May 24, 2022 — Texas history was made. In a small town of Uvalde, 19 children and two adults were killed in a public elementary school two days before summer break. It is the deadliest school shooting in the Texas education system and America’s worst school massacre since 2012. Worse? Border patrol agents and police officers were on the scene with misinformation, allowing the gunman to actively roam inside for over an hour.
“I am quite horrified to have to give a talk about the massacre committed in my own town,” Monica Muñoz Martinez, history associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, said. “All of the years of research and writing about horrific events in Texas has not prepared me for the impact of massacres on communities, on families, that lasts for generations. It is not just an event; the horror of Uvalde is a long road ahead, making processing the terror painful and all the more real.”
Organized by the special committee of race and social justice, the first in-person Panos Endowed Lecture, chaired by Nicholas DeGenova, UH professor, featured keynote speaker Monica Muñoz Martinez, history associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as UH history professor Raul Ramos.
She presented, “Social Justice in Uvalde: Breaking Juan Crow Legacies to Rebuild Anew,” the sixth lecture of the Panos Family Endowed Lecture in Equity and Social Justice series. Exploring racial injustice through the lens of community suffering and regrowth, it targeted cultural biases and slander, political oppression, prejudice and racial maltreatment still thriving today.
“We see Martiñez ask about the lingering aspects of trauma, of violence, and the need to not only identify those lasting impacts but to identify the forces that have hidden them, that obscured them, that have silenced them and to remove those in one way or another,” said Raul Ramos, UH history professor. “She is committed to the idea that this is a way to heal communities.”
Livestreamed, historian of race relations in the U.S. and racial violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, Martinez presented harsh topics of Texas cruelty and discrimination, highlighting the long history of Juan Crow policies and border policing that shaped Uvalde as well as residents who fought for change despite resistance to gain a deeper understanding of systemic racism, racial justice and holistic regrowth.
“We care about our communities, our families and each other, and that compels us to learn and need to understand about the past and the present and the ways that they are inseparably intertwined,” Ramos said. “I am hopeful because believe the work Dr. Muñoz is doing in Refusing to Forget is empowering people to tell their stories, to find ways to share their history and to not be silent amidst this injustice.”
Martinez discusses the violence that Mexicans suffered in rural Texas from 1910-1920 that she discovered while researching for “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas.” Law enforcement denied Mexicans due process, racially profiling them as a foreign threat based on appearance alone. But, despite hangings, shootings, burnings and beatings, survivors were bold, confronting assailants in court to overcome unjust racism. By working with Mexican diplomats to investigate, pressuring police for action, speaking to journalists and petitioning politicians for change despite fierce segregation and intimidation, steps were taken.
Since the 1940s, there have been studies about Mexican American students because of concerns about “push outs” of systems of education that were created to be culturally hostile to Mexican Americans. By intentionally pushing Mexican American students out of school early, an uneducated labor force was maintained, keeping people ill-equipped to advocate for themselves as seen in Uvalde.
Currently organizing “Restore Uvalde: Health, Communication, Outreach,” Martinez envisions a community survey to identify immediate and long-term needs of the town, a bilingual public health campaign and restorative justice practices to rebuild community trust and relationships, strategically meeting the needs of Uvalde following the Robb Elementary massacre.
History of Mexican stories being told, murals freshly painted along city walls are an example of the community uniting for healing. It is about being visible where generations have felt invisible, but “this is a long road. This kind of restorative justice takes decades, not days, and we have to think not only of repairing the harms of May 24, 2020 but of repairing the longstanding neglect and inequality of the community. If we move forward and don’t deal with the racism in this town, we have missed the moment — if not now, when?” Martinez said.
The next series lecture is scheduled for March 9 with Prof. Melissa Murry of NYU Law School focusing on the racial politics of abortion debate and women’s struggles for reproductive rights.