storm. He got into the station wagon – “which his grandmother would never have lent him” – and that he “didn’t know how to drive”, but managed to move the handle and began a shrieking motion toward school. “Look what my grandson did to me!” said the woman with a bloody face. They were just cleaning up the blood when they heard the shots from the school. His wife called the police and they ran to hide or else he would return.
Uvalde, whose population was largely Anglo when he arrived, had his most American experience with one of those raging mass shootings that constantly rock the country. Everything is Americanized, from the first name to the last name. “Uvalde” is how the gringos pronounce “Ugalde”, a name given to it in 1856 by Governor Juan de Ugalde, who was from Cádiz. Betto also had his last name changed to “Gallegas” on his documents. “And it took me a lot of time and money to get mine back,” he laments. But no change, not even that of the migrants who now come to deal drugs instead of dreams, has been as painful to him as seeing his neighbor with her face shattered by a gunshot. “She’s fine, her husband told me, but she’s going to need a lot of surgeries.”
Source: La Verdad
I am an experienced and passionate journalist with a strong track record in news website reporting. I specialize in technology coverage, breaking stories on the latest developments and trends from around the world. Working for Today Times Live has given me the opportunity to write thought-provoking pieces that have caught the attention of many readers.
