The attack at Walmart cut deep into the fabric of the binational, bicultural and bilingual city connected by bridges and generations of families to its sister city of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. Most of the people killed or wounded were either Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Minutes before the shooting, the suspect posted a lengthy anti-immigrant manifesto online, declaring that the attack was a response to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and “all the problems these invaders cause and will cause.”
For months, Hispanic residents, elected officials and activists in El Paso and other Texas cities have been calling the Walmart shooting a hate crime. They had been calling on the Trump administration to take federal action in the largest anti-Latino attack in the country, just as Dylann S. Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners in 2015 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina, was convicted on 33 federal charges that included hate crime charges.
“This was the intersection of racism and mass violence,” said Texas State Representative César Blanco, a Democrat and Navy veteran whose district includes the Walmart. “What he did in our community, based on the manifesto that was posted in advance of the massacre, definitely tells us where his mind was.”
In the aftermath of the attack, some in El Paso feared that copycat anti-Latino shootings would strike the city. As a result, several Hispanic residents and survivors sought to protect themselves — buying firearms, target practicing at shooting ranges and applying for state-issued licenses to carry handguns.
In the six months since the shooting, the city remains in the midst of healing.
The Walmart store reopened just 12 weeks ago, and the last funeral a month before that — the services for Jorge Calvillo García, 61, were delayed so his wounded son could attend after being released from the hospital. The last remaining patient at the University Medical Center of El Paso — Mario De Alba, 48, a repairman from the Mexican state of Chihuahua who was shot in the back while shielding his wife and 9-year-old daughter — left the hospital in November, but he is expected to return this month for a follow-up surgery. One other victim, Guillermo Garcia, a girls’ soccer coach, has been hospitalized since the shooting and continues to receive treatment at Del Sol Medical Center.