4 May 18 – 24, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents | UNFAIR PARK | SIGNS OF LIFE A year after a mass killing, Uvalde moves ahead while holding on to the past. BY KELLY DEARMORE T he signs of the massacre are unavoidable as you drive around Uvalde these days. Lit- eral signs, and plenty of them. It takes only a few minutes on Main Street to cross the entire town of just over 15,000 residents, and the signs are ev- erywhere you look. Even miles away from Robb Elementary School, where an 18-year- old gunned down 19 children and two teach- ers on May 24, 2022, “Uvalde Strong” is displayed in one form or another on building walls, shop windows and front yards. Some of those signs are bold, bright and look new. Many of them, however, seem as though they’ve been in place far longer than a year. Tattered, faded and torn, some signs no longer convey the hopeful message they once did. On a wall inside a fast-food joint, the “g” is missing from “Strong.” Sitting be- neath the sign, a family with restless young kids ate their meal, seemingly without any worries beyond finishing lunch. It’s a strik- ing image for an out-of-towner to behold. Plenty of cities have added “Strong” to their names as a rallying cry in the wake of disaster. “Boston Strong” was popular after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, just as “Houston Strong” was a common response to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. #DallasStrong was a popular hashtag after five law enforce- ment officers were shot to death during a protest downtown in 2016. Since Saturday, May 6, when eight people were killed at Al- len Premium Outlets by a man with a semi- automatic rifle, “Allen Strong” has begun to frequently appear online. The bloodshed in Allen occurred right on the heels of another mass shooting in Texas, when five people, including a child, were mur- dered in Cleveland by a man with an assault ri- fle. That shooting happened only weeks after three young students and three adults were murdered in Nashville, Tennessee, inside the Covenant School in late March. According to the Gun Violence archive, more than 200 mass shootings, in which four or more people were injured or killed, have occurred in the United States in 2023. A city that is strong, theoretically, is strong because it is unified. According to some Uvalde locals, that was the case at least for the first couple of months after the murders. People on both sides of the political and social divide in the predominantly conserva- tive region in South Texas were bound by collective shock and grief in the middle of 2022. But as the summer gave way to a new school year, one in which former Robb stu- dents were split up and sent to different lo- cal schools, the disagreements of the past became more pronounced as life, for most of Uvalde’s residents, more or less, went back to normal. A new group of people in town who had once been quiet or even ambivalent toward politics and guns became loudly vocal against what many others in Uvalde contin- ued to hold dear: guns. Even the many signs reminding residents of what a gun horrifi- cally stole from their small population wasn’t enough to change that. Eva Mireles, 44, was one of the two teachers who died last May as she shielded students from the gunman. She’s been lauded as a hero over the past year. Her sis- ter, Maggie Mireles, has spent most of that time in tears and in protest. The issues Mag- gie Mireles speaks out about and thinks about regularly now are different from what they used to be. “I definitely shared my views on politics sometimes, but I didn’t have a strong politi- cal agenda before this,” Mireles says. “Be- fore the shooting, I wasn’t informed. I wasn’t as aware. I wasn’t as educated as I am now, not that I am the most educated person, by any means. But I definitely be- came more involved once it hit close to home.” Mireles, who lives in San Antonio, is one of dozens of family members of the kids and teachers who died at Robb Elementary who have become advocates for stricter gun laws. As happened with similar groups of family members and survivors connected to massa- cres in Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Con- necticut; and Santa Fe, Texas, Mireles and many more have become dedicated warriors against what they feel took apart their lives by taking the lives of their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, brothers, sis- ters, nieces, nephews, wives and mothers that terrible day. A collection of small crosses rises near a fountain in the middle of down- town, but many of the trinkets, stuffed animals and flowers left near them look lifeless, worn and gray. The grandest signs that Uvalde has at least 21 fewer resi- dents now than it did a year ago are painted on large walls downtown, around that foun- tain. The Healing Uvalde mural project is an ambitious, vibrant series of giant, painted murals dedicated to each of the lives lost on that day at Robb Elementary. Abel Ortiz-Acosta is an artist who owns the Art Lab Contemporary Art Space in downtown Uvalde. He remembers coming up with the idea for the project not long after the murders, but he waited until all of the funerals were done before bringing up his idea to any of the victims’ families. Because 19 of the proposed mural sub- jects were minors, he would need to get pa- rental permission, and he wanted to find out as much as he could about each of them in order to give their individual murals a true feel for who the kids and teachers really were. At first, Ortiz-Acosta didn’t expect to have all the parents sign off, so he was sur- prised when all 21 victim families agreed to be a part of the Uvalde Healing project. Originally, the project was going to take up only the wall on the side of Ortiz-Acosta’s gallery, but he decided that wouldn’t be enough to properly honor the victims. He gained permission from other building own- ers downtown so that each of the 21 who died would be given their own larger-than- life tribute. The St. Henry De Osso Family Project, just north of the downtown square, is housed in a long building with high walls. Some of the children who died at Robb re- ceived tutoring in that building. Now, the front and back of it bear many of their vivid memorial murals. Ortiz-Acosta says that specific location is “the heart of the whole project.” Other locations, including a cloth- ing store, a financial outlet and a print shop, also bear murals of the fallen. Painted by a collection of volunteer art- ists from all over the state, with the help of victims’ families in some cases, the murals pop with life. Each displays personal details, revealing the passions and favorites of their subjects. Rojelio Torres’ mural has his name spelled in Pokemon-style lettering with Pi- kachu and other characters crowding Kelly Dearmore >> p6 One of 21 murals dedicated to the victims of the Robb Elementary shooting.
