Cards, gifts, a ‘tunnel of love’: Uvalde library offers healing

When Tammie Sinclair needed some peace and quiet growing up in a crowded, three-generation household, there was only one place to go. The public library was her sanctuary, her escape, even her summer camp.

And for the past year, El Progreso Memorial Library has been her workplace. She hopes her work here will benefit her hometown for generations.

Since January, the Uvalde native and former teacher has been leading a grant-funded program to archive the national response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School last year. She and a small group of volunteers have been archiving thousands of cards, gifts, newspaper articles, and more from the aftermath of the tragedy. She’s also helping to start an oral history project that will be run out of the library, and she’s helping plan the physical expansion of El Progreso to better house all of it into the future.

As Uvalde continues to heal after the shooting, Ms. Sinclair’s work is aiming to highlight the flood of love and support that has followed the tragedy. And in the long term, the aim is to help Uvalde learn more about itself – and grow as a result. In her view, there’s no better place to do all this than a public library. 

“This is one place in the community where anybody is welcome,” says Ms. Sinclair. “We want to be a place of hope and education.”

“There’s a lot of ugly that came out of [the shooting] – not just the tragedy itself, but the aftermath,” she adds, “but it’s what you choose to focus on, and we’re trying to focus on the good.”

Library a “critical part of the healing and the coping”

For much of its 120-year history, El Progreso has been more than just a library. Since the shooting, it’s played an important role in supporting Uvalde, providing both services and a sense of normalcy.

Within days of the tragedy, the library hosted craft therapy workshops and a mental health symposium. In later months, events geared toward helping children maintain routines and process their feelings – including book readings, musical performances, toy giveaways, bilingual counseling, and drumming circles – have followed.

“I don’t know what the town would do without the library, to be honest,” says Michael Robinson, a former member of the library’s board who owns a local news site, the Uvalde Hesperian.

“Our library is not your typical ‘check out a book and get a computer’ library,” he adds. “It’s been a really critical part of the healing and the coping with the tragedy.”

Since the mass shooting, messages of love and support had flooded in from around the country. Cards, letters, and gifts – often addressed, simply, to Uvalde – arrived at the post office, City Hall, even Robb Elementary itself.

But what to do with all of them? Surely the public library would know where to keep everything, and how to organize it?

Thus, El Progreso became Uvalde’s unofficial post office. And Ms. Sinclair – a newly minted librarian – became an archivist. She did her state-mandated librarian training here late last year, and then she kept coming back even when living in San Antonio. She knew she wanted to be a library director, or work with teens, but then the archivist position came up. 

“I’d always wanted to kind of give back to my community and be a librarian,” she says. But the idea of returning to her hometown and being the project’s archivist “just kept tugging at my heartstrings.”

“I thought, ‘I think I have to do this,’” she adds. “So I applied. And here we are.” 

The job, funded with a 12-month grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities and Humanities Texas, began in January. A crash course in archival best practices later, and Ms. Sinclair has the archives for the “Los Angelitos de Robb” project on a solid footing. 

Over 2,000 unique items – from condolence cards, to quilts, to handcrafted wood cutouts of the 21 victims of the shooting – have been cataloged and stored. Local, state, and national newspaper coverage of the response has been archived as well. Not everything can be preserved, such as gifts left in town at outdoor memorials, but they’re still processing boxes of cards and gifts received in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. 

“I hope it will be healing and comforting to people to see this enormous outpouring of love that has come in the wake of this evil,” says Mendell Morgan, the director of the library. 

For the first anniversary of the shooting, staff used hundreds of cards in its collection to create a “tunnel of love” at the entrance to the library. Copies of sympathy cards that have already been archived are left on shelves at the library entrance for people to take.

Uvalde’s rich history

The library has always been a place of comfort and learning for Ms. Sinclair, and she wants it to be that for the rest of Uvalde as well.

She was a struggling reader growing up, but she struggled even more at sports. Under no circumstances was she going to sports camp in the summers, so she would come to the library with her mother.

“I just fell in love,” she says. “I always felt welcome.”

Like many children raised in a small town, however, she grew up wanting to leave. And despite all the time she spent at the library, she never learned much about her town – not until she came back to work there.

Some may know Uvalde as the birthplace of actors Matthew McConaughey and Dale Evans, or politicians John Nance Garner (a vice president) and Dolph Briscoe (a Texas governor). But the town was also once the “honey capital of the world” (producing 1.5 million pounds per season, according to one early-20th-century news report), and the site of a student walkout seminal to the 1970s Chicano Movement. 

Ultimately, Uvalde had a rich history long before tragedy struck last year. And while the project is focused right now on preserving the response to the devastation at Robb Elementary, Ms. Sinclair, and the town, hope it will come to focus on that rich history.

Part of the grant, for example, is for an oral history project, recording and preserving interviews with people about the tragedy. “The hope is that it will [start] with the tragedy, but then expand,” says Ms. Sinclair. Eventually, El Progreso could “become a regional repository for oral histories.”

“We weren’t on the map” prior to the shooting, says Diana Olvedo-Karau, who was born and raised in Uvalde and moved back five years ago.

“My hope is that the tragedy is not going to define Uvalde. We are so much more than that,” she adds.

To achieve this, the library is looking to physically expand. The existing archives have been outgrown, and Ms. Sinclair says they want to build a bigger meeting room for community members, as well as a space that’s more teenager-friendly. They also want to continue offering all the free events and services they’ve made room for over the past year, such as a grief counselor who still holds weekly in-person sessions at the library. Funding for a new children’s wing will come from an endowment that’s starting with $76,000 the library has received from donors around the country after the shooting, according to the San Antonio Report.

All told, if there’s one place that can continue to help Uvalde heal and be a part of how the community grows out of the tragedy, it’s a place where everyone is welcome. It’s a library, supporters say.

“We’re a cooling center in the summer and a warming center in the winter,” says Ms. Sinclair. “No one’s turned away here.”

“Any given day you could come in, and some different program is happening,” she adds. “That is what is key here. ... You can reach people in so many different ways.”