Former Modesto man weighs injustice in Uvalde, his other hometown

I was born in Uvalde, Texas and we lived there until I was 11, when we moved to the Central Valley.

The horrific murders in Uvalde shock the conscience of virtually everyone. For an Uvalde native steeped in the inequities of this town’s history, it was a gut punch. It also prompted much internal inquiry and remembrance.

Over the past 60 years, how have Mexican Americans in Uvalde experienced justice? If past is prologue, what justice will be for parents and family members of the dead and wounded should cause concern.

Some context:

During the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback,” Mexican nationals, some of whom lived in Uvalde, were deported.

My father was born Enrique Terrazas in Mexico. When World War II broke out, a man named Lorenzo B. Figueroa was drafted, but chose not to go. My dad assumed his name and honorably served, as did many Mexican Americans from Uvalde, in the U.S. Army.

In the mid-1950s, he was charged with being in our country fraudulently. After much family anguish and litigation, my dad, by this time working as a farmworker, was granted a green card and became a naturalized citizen.

Were my dad and family granted justice? Some would say yes — after all, he wasn’t deported. But he had to defend his right to be here even though he had put his life on the line for his country and was a hard-working man who paid taxes. He was contributing.

If this is justice, it was justice deferred and only grudgingly granted, to say nothing of the impact on my mother and brother who were Mexican citizens.

I still have a photo of the VFW Little League team I played on, taken in 1962, which is when I first interacted with white kids in Uvalde. How could that be?

Unequal treatment in Uvalde

The Lasso movie house was for whites, while the Texas was for Mexicans.

El Parque de Abajo [lower park] was for Mexicans, while the whites’ park was up north.

The camposanto [cemetery] was for Mexicans, while the one up north was for whites.

I attended Sacred Heart Elementary and it was all Mexican Americans, while the public schools catered to whites.

The Kinkaid hotel and restaurant was the best in town, but service was refused to my family.

Was this justice for Mexican Americans?

In 1970, Mexican American-Chicano students walked out of Uvalde High School to protest discriminatory treatment of Mexican Americans by an all-white school board. The walkout lasted nearly six weeks and seniors who participated in the walkout did not receive their high school diplomas.

Armed Texas Rangers were called into Uvalde. Texas Department of Public Safety helicopters flew over the city. The Uvalde Draft Board obtained a list of students who walked out and were reclassified as 1A; they in turn were drafted.

Ten servicemen from Uvalde were killed in Vietnam and all were Mexican Americans.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund eventually filed suit against the Uvalde School District and after decades of litigation, the district was ordered to comply with many of the issues raised in the walkout and lawsuit.

Was justice served to the Mexican American community that suffered the consequences of discrimination? Eventually, grudgingly and yet not fully, with inequities still existing.

I returned to Uvalde in 2014 to do research on a book I am writing about what happened to the 13 kids in the picture of my 1962 Little League team in the ensuing half-century. I arranged to talk to one kid’s brother through his Mexican American secretary. Upon departing the man’s office, his secretary told me, “He doesn’t talk to Mexicans.”

I was grateful for the connection, but, even if I was the exception, is justice administered to Mexican Americans if they are not talked to because they are Mexican Americans?

Justice grudgingly parceled out

Most people in Uvalde refer to themselves as Mexican Americans or Mexicans. News media covering the massacre keep referring to them and us as Latinos. In a previous mass shooting in El Paso, the shooter specifically said he was out “to kill Mexicans,” yet the media again referred to them as Latinos.

The media should honor and respect how people identify themselves. That’s called accuracy, which is a value journalists hold dear. When will Mexican Americans in our country obtain just treatment from the media?

This is the context Uvalde provides, and it does not augur well.

The accumulation of injustice toward Mexican Americans in Uvalde leads Mexican Americans to say that enough is enough. Or as we say, “ya basta.”

So, will there be justice for the Uvalde parents and family members of the massacred?

History dictates that, if it comes, it will be unjustly deferred and grudgingly parceled out so it does not resemble full justice.