A Dome of Insecurity

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Uvalde, Texas, where, of course, the elementary school shooting was, is a town with a population of only about 15,000 people, and because it's just 80 miles from the Mexican border, it is heavily guarded. Now, as we know, despite the presence of hundreds of police at the scene or close to the scene on the day of the shooting and the town's history of police surveillance, 19 lives were lost that day anyway.

While the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting reporting focused on the need for gun control laws and the failure of the police to enter the classroom, there was this context that has gone largely unmentioned such as the history of heavy patrolling and violence at the US-Mexico border, Mexicans and Americans of color, long-facing discrimination and inequalities in the area. Some people even speculate that this could have contributed to the shooter's mental state.

Here to speak with us about these factors as we talk about a different kind of context for the Uvalde tragedy, Michelle Garcia, who's a journalist and recipient of the Soros Equality Fellowship. She's got an article about exactly this for the site Palabra, which publishes work from members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. It's also published by URL Media, which is based here in New York.

We also have University of Texas history professor, Monica Muñoz Martinez. Michelle and Professor Martinez, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us for this.

Michelle Garcia: Good to be here, Brian. Thank you.

Monica Muñoz Martinez: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Michelle, I'll start with you since you wrote the article that brought this to our attention. You described policing at Uvalde as, "The border security apparatus created by elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, had converted South Texas communities into a real and symbolic theater, complete with armed agents and heavy weapons to project an image of toughness and power." By way of background, why does the security apparatus exist in and around Uvalde, and how long has it been there?

Michelle Garcia: Well, Brian, the thing is, even though, as you said in your introduction, Uvalde is 80 miles from the actual border. We've seen, especially after 911, the northward march of the border itself of how it's defined, but more importantly, border security, and the border security apparatus, the state, the local, all of the enforcement agents involved, and all that it entails, multiple agencies.

Recently, in the past year, Governor Greg Abbott has accelerated that with his operation Lone Star, which has made these communities including near Uvalde and Kinney County, the site of where state troopers are arresting immigrants and charging them with criminal trespass, where you have the creation of an entirely new parallel criminal justice system. There's many other features that I get into in the piece.

What was stunning to me as I was watching the coverage shortly after was the carousel of images of law enforcement, and somehow, this was going unmentioned, how did all of these hundreds of agents suddenly appear in this town that's surrounded by ranches? It's because the apparatus has so deeply penetrated the entire region.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote that the violent border security apparatus when ignored by liberals and progressives who instead responded to the massacre by arguing for stricter gun laws. Why is it important? Because some of our listeners, even at this point in our conversation, may be wondering what the connection is. Why do you think it's important for politicians and the public to understand the history of policing and violence in this area of South Texas when understanding the Uvalde elementary school massacre?

Michelle Garcia: You consider that there has been very violent rhetoric used by elected officials on the state level, on the federal level, Fox News, local officials, dehumanizing language and policies, and that all is packaged under the guise of immigration and border security. In that sense, it becomes normalized, "Oh, this is something that is happening to 'them'."

What was startling to me as somebody who's been writing about the border for a long time, I'm working on a book about borders right now, and I've been living on the border in South Texas, is that there is no thought really at all given to the effect of both the communities, of having to be forced witnesses to policies that include abuses, physical abuse, jailing people for these-- like I said, charging them for criminal trespass, villainizing people, demonizing them, and what that creates in the atmosphere for both the local communities but us as a nation.

We are watching both a police and security apparatus and a violent rhetoric tolerated and such deep inhumanity normalized. That goes completely ignored. When the news was occurring, and the immediate news, and even sometime after, it was as if South Texas was a green screen, as if there was nothing there, no context.

I know Monica both as a Uvalde resident and the author of The Injustice-- her book about the injustice, never forgetting the injustice document, this deep penetration and the history, and how it informs the present moment, even with border security, but the insurrection at the Capitol, elections, how campaigns are run, the rhetoric of the campaigns. There has been really no analysis in response to what this does to us as a nation and to the communities themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Let me bring in Professor Martinez on this point, and let me cite the full title of your book, which is The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Could you give us your thoughts on the same question that Michelle was just discussing? What's the relevance no matter what people may think about the immigration laws, or how the border should be enforced, or anything else, the relevance of all of that, as you see it, to understanding the context of the school shooting?

Monica Muñoz Martinez: This is a complicated conversation. I'm from Uvalde, I attended all of my schooling in Uvalde schools, attended Robb Elementary, as did my sister and parents.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I didn't know you went to that school.

Monica Muñoz Martinez: Yes. Right now it's a community school, so every student unless their parents opt out they attend third and fourth grade, and I believe, also a second grade at Robb Elementary. The town being so small, everybody is impacted. Everybody is within just one degree of separation. If you don't know a victim, or a child, or a teacher, you know their parents, or their grandparents, or their aunts, or their uncles, or their cousins. The grief is just devastating. The depths of grief are impossible to calculate.

It's also expanded because there are not a lot of job opportunities in Uvalde, and so many people graduate high school and leave. Their families are still there, so they're still connected. They live in San Antonio and Del Rio, in Austin, in Houston, in New York, but people are connected to this community. That lack of job opportunities has also meant that there a lot of Uvalde residents that find that the only options for finding a job with health insurance, with benefits is through law enforcement.

The Border Patrol comes in regularly, recruits in Uvalde at events, big town celebration events like the Hunters Roundup that kicks off the hunting season. It's a complicated moment in Uvalde because there are law enforcement officers and Border Patrol officers who lost loved ones, and yet there are also families in Uvalde who experienced panic and had to carry the burden of trying to call on the police to help them rescue their children.

I have a cousin that lives close to Robb Elementary. When the sirens were blaring and cars were driving over, he went over to see what was happening and he saw parents being arrested and held back by law enforcement. When this community is watching, for example, these press conferences that deny the parents were arrested or that deny those kinds of actions, it's insulting, and it further erodes the trust that people have in state officials.

Especially when we think about the failure of Uvalde, if we just think about the sheer police presence, there's the school law enforcement, there's the city law enforcement, county law enforcement, the Border Patrol presence, and now because of Operation Lone Star Texas DPS. None of that law enforcement presence could protect these children and these teachers. At the end of the day, it was teachers protecting, trying to shield these children with their bodies and it was the students themselves calling for help, pretending to play dead.

We have friends their children are reliving stories of pulling their friends underneath desks. When we think about this context of the inability, state governments not responding to the needs of these communities, it is absolutely their failure to pass gun reform after El Paso, after the Santa Fe School shooting in 2018. It is also that state funds and federal funds are not reaching the people in Uvalde.

It's going to things like policing and law enforcement. Even the Uvalde mayor gave press conferences saying, 'Look, we have students, we have teenagers in Uvalde that are suicidal and we don't have anywhere to send them." A member of my family is the justice of the peace that had to help identify the remains of these victims. He also has exposed the lack of mental health resources. He says, "Look, the only way that people in Uvalde had access to mental health is if they were arrested."

Growing up in Uvalde, I also had family and friends who needed mental health resources. We had to find them therapists in San Antonio. That's a drive of an hour and a half that takes time off of work and insurance. Now in the wake of this horrific tragedy, people are recognizing that even after the El Paso Massacre when Governor Abbot committed not to gun reform but to more mental health benefits, that did not reach communities like Uvalde.

Brian Lehrer: Are you making a connection? Are you making an argument that if there was less law enforcement presence in Uvalde that is less focused by the government on trying to catch people who are here illegally that there would be more resources for mental health and other social services in the town?

Monica Muñoz Martinez: There has been reporting that in part Governor Abbott pulled money from the health and human services budget to put to funding Operation Lone Star. There are those kinds of concrete examples, but part of the racial appeals that are made in campaigns, for example, that describe an invasion from the border or a threat from the border means that you had all of this law enforcement looking in the wrong direction.

You have gun laws that make it easy for somebody to go and just drive across town in Uvalde and purchase AR-15s and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

The Department of Homeland Security just yesterday released a bulletin raising alarm about domestic violent extremists and conspiracy theorists online that were actually praising the May-- this massacre in Uvalde. The threat that people are being told to be-- I'll also push back respectfully on describing people as undocumented or illegal. Many of the people who are trying to come into the United States are seeking asylum. Even our just baseline conversations about immigration so often criminalize people first.

I have family and friends who live in these border communities who have encountered people in need who have tried to cross the border, people who need food and water. I think to Michelle's point about our immigration debates and the rhetoric, it dehumanizes people so wholly that we don't even understand it as a human rights issue. In Uvalde to have hundreds of law enforcement officers there to "protect" people from an invasion when our own Department of Homeland Security is saying, "The threat here are like the shooter in Buffalo and the shooter that traveled to El Paso that are targeting communities of color and vulnerable communities."

In Robb Elementary, some of the memories that I have are playing with friends outside of the classroom before school started, because the classrooms open to the outside. This is not an enclosed school. I believe it was built in the 1930s. If you think about army barracks, you know where a classroom opens to the outside. I think when people [unintelligible 00:16:18]

Brian Lehrer: To drill down one level deeper on what you just said, for people who say, "Oh, this was not like Buffalo, which was an explicit white supremacist shooting for white supremacist purposes. This was not like El Paso in that respect. This was a Latino kid shooting other Latino kids." You see a different context, right?

Monica Muñoz Martinez: I see certainly that these are connected by people who had easy access to guns. We don't know yet the motive of this shooter, but I will say that when I received the news of this massacre or that the shooting had happened, we didn't even yet know how many victims there were. The first response is to check in with family to try to see if my little cousins were okay, but my next response was did somebody drive? Like the shooter in Buffalo, did somebody just look up the demographics of this community?

Brian Lehrer: Drove hours to hit that demographic.

Monica Muñoz Martinez: The way that we see what DHS has reported is happening online with people calling for encouraging copycat attacks. My last media interview before the massacre happened was in the aftermath of Buffalo. After the El Paso Massacre, I was called to testify about the long history of anti-Mexican sentiment and how the rhetoric leads to violence, not only by the delontes and extremists but also in policy.

To tie it very quickly to just the history of Uvalde and to bring it to the present, my parents walked out of the schools in Uvalde in 1970 when they were sophomores in protest of segregation, in protest of corporal punishment for speaking Spanish. In 2020, I had cousins in high school who had just finished their sophomore year, they participated in a protest for Black Lives Matter. In 1970, my parents were intimidated by the Texas Rangers. The Texas Rangers had helicopters circling.

They stood on roofs with rifles pointed down at children and parents who were asking for their basic civil rights. The Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education had not reached places in Texas like Uvalde. In 2020, when my little cousins were organizing to try to raise the issue of justice of ending police violence and to say clearly Black Lives Matter, the local mayor called on the Border Patrol and local police. He instituted a curfew and he had Border Patrol helicopters hovering over these demonstrators as an active intimidation.

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting that you bring that up. We're almost out of time in this segment, but let me go back to Michelle for a last related thought as the writer of the article that inspired this conversation. Professor Martinez was just talking about her parents and that history of activism and oppression.

We had a question from Twitter that I'll throw to you. We just have a minute left. Can your guests talk about the history of student activism in Uvalde that is written about in this article? That's from somebody who read your article, Michelle. You want to give us a closing thought of any kind?

Michelle Garcia: I think that there was awareness of a sort of response to an absence from elected officials at the time to defend Latinos, defend Mexican Americans in the face of segregation and segregationist policies. We see this continuing to this day in the absence of a discussion and representation from elected officials to understand the toll and the racist policies that both Latinos are subjected to, Mexican Americans are subjected to.

Then are also it's stoking arguably, and as a quote, people in my piece, a self-hatred that theoretically, and arguably experts have said, becomes expressed outward and violence outward. How is this apparatus taking a toll on people's psyche, especially if they're already compromised, and then contributing to violent behavior, especially when you are surrounded by people in authority who are receiving so much attention, adulation, and funds for repeating violence and racist rhetoric that includes things like dehumanizing language and toxin invasion?

That is a continuum. We should not assume that the workings of racism do not trickle-- the tentacles do not affect Latinos in a way that that potential can then become or that sense of internalized violence, then you lash out. This is a much more complicated issue than a binary, but it comes down to what the narrative of violence is and how it's normalized in our coverage, in our conversations, in our country, and our culture.

Brian Lehrer: Michelle Garcia, journalist and essayist who wrote about the connection between the mass of law enforcement presence all the time in Uvalde, Texas, and what happened there Robb Elementary School. That was published on Palabra, which publishes work from members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Monica Muñoz Martinez, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of a related book called The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Thank you both very much for joining us.

Michelle Garcia: Thank you.

Monica Muñoz Martinez: Thank you.

 

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