UVALDE, Tex. — Those who spend their lives in this remote town in the rolling scrublands of South Texas say there is something here they could never find elsewhere.
But since Tuesday, when one of Uvalde’s own killed 21 people — including 19 children — at Robb Elementary School, its residents have been forced to consider that they may not have known each other as well as they thought. The town they once called a haven from the pathologies of American life has found itself, and a nation seemingly inured to gun violence, on the brink of despair.
The most powerful sign yet of that wrenching transformation was the arrival on Sunday of President Biden, who came to Uvalde to comfort the families of the dead and wounded. But his presence also confirmed that the town was something its residents never expected it to be: The site of the worst school shooting since the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn. Uvalde is a place no longer known for its village closeness but for nearly two dozen white crosses erected to honor the dead.
Biden’s appearance capped nearly a week of jolting intrusions into the rhythms of daily life here, as residents have confronted not only the slaughter of children and their teachers but also subsequent questions about whether some of those lives could have been saved by more prompt attempts to bring down the 18-year-old gunman. Uvalde’s residents, most of them Mexican American, have watched television news broadcasters describe their travails in French and Japanese and politicians resurrect familiar arguments about gun control. And they have watched their own understanding of their community begin to dissolve.
“It’s a wonderful place. We care for each other,” Joe Ruiz, pastor of Templo Cristiano church, said during an interview in his office at the Pentecostal church this week. But no sooner had Ruiz begun his stock defense of Uvalde’s communitarian spirit than he faltered, and looked at his desk.
“I thought we cared for each other,” he said, shaking his head. “This shouldn’t happen in Uvalde.”
Long before Tuesday, reality interfered with some visions of Uvalde as a pastoral idyll. The city has struggled with gangs active in the region’s busy methamphetamine trade. The railroad tracks that run through town are watched by Border Patrol agents waiting for those who have crossed into Texas illegally.
Like some others in town, Jessie Morales said that when he heard someone had crashed a truck outside Robb Elementary on Tuesday, he assumed it was a “bailout,” a maneuver in which human smugglers drive a vehicle as far and as fast as they can when pursued by law enforcement, then abruptly stop to flee on foot.
It was only later that Morales — a 32-year-old whose 8-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, attends Robb — would learn the truck was driven by Salvador Ramos, who minutes after crashing it entered the school, where he was eventually killed by a Border Patrol agent.
Morales’s daughter wasn’t injured. He can’t say the same about his sense of the hometown to which he returned after a stint in the larger border city of Del Rio, thinking it would be a good place to raise his children.
“This is a quiet little town,” he said on Friday night while paying his respects at a memorial on the town square. “Everybody’s family here. Everybody knows everybody. And for something like this to happen —”
“I don’t know, man.”
Biden’s first stop Sunday was the memorial outside Robb Elementary School, located in a quiet grid of streets overhung with pecan trees and roamed by quarrelsome chickens.
He and his wife, Jill, laid flowers at the base of a memorial already overflowing with them, and gently touched, one by one, giant cut-out portraits of the victims. They also spoke quietly with residents and officials there.
Rosa Chavez has lived half a block away from the school for 35 years, and was cooking calabaza con pollo on Tuesday when gunfire began to resound.
Chavez, who suffers from diabetes and hypertension, sat in a chair on her front porch as her neighbors began to run toward Robb Elementary. Her 4-year-old granddaughter followed her outside, her ears hurting from the noise, her eyes unable to follow the swarm of parents and police.
On Friday morning, Chavez, 65, spoke in Spanish to The Washington Post as she and her granddaughter, Aracely, rolled out flour tortillas in the kitchen.
“Muy pacifico,” she insisted. Very peaceful.
“We all know each other,” she said. “It’s a peaceful, pretty town.”
Aracely, her dark hair held in a topknot by a pink band, poked at a white mound of tortilla dough on the kitchen table. She was bored, and that boredom would not be relieved by the president’s visit. Her grandmother was no longer letting her play outside.
Dora Terrazas, who lives down the road from Chavez, had what she has come to realize was an especially close encounter with Uvalde’s dark side about two months ago. Terrazas, a 70-year-old auto inspector, has spent her entire life in Uvalde and was accustomed to doing favors for people. She naturally agreed when a friend asked her to give a ride to his girlfriend’s son.
Terrazas found him on a dirt road off Sabinal Street. The boy who stepped into the cab of her white pickup truck was slight and painfully quiet. She would have guessed he was perhaps 14, though he was nearly four years older.
“I asked him what his name was,” Terrazas said. “He said his name was Salvador.”
Reflecting on the word’s meaning in Spanish — savior — she told him his mother had given him a good name. Then she asked if he went to church.
His one-syllable response: No.
“I said, ‘You should, the way things are now,’” Terrazas recalled.
He said nothing. The silence lasted for the remainder of their 10-minute car ride. Then they reached their destination: the home of Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whom he would shoot eight weeks later, just before he entered the school with a rifle.
After he leaves the elementary school, Biden is scheduled to attend Mass at Sacred Heart, Uvalde’s only Catholic church, a center of gravity for a way of life that now seems hopelessly disrupted. The priest, Eduardo Morales — better known as Father Eddie — has shared in his parishioners’ shock, weeping with families he has tried to comfort.
“I thought I’d be okay,” he said, “and I wasn’t.”
The men and women who worship at Sacred Heart have much to be angry about. But the priest cautions his parishioners that their anger must not turn to hatred. There will be a day, he believes — after the president has come and gone, and after the children’s funerals he will soon be overseeing, day after day and sometimes twice a day — when Uvalde can again be a place where people find a sense of togetherness that eludes them elsewhere.
“I hope we’ll be able to say it still is like that,” he said, “that this is home.”
Sarah L. Voisin and Tim Craig contributed to this report.
