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You-VAL-dee.
You-VAHL-day.
Oo-VAHL-deh.
When tragedy struck Uvalde, journalists flooded into the small Texas town to report on the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
That included NPR’s own team — and it didn’t take long for discussion to break out amongst staff about how to say the name of the town on air.
First, there was “you-VAL-dee,” the anglicized pronunciation that’s commonly accepted by locals.
But some people there also call it “ooh-VAHL-deh,” closer to the Spanish pronunciation, or “you-VAHL-day,” which sounds like a middle ground between the two.
Because Uvalde is a town made up of mostly Latino or Hispanic residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data, landing on a “correct” pronunciation is tricky — the language of the people who live there exists on a sliding spectrum between Spanish and English, and often consists of a combination of the two.
But how we say Uvalde matters because it represents a long lineage of how Latinos have been racialized in the U.S. and in South Texas, specifically.
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President Biden and first lady Jill Biden drive past a memorial site in the town square of Uvalde set up for those killed in the school mass shooting, on their way to Robb Elementary School on Sunday in Uvalde, Texas. Wong Maye-E/AP
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