Tess Mata was a dedicated softball pitcher and José Altuve fan. She grew up watching her older sister play the game and played in the Uvalde Little League before she was killed with 20 others in a school shooting. Via ESPN
A jersey signed by Houston Astros players hangs in the Mata family's living room. Tess Mata, 10, was a shining light in Uvalde, Texas, with an infectious love of dancing, softball, and most of all, family. the brown awning and threw a yellow softball at the white box that her father had spray-painted on a sugar maple tree. Tess hated practicing out here in the backyard.
When that happened, even the neighbors in the Mata's quiet neighborhood in Uvalde heard the soft thumping of a softball hitting a tree. Thump. Thump. Thump. Over and over again. Each time, the ball broke off small pieces of bark. She threw for hours, and after she was done, Jerry rubbed Biofreeze on her shoulder to comfort her.
It was a place with no clear owner outside those with a stomach for violence strong enough to hold a claim. A place that seemingly alternated between floods and droughts. At times, with cholera in the water, even trying to quench your thirst in that unrelenting heat could be deadly. That general lawlessness there, mixed with the large and small animals -- bears, mountain lions and wolves, and scorpions, tarantulas, snakes and mosquitoes -- made the area almost uninhabitable.
"God created men equal. Colonel Colt made them equal." That became a common saying as the Colt revolver's impact spread across the country. Manifest Destiny was the ideology guiding the country's western expansion -- from Texas, west to New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Nevada, Colorado, Utah and all of California, then north to Oregon and Washington -- and the Colt was the gun used to enforce it.
They stayed, planning for their two daughters to have the same friends from kindergarten to high school, and probably long after that. They'd have the same neighbors, and Veronica, a kindergarten teacher at Dalton Elementary School, would see her young students grow into adults. With time, she'd even teach the kids of her students, too. Faith and Tess would play sports, often with the same teammates, and their lives would, in many ways, revolve around that.
"He proved that anybody short can play," Jerry says of the 5-foot-6 Altuve. He thinks Tess related to him because of his height. "You weren't supposed to speak Spanish," Roberto says. When teachers heard anyone doing that, they sent the students to the principal's office."He had a wooden paddle with a bunch of holes," Roberto remembers. Because of those holes drilled into the paddle, he also remembers the soft whistling sound that came the split second before a violent slap against his body.
Roberto remembers how, as they marched peacefully, singing"De Colores" -- the Mexican folk song that became the anthem of the United Farm Workers -- Texas Rangers, from atop surrounding buildings, aimed their guns at them. How helicopters hovered above. How even after students returned to class after a six-week boycott, some held back a grade as a form of punishment, others reclassified and drafted into the military, the fight was far from over.
With Robb Elementary School, even if it isn't the way it once was, it's still the school on the Mexican side of Uvalde, where almost 90% of the students are Latinx, most of Mexican ethnicity, and a quarter are in a bilingual program. Still the school where just over 81% are classified as economically disadvantaged. Still the school four blocks from, where, during the walkout, the community gathered to teach the students, trying to make sure they didn't fall behind.
"She would make us laugh every day," Veronica says, sitting next to Jerry at the kitchen table. She says even when Tess did something wrong, it was simply impossible to stay upset with her. Like the time they told her not to wear a quinceañera dress for picture day at Robb Elementary because it was simply too much for the occasion."OK," Tess said.
The Colt Paterson -- the gun patented in 1836 -- was the weapon of Texas. When Texans decided they wanted parts, if not all, of neighboring New Mexico in 1841, they carried Colts with them. From the Colt Paterson, evolved the Colt Walker. The revolver was named after Samuel H. Walker, who wrote letters to Colt, praising the value of his weapon out in the Texas frontier.
"There are very dark parts of Texas history," says Martinez, who receives hate mail for her work."But I choose to be inspired by the people who've continued, for generation after generation, to call for justice."-- Mexican songs recounting that history of oppression and tragedy and the folk heroes who waged war when their land got taken from them -- about what the Texas Rangers did. They're a sort of oral tradition handed down from one generation to the next.
This made Samuel Colt extravagantly wealthy. He'd been buried in debt until Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 and Texas revolted because of it. Until then, he'd been trying to convince the world of the usefulness of his revolutionary weapon.
Moving away for college was hard; you come from a small town, from a small, tight-knit family, and being apart takes some getting used to. To help ease that distance, Jerry and Veronica would send Faith photos of Tess. Photos of her playing softball, of her dancing, of her with Oliver. Hotels are sold out for weeks. And because the infrastructure wasn't designed for this, the streets are congested. There are SUVs from police departments across Texas that, here in Uvalde, because of all the questions of why cops waited so long to act at Robb Elementary, and why they'd waited even longer to give answers, adds to the simmering tension you can feel in your chest and throat.
Your town is full of people, trying to help by giving away things. A teenager holds a sign near a coffee shop on Main Street that says,"Free Carne Guisada." At Town Square, across from the county courthouse whose front lawn has a granite monument saying Uvalde's main street was once Jefferson Davis Highway, a boy walks around offering free bibles. A sign in Spanish, taped to a light post, near there, says there's free therapy for the survivors.about the tragedy.
The room has trophies and medals from sports she played. A bag full of softballs is on her dresser, next to her glove. Stuffed animals -- a teal-colored octopus, a purple owl and a pig the size of a pillow -- lie on her bed, atop a comforter full of butterflies in all colors and sizes. Tess' softball bat pack rests on the floor in front of the closet full of the clothes she once wore. The money she earned selling bracelets with beads is still in the jar.
"This is where our heart's at," Jerry says of Tess' room, and their home, and their small South Texas town next to the now waterless Nueces River.She wants to leave and take her parents with her. Veronica and Jerry say they can't. Everything that's left of Tess is here. They wear matching gray T-shirts with the Bandits logo on them. Three weeks and two days after that Tuesday, they line up next to the other families along the first-base line. All of them here, at an all-star game ceremony, to honor the lives of the 19 students and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary. That number is higher if you count the husband who died of a heart attack two days after his wife, who was Tess' teacher, was killed.
Softball players give flowers to April Elrod and Jacob Kubish, the mother and stepfather of Makenna Elrod, at a Little League ceremony on June 18. Makenna was one of the 21 people killed at Robb Elementary. Uvalde Little League officials considered canceling the all-star tournament. That was around the time when teams across the country, as far away as Hawaii, filled the league's Facebook page with pictures of kids playing in honor of the Robb Elementary students and teachers.
In the days after, the Matas found a TikTok account Tess kept hidden because she wasn't allowed to have one. The account had over 200 unpublished drafts of Tess smiling and talking, dancing and laughing. Along with the selfies she took on Veronica and Jerry's phones when they weren't looking, Tess left them a sort of digital diary that they can look at whenever they miss her too much.
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