In a close-knit Texas town like Uvalde, the pain will linger
A cross for Eliahna Torres, 10 is engulfed with flowers, toys, balloons, candles and written messages at the Town Square, where a memorial for the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School is located, on Saturday, May 28, 2022, in Uvalde.
Early Texas certainly had its share of ruffians, renegades and outlaws — probably more than its share — but it’s only today’s Texas, our Texas, that experiences mass shootings in a suburban high school, in churches, a Walmart, an Army base, the streets of Midland-Odessa, a Luby’s Cafeteria and a small-town elementary school. Our frontier forebears, whatever their own travails, would have been aghast, unbelieving.
Whenever I make the long drive from Houston westward to the Big Bend, I get off I-10 at San Antonio and pick up Highway 90. The little towns along 90 — Castroville, Hondo, D’Hanis, Sabinal — break up the interstate monotony. Today the Garner home is a museum that honors both Garner and Uvalde’s more recent favorite son, Dolph Briscoe, a Uvalde banker and rancher who served two terms as governor in the 1970s. Memories of the two men are fading and the museum is closed for renovation, but Uvalde County Judge Bill Mitchell, an elected official in Uvalde for 44 years — 32 as county judge — remembers both men. Briscoe was both neighbor and mentor.
Uvalde is more than 60 percent Hispanic, and yet, as Mitchell tells it, folks, whatever their background, get along. It’s a close-knit community. No matter what side of town you live on, no matter your ethnic heritage, you more than likely know one of the families suffering today.
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