Signs of Life: One Year After the Tragedy, Uvalde Clings to the Past

The signs of the massacre are unavoidable as you drive around Uvalde these days. Literal signs, and plenty of them. It takes only a few minutes on Main Street to cross the entire town of just over 15,000 residents, and the signs are everywhere you look. Even miles away from Robb Elementary School, where an 18-year-old gunned down 19 children and two teachers on May 24, 2022, “Uvalde Strong” is displayed in one form or another on building walls, shop windows and front yards.

Some of those signs are bold, bright and look new. Many of them, however, seem as though they’ve been in place far longer than a year. Tattered, faded and torn, some signs no longer convey the hopeful message they once did. On a wall inside a fast-food joint, the “g” is missing from “Strong.” Sitting beneath the sign, a family with restless young kids ate their meal, seemingly without any worries beyond finishing lunch. It’s a striking image for an out-of-towner to behold.

Plenty of cities have added “Strong” to their names as a rallying cry in the wake of disaster. “Boston Strong” was popular after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, just as “Houston Strong” was a common response to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. #DallasStrong was a popular hashtag after five law enforcement officers were shot to death during a protest downtown in 2016. Since Saturday, May 6, when eight people were killed at Allen Premium Outlets by a man with a semiautomatic rifle, “Allen Strong” has begun to frequently appear online.

The bloodshed in Allen occurred right on the heels of another mass shooting in Texas, when five people, including a child, were murdered in Cleveland by a man with an assault rifle. That shooting happened only weeks after three young students and three adults were murdered in Nashville, Tennessee, inside the Covenant School in late March. According to Gun Violence Archive, more than 200 mass shootings, in which four or more people were injured or killed, have occurred in the United States in 2023.

“I definitely shared my views on politics sometimes, but I didn’t have a strong political agenda before this.” - Maggie Mireles

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A city that is strong, theoretically, is strong because it is unified. According to some Uvalde locals, that was the case at least for the first couple of months after the murders.

People on both sides of the political and social divide in the predominantly conservative region in South Texas were bound by collective shock and grief in the middle of 2022. But as the summer gave way to a new school year, one in which former Robb students were split up and sent to different local schools, the disagreements of the past became more pronounced as life, for most of Uvalde’s residents, more or less, went back to normal.

A new group of people in town who had once been quiet or even ambivalent toward politics and guns became loudly vocal against what many others in Uvalde continued to hold dear: guns. Even the many signs reminding residents of what a gun horrifically stole from their small population wasn’t enough to change that.

Signs to Help Remember

Eva Mireles, 44, was one of the two teachers who died last May as she shielded students from the gunman. She’s been lauded as a hero over the past year. Her sister, Maggie Mireles, has spent most of that time in tears and in protest. The issues Maggie Mireles speaks out about and thinks about regularly now are different from what they used to be.

“I definitely shared my views on politics sometimes, but I didn’t have a strong political agenda before this,” Mireles says. “Before the shooting, I wasn't informed. I wasn’t as aware. I wasn't as educated as I am now, not that I am the most educated person, by any means. But I definitely became more involved once it hit close to home.”

Mireles, who lives in San Antonio, is one of dozens of family members of the kids and teachers who died at Robb Elementary who have become advocates for stricter gun laws. As happened with similar groups of family members and survivors connected to massacres in Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; and Santa Fe, Texas, Mireles and many more have become dedicated warriors against what they feel took apart their lives by taking the lives of their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, wives and mothers that terrible day. 

A collection of small crosses rises near a fountain in the middle of downtown, but many of the trinkets, stuffed animals and flowers left near them look lifeless, worn and gray. The grandest signs that Uvalde has at least 21 fewer residents now than it did a year ago are painted on large walls downtown, around that fountain. The Healing Uvalde mural project is an ambitious, vibrant series of giant, painted murals dedicated to each of the lives lost on that day at Robb Elementary.

Abel Ortiz-Acosta is an artist who owns the Art Lab Contemporary Art Space in downtown Uvalde. He remembers coming up with the idea for the project not long after the murders, but he waited until all of the funerals were done before bringing up his idea to any of the victims' families.

Because 19 of the proposed mural subjects were minors, he would need to get parental permission, and he wanted to find out as much as he could about each of them in order to give their individual murals a true feel for who the kids and teachers really were. At first, Ortiz-Acosta didn't expect to have all the parents sign off, so he was surprised when all 21 victim families agreed to be a part of the Uvalde Healing project.

Originally, the project was going to take up only the wall on the side of Ortiz-Acosta’s gallery, but he decided that wouldn’t be enough to properly honor the victims. He gained permission from other building owners downtown so that each of the 21 who died would be given their own larger-than-life tribute.

The St. Henry De Osso Family Project, just north of the downtown square, is housed in a long building with high walls. Some of the children who died at Robb received tutoring in that building. Now, both sides of it bear many of their vivid memorial murals. Ortiz-Acosta says that specific location is “the heart of the whole project.” Other locations, including a clothing store, a financial outlet and a print shop, also bear murals of the fallen.

Painted by a collection of volunteer artists from all over the state, with the help of victims' families in some cases, the murals pop with life. Each displays personal details, revealing the passions and favorites of their subjects.
Rojelio Torres’ mural has his name spelled in Pokemon-style lettering with Pikachu and other characters crowding around the 10-year-old’s portrait. The painting of Tess Marie Mata, also 10, shows her giving a peace sign and surrounded by images pointing to her love of softball and the Houston Astros.

The butterfly-intensive mural for Eliahna “Ellie” Amyah Garcia, 9, makes it clear she enjoyed Takis, Maruchan Instant Lunch noodles and basketball. On the St. Henry De Osso Project building,  Eva Mireles’ bright, flowery mural shows her beaming, with her arms held out, holding a Crossfit flag in one hand and a flag that reads “Always Strong” in the other. It’s fitting that a mural with the names of all who died in the attack is right next to hers — close to the kids, forever at her side now.

When you walk around downtown, taking in the murals, it’s nearly impossible to not immediately, reflexively smile at the first sight of each one. The faces looking back at you are flashing big smiles of their own, after all. And the colors. There’s hardly any black or gray to be seen. Instead, lively purple, yellow, green, pink and red carries the weight. For Ortiz-Acosta, the bursts of color in the murals are vital to their overall purpose.

“Not only are the colors in the murals based on the kids’ favorite colors, but those colors really bring the downtown area to life,” Ortiz-Acosta says. “The colors were important because they needed to pop, because the whole idea of these murals are for the kids to be remembered forever. The murals won’t let us forget.”

The gallery owner is convinced the murals will remind any in Uvalde who might ever possibly need reminding that these kids and teachers were once their neighbors. He also placed a sign reading “Uvalde es Amor” (“Uvalde is Love”) on his gallery’s front window. But similar to others in the town who didn't want to go on the record with their comments, Ortiz-Acosta has seen that some in Uvalde didn’t let the killings change their ways of thinking when November 2022 rolled around.


“I do think the community was united for a while,” he says. “But things did shift, and I think some of the families of victims and some of the survivors began to think that “Uvalde Strong” from some people were hollow words, because, look at the election. The voting pattern here didn't change at all, so that’s why some people around here consider those words hollow when it comes to who is displaying that sign. Actions speak louder than words.”

In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott easily won reelection over Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke, carrying 60% of the vote in Uvalde County. That was 21 percentage points more than O’Rourke received, after spending much time following the shooting in Uvalde, promising gun law reform if he was elected. It's something Abbott has for years gone out of his way to say that he will not pursue as governor.

The Robb Elementary School campus is now a dismal sight that’s nearly impossible to avoid. For many of the residents living in the neighborhood, the former school acted as the heart of the community for decades. Looking at it now, it resembles a colorless, barren, post-apocalyptic shelter more than it does a place where kids learned, played and laughed up until recently. On the morning of May 24, 2022, parents had attended end-of-year celebrations for the students inside the school, saying goodbye to their kids for the day just a couple of hours before the shooting.

State trooper SUVs are usually stationed at a couple of points around the school’s perimeter now. It’s a whiplash-inducing contrast to the pulse provided by the downtown murals. The building is set to be demolished soon, and plans to build a new school and a memorial park are in the works.

Near the school’s main entrance, a large white sign with thick red letters reading “Robb Elementary, Together We Rise!” is attached to the brown brick building. To see it you have to look over the tall, black tarp-covered chain link fence. That sign is just around the corner from the side door that Salvador Ramos, who was killed by law officers, busted through as he shot his way through the school’s parking lot.

At the corner of Geraldine Street and Old Carrizo Road, the Robb Elementary brick sign now hosts rows of decorated crosses in front of it. Each is painted white with a maroon Texas and black letters spelling the names of each of the victims; many of the crosses have rosaries draped around them. A cross for Eva Mireles sits in the center of the front row. In the front yard across the street, a “Uvalde Strong” sign faces the cross-filled corner.

Maggie Mireles visits her niece and brother-in-law, Ruben Ruiz, almost every weekend she says, and hasn’t liked a lot of what she has seen and heard around town during those visits. Ruiz, a former policeman for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, found himself under scrutiny immediately after the shooting when he was spotted on surveillance video in the school hallway checking his phone before he was escorted out of the building.

As it was revealed later, Eva Mireles texted Ruiz, telling him she “had been shot and was dying.” He tried to go back into the school to rescue his wife, but he was removed from the property and disarmed, according to reports. Maggie Mireles says Ruiz still lives in Uvalde, but his life there is, for obvious reasons, completely different now.

“He lost his high school sweetheart,” Mireles says. “He lost his wife, his one true love. They never did anything without each other. My sister was into Crossfit and running and hiking and she always made him go along. My heart breaks for him because I know he’s not OK. He faced a lot of backlash, and he avoids the news, and I think it’s all taken a big toll on him, but he wouldn’t tell anyone about it.”

Mireles knows there’s still plenty of pain being felt around town by others, too, but she hasn’t seen as much action flowing from the sorrow as she had hoped. She wants universal background checks for people buying guns, and she wants to see a ban on assault weapons. She’s been interviewed by national media outlets and once had a chance to ask Gov. Abbott, face-to-face, to change his stance on gun laws in Texas. But many in Uvalde don’t want the same things she does, even now.

She knows that changes in gun laws won’t bring her sister back and that the pain from Eva’s death will never go away. But the changes she’s fighting for can help make the world safer for everyone who is still here, she says. For now, she doesn’t think the signs all over town represent the truth in Uvalde, even if they might have for a little while.

“At first it was like, yes, ‘Uvalde Strong,’ because people were united,” she says. “Now it's like, no, I don't even use the hashtag for ‘Uvalde Strong’ at all, especially after what happened with the elections. Uvalde was not strong. It's been important for the families of the victims to have really stuck together and to really understand each other.”

A couple of blocks from where the crosses are kept, more signs dot the neighborhood. There are plenty of “Uvalde Strong” yard signs, but those aren't the most eye-catching ones to be seen so close to Robb Elementary.

A pair of yards positioned close to one another have signs that read “BAN ALL ASSAULT RIFLES.” The signs are a stark white with red block lettering at the top and bottom, with the image of a black assault rifle in the middle with a red prohibition sign striking through it. It’s the sort of sign that, in so many other neighborhoods, would simply alert neighbors there’s a liberal in their midst. In Uvalde in 2023, it means more.

And, Mireles says, because Uvalde has plenty of people, who “like to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” a sign begging for any guns to be outlawed is an explicit invitation to pick a side — to either be with someone or stand opposed to them.

“The biggest lesson I have learned from becoming more vocal and more active is to see the amount of people that are just against you,” Mireles says. “Even family and friends and people you thought would always back you up. Once I started showing that I am against assault rifles, for example, and I started fighting for stronger gun laws, I’ve noticed who really has my back and who really doesn’t.”


Ortiz-Acosta is proud of the Uvalde Healing murals and has been happy to give tours to people curious about the project and about life in Uvalde since the worst day in its history. He hopes that in this case, art can bring about change. That is certainly one of the goals of the murals, but more than anything else, the paintings, for what Ortiz-Acosta hopes is eternity, will be poignant signs that Uvalde once had 21 beautiful smiles that must never be forgotten.

“The point of the murals is that we’ll be reminded every day,” he says. “We can't ever forget. We won’t ever forget their names, their faces or what they liked to do. These murals are celebrations. These murals will hopefully embed everyone we lost in our minds.”