To Dr. Emilio Zamora's point in his recent reflection posted on Monday to this blog and now appearing as an op-ed in Sunday's Austin American-Statesman that was based on our weekend trip to Uvalde, we must consider the wider social context in order to more fully understand how mostly-Mexican Uvaldeans already suffered from pre-existing social trauma and subordination even before the deadly shootings of May 24, 2022. This is precisely the focus that Neil Meyer, writing for the Washington Post, describes below.
I take this opportunity to deepen the analysis.
"Colonialism"—or to borrow from Quijano (2000), the "coloniality of power," or Valenzuela's (2019) "colonial matrix of power"—capture the sociopolitical dynamics at play characterizing so much of what Texas IS for people of color under white settler colonialism. This is hardly hyperbole, but rather a lived experience under white supremacist patriarchy that helps explain the NRA's stranglehold on the Republican Party.
Upon reading Meyer's piece and critically consuming vast amounts of news media and seeing how ignorantly and dismissively Uvalde is portrayed, it's time to resurrect not only these concepts of coloniality, but also the notion of "middleman minorities" as coined by Blalock (1967) and theorized by University of California Riverside sociologist Dr. Edna Bonacich (1973) in her classic piece titled, "A Theory of Middleman Minorities."
Such minorities are the entrepreneurs and middlemen who play an intermediary role between dominant and subordinate groups in society. Their clients or customers are most often members of marginalized
racial/ethnic groups that are themselves living lives that are separate from the dominant group (or groups) in power that we may also understand as the white power structure that includes Eurocentric school curriculum.
The images we are seeing on the news every day speak to this dynamic of coloniality that very much convey not solely the history, but also the contemporary circumstance, of living under white supremacy in Texas. For example, read this May 27, 2022 El Paso Times piece by Martha Pskowski andNicole Foytitled, "Uvalde school shooting, Mexican-Americans fought for decades to improve school system). But for the coloniality of power, just struggles like this shouldn't take decades.
A larger point is that just because we're seeing brown faces on TV among the Department of Public Safety police and immigration officers in leadership positions or a Latino 18-year old who committed this horrible atrocity against children, doesn't at all mean that white supremacy isn't at play. After all, we are still talking about a white power structure and its ideologies that systematically promote racial ignorance and self hatred that minoritized youth experience in the form of internalized racism or oppression.
For more understanding of internalized oppression, I encourage you to read one of my published pieces along these lines titled, Uncovering Internalized Oppression. You can read it online in an excellent anthology by Mica Pollock (2008) titled, "Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school.
To wit, at the grassroots level here in Austin, locals refer to UT-Austin as "the plantation," an organic term that reflects locals' relationship to the powerful, exclusionary class the UT symbolizes. Not that we're not becoming more diverse, but rather that Austin youth are not getting into UT according to numbers suggesting greater parity and opportunity that living in Austin would seem to warrant. Similarly, Uvalde is also a "plantation," if you will, a hierarchy with deep roots in Juan Crow segregation and racism in West Texas.
While the "man" in "middleman" needs to get updated as a term to current gender-conscious standards, it nevertheless turns out that what we largely see is indeed mostly Latino males holding power in these self-policing spaces. As middlemen minorities, their job is to control their own people, reifying time-honored patriarchal, masculinist identities that get casually reinforced and mystified as "wild West mythology" as noted by Meyer.
THIS is what those opposing the so-called teaching of CRT in schools don't want you to know—even when the evidence before our very eyes is a flashing neon sign.
-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
#WeAreAllWestTexas
References
Blalock, H. M., Jr. (1967). Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations. New York: John Wiley.
Bonacich, E. (1973). A theory of middleman minorities. American sociological review, 583-594.
Pollock, M. (Ed.). (2008). Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school. The New Press.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215-232.
Valenzuela, A. (2019). The struggle to decolonize official knowledge in Texas’ state curriculum: Side-stepping the colonial matrix of power. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(2-3), 197-215.
May 29, 2022 at 1:42 p.m. EDT | Washington Post
President Biden pays his respects at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Sunday. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP)
From: THE WASHINGTON POST
OPINION: I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened.
By Neil Meyer
May 29, 2022 at 1:42 p.m. EDT
Neil Meyer, a retired lawyer, is a fifth-generation Texan. He now lives in Bethesda.
I was born in Uvalde, Tex., lived there recently and love its complex history and people. Like most, I’ve been struggling under the weight of grief to understand the violence that left 19 children, two teachers and a young killer dead last week. But I’m not surprised.
First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.
Second, at news of the shooting, I was struck to hear the words “Robb Elementary” because I knew of its centrality to the struggle in Uvalde over the past half-century to desegregate its schools. Robb sits in the city’s southwest quadrant. So I knew the victims of the shooting would largely be Hispanic. They have been locked into that school for decades.
In Uvalde, simply put, everything north of Highway 90 is primarily White Republican, and everything south is mostly Hispanic Democrat. The city has about 15,000 residents; more than 80 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Most of Uvalde’s political leadership and the heads of the largest employers are White. At the center of town on the courthouse grounds, you’ll find a monument to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president — installed when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Uvalde politics. (Some of us tried to get the monument removed after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s a story for another day.)
When I heard reports about the shooter, a young Latino, I winced at the reflexive disclaimer that he wasn’t an “illegal immigrant.” It wasn’t surprising to learn that he was bullied for a speech impediment, may have come from a broken family struggling with drug use and had experienced problems in school. Drug use plagues the city, and the courts struggle under the weight of young people’s encounters with the legal system. About 1 in 3 Uvalde children live in poverty.
The killer allegedly bought his guns at the Oasis Outback, a popular lunch spot for wealthier Uvaldeans, known for its large buffet, hunting supplies and gun shop. On most days you’ll also see groups of Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement there. It’s a monthly meeting place for groups such as the Uvalde County Republican Women, whose Facebook page includes posts decrying “the border invasion.” The Oasis reflects the establishment’s deep cultural reverence for guns, hunting and the Wild West mythology. I wasn’t surprised that an 18-year-old could walk in and easily buy tactical weapons without anyone being concerned.
I wasn’t surprised to see the Republican panel of politicians at a news conference the day after the shooting, almost all White and in top positions of power in the community and the state, taking the lead. In Uvalde, the custodians of order — the chief of police, the sheriff, the head of the school district police — are Hispanic, but here they were largely silent. Unsurprisingly, they now bear the primary blame for the disastrous response at the school.
Finally, I wasn’t surprised to see victims being flown to San Antonio for treatment. The Uvalde hospital was converted in recent years to a critical access facility, limiting its number of beds. The hospital benefited financially, but many residents seeking health care must now travel to distant locations. The negative impact on a community with high rates of poverty — families who can’t afford this burden — is obvious.
President Biden and the first lady visited Uvalde on Sunday to offer comfort to the families of victims at Robb. But Uvalde and other towns like it need more than comfort — we need to know that American leaders will take the overdue steps necessary to keep these communities safe.
Let’s start with banning assault weapons and limiting young people’s access to firearms. The freedom to own weapons that facilitate mass murder is less important than the safety of our children, they’re not needed for hunting, and they don’t need to be sold to 18-year-olds. Most Americans and many Texans agree, despite the rhetoric of Republican leaders.
Let’s also recognize that Uvalde has a sufficiently large law enforcement presence, between the police department, the sheriff’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Rangers, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. We won’t succeed in creating “hardened targets” by arming teachers and other civilians.
Finally, the social conditions that gave birth to deadly violence and the killer’s mental condition can be addressed through our support of community organizations, health-care systems and schools — by supplying resources and legal avenues to identify and deal with emerging threats such as the one posed by this young man.
The deaths at Robb Elementary were predictable and avoidable. Uvalde, the state of Texas and the United States of America failed the children and teachers who died there. We owe it to their memory and to current and future generations to avoid yet another, similar tragedy.
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