Please welcome guest host Silvia Foster-Frau, a national reporter covering America's emergence as a majority-multicultural society. Most movements don't last, but sometimes the generational knowledge of such efforts do.That was what I learned when I got to Uvalde, Tex., this week, nearly one month after the mass shooting where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers as police idly waited outside their classroom. Before I caught my flight, my colleague Teo Armus and I were interviewing Uvalde residents who were activists in the Chicano movement. In my research, I stumbled upon Alfredo Santos, a 70-year-old former labor organizer and editor of the bilingual Austin-based paper La Voz. He was an activist in Uvalde as a teenager — a participant in its landmark school walkout who said he learned "how not to be afraid" from that experience. He told me he was headed to a school board meeting on Monday with a group of female activists that had formed, many of them the daughters of activists from the '70s.He connected me to Angie Villescaz, and from her, I learned about this burgeoning new organization, the Fierce Madres, who were spurred to action not just in reaction to the massacre itself, which killed students who attended a majority-Mexican American student school, but to the response by local and state officials. "History repeats itself," Fierce Madres Tina Quintanilla told me — once again, she felt like the community members were not being treated fairly and with transparency by the people in charge in Uvalde. They described to me their dedication to carrying the torch lit by their parents in their fight against poor conditions and treatment. As Estella Martinez, 70, told me: "They moved the needle, but it's up to us to finish it." (Sergio Flores for The Washington Post) After a long procession of funerals in the wake of the deadly school shooting in May, the collective grief in Uvalde, Tex., is turning into collective rage. By Silvia Foster-Frau and Teo Armus ● Read more » | | |
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