“It needs to stop”: Mass shooting sparks a wave of political activism in Uvalde

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

UVALDE — On a hot Saturday morning in June, Javier Cazares drove to Austin with his wife and 17-year-old daughter to join hundreds of demonstrators at the state Capitol in demanding that lawmakers adopt stricter gun laws that could help prevent another mass shooting.

Cazares, 43, said he wanted to blend in with the rest of the demonstrators. Political activism wasn’t in his nature. He didn’t even vote in the 2020 presidential election.

“I was that person that would say, ‘Nothing is going to change, my voice and my vote doesn’t count,'” he said.

Then one of the demonstration organizers recognized him as the father of 9-year-old Jacklyn Cazares, one of the students killed in the Robb Elementary shooting less than three weeks earlier by an 18-year-old gunman. The organizer encouraged the family to speak to the demonstrators.

His daughter, Jazmin, quickly agreed. Then a nervous Cazares, wearing a military dog tag from his neck bearing his slain daughter’s fingerprint, mustered up the courage to address the crowd.

“I promised my daughter at the hospital that we were going to fight, and we’ll keep on fighting until something is done,” he told the crowd.

That day marked Cazares’ political awakening. First, he and his wife helped register people to vote in Uvalde. But that wasn’t enough. Now he’s decided to run as a write-in candidate for Uvalde County Precinct 2 commissioner, challenging Uvalde Police Department Lt. Mariano Pargas Jr., who is running for reelection and was the acting police chief the day of the May 24 shooting.

The deadliest school shooting in Texas history has politically activated a lot of Uvalde residents.

In the months since the shooting, families of the 19 students and two teachers killed have packed City Council and school board meetings to demand increased school security and the firing of the police officers who waited more than an hour at the school before a Border Patrol tactical team arrived and confronted the gunman in a classroom, ending the massacre.

They have also traveled to Austin and Washington, D.C., to testify before lawmakers and urge them to adopt stricter gun laws — such as raising the minimum age to legally purchase AR-15-style rifles from 18 to 21.

A day after the shooting, some Uvalde mothers formed a group called Fierce Madres to pressure the school board to fire Pete Arredondo — the school district police chief who was among the first officers to arrive at the scene — and advocate for political candidates who support stricter gun laws. The school board fired Arredondo on Aug. 24.

“These families that had to bury their children have turned into activists. They turned their pain and grief into something productive,” said Angela “Angie” Villescaz, the founder of Fierce Madres who attended Robb Elementary as a child.

One of the group’s members, Eloisa R. Medina, will serve the rest of Arredondo’s four-year term on the Uvalde City Council. Arredondo, who was elected in a May 7 election, surrendered his seat after not attending three consecutive council meetings following the shooting. Medina, who had never held political office before, won the seat by default after the other candidate dropped out of the race and the city canceled a special election.

“I think as long as things are calm in communities like Uvalde, residents are trusting that their elected officials are taking care of their children or are actually making the best decisions they can for the school district,” Villescaz said, “but when you see this epic failure, you have no choice but to face reality and be like, ‘Wow, these are not really good leaders.'”

Elected officials resist pressure to change gun laws

The surge in political activism in Uvalde has mirrored what happened in other cities that experienced mass shootings — such as Parkland, Florida, where a 19-year-old gunman entered his former high school and killed 17 people in 2018. Some Parkland students, such as X Gonz?lez and David Hogg, led nationwide campaigns against gun violence and in support of stricter gun laws.

The student-led movement resulted in Florida passing a law raising the minimum age to purchase a rifle in the state to 21.

Becoming politically involved can be part of the grieving process for survivors, said Ronna Milo Haglili, a psychologist in San Francisco who has studied the connection between traumatic experiences and activism. It can also serve as an attempt to help “break the chain” of future trauma, she said.

“People wanted to prevent the suffering that happened to them from others,” she said. “I find it to be an indication of the greatness of the human spirit because it’s not a path that every person who has endured suffering would choose.”

Cazares said that’s a big motivation for his newfound political activism. It’s too late to bring back his daughter, he said, but he hopes that with his advocacy, he can help save people from another mass shooting.

“It’s not something I wanted to do, it’s something I was forced to do,” he said. “There have been too many deaths. It needs to stop.”

Uvalde residents have seen their activism make an impact locally. But their bigger goal — convincing state leaders and Republican members of Congress to tighten gun laws — is a much more difficult struggle.

Arredondo was fired after relentless community pressure. And when a group called Medina Area Friends of NRA in nearby Hondo planned to hold a raffle with an AR-15 rifle as the prize at a city-owned venue, families of Uvalde victims — including Cazares’ daughter Jazmin — demonstrated during a Hondo City Council meeting before the Aug. 6 fundraiser. After council members heard heated comments from the family members, they voted to revoke the rental agreement with Medina Area Friends, canceling the event.

Alfred Garza III, whose 10-year-old daughter, Amerie Jo Garza, was killed in the Robb Elementary shooting, said he hopes the energy can be sustained. He said he wants Uvalde residents to continue putting pressure on elected officials to adopt stricter gun laws.

“They know these things need to get done and they just haven’t done anything about it, and it pisses me off because you ask this question about gun reform and they just talk about something else,” he said. “My daughter’s life is more important than their position in office.”

Similar calls have come after previous Texas mass shootings — Sutherland Springs in 2017; Santa Fe High School in 2018; El Paso, Midland and Odessa in 2019 — and Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s Republican leadership have instead pushed to loosen restrictions on firearms, including a 2021 law allowing Texans to carry firearms without a license or training.

Some of the families in Uvalde have asked Abbott to call the Legislature into special session and approve a law to raise the minimum age to buy an assault-style rifle in Texas from 18 to 21.

Uvalde elected officials — both Democrats and Republicans — have sided with the families. Recently the county commissioners adopted a resolution asking Abbott and the Legislature to support raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 to 21. At a City Council meeting this summer, Uvalde’s Republican mayor, Don McLaughlin, told County Commissioner Ronald Garza, who sponsored the resolution, that he agreed with the proposal.

Abbott recently said that would be unconstitutional, citing a recent federal court ruling.

On Wednesday, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, the mother of 10-year-old Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio, one of the students who died in the shooting, tweeted a photo of herself and her husband, Felix Rubio, during a visit to Washington, D.C., where they met with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Mata-Rubio told The Texas Tribune that her husband presented Cruz with a photo of his daughter “in her child-size casket” and asked him to support a federal ban on semi-automatic weapons. Cruz instead suggested increasing law enforcement presence on school campuses, Mata-Rubio said.

“To the moon and back”

On a recent evening, Cazares; his wife, Gloria; and Jazmin parked in front of a mural near the town’s plaza depicting Jacklyn wearing a white dress and gold necklace with an angel pendant. She’s surrounded by flowers and hummingbirds, with a thought bubble that reads, “I love you to the moon and back.”

It’s a phrase the entire family — Jacklyn,her parents, her sister and her older brother, 24-year-old Johnathan — said to each other.

Cazares said he now realizes that elected leaders’ policies have a direct impact on his life.

During demonstrations, he shares his story, hoping to convince people to register to vote. He tells people that they have the power to change things — and perhaps avoid losing a relative in a shooting.

“I’m in it for the long haul,” he said. “This hurt me too deeply to just let it go.”

Cazares kicked off his campaign for county commissioner last Saturday at an event with supporters at a park. Two other write-in candidates are in the race: Diana Olvedo-Karau, a retired Uvalde resident who had nieces and nephews at Robb Elementary the day of the shooting and frequently appears at City Council meetings to question what members are going to do to prevent another mass shooting, and Julio Valdez, a local business owner.

Cazares said he decided to run for office to create change in Uvalde. He wants to improve social services that would increase the quality of life for residents, such as better roads and cleaner parks, he said.

But mostly, he wants to find ways to stop another mass shooting from happening. Cazares said he’s a gun owner and doesn’t support seizing people’s guns but thinks it should be harder for people with bad intentions to obtain them. He supports raising the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles and adopting universal background checks for people wanting to buy firearms.

He said he knows his campaign is a long shot.

“I might be the underdog here and it’s OK. But never underestimate the power of this underdog, that is a grieving father,” Cazares said in a Facebook post announcing his candidacy. “I will fight the hardest fights and I have the purest of hearts. I’m going to fight for change, I’m fighting for better protection of your children in school, I’m fighting for the better of Uvalde.”

Disclosure: Facebook has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune Festival is almost here! From Thursday through Saturday, Sept. 22-24, in downtown Austin, TribFest attendees will enjoy three days full of mind-expanding events, conversations and panels featuring more than 350 big names including Chris Bosh, Pete Buttigieg, Liz Cheney, Annette Gordon-Reed and many others. Join us for Texas’ biggest politics and policy event when you buy your tickets today.