How we pronounce Uvalde says a lot about the power of language in mixed communities

The name of the town comes from a misspelled Spanish name. The way people say it traces a long history of racializing Latinos in the U.S. 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. Uvalde was originally named Encina, after the oak trees that grow there. It was later renamed in honor of Mexican governor Juan de Ugalde and incorporated as a county seat in 1856. Because the town's name was misspelled from its namesake, the way to pronounce it is inherently complicated, says Ricardo Ainslie, director of the Mexico Center at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. But Uvalde is just one example of how many Spanish-origin words are anglicized in Texas and other parts of the country — names like Del Rio, San Marcos, Refugio, or even Los Angeles and San Francisco. "We know that English was forced upon Mexican-ancestry people living in Texas, probably beginning with the Texas War of Independence and thereafter," says Ainslie. "Spanish was forbidden in schools and children were punished for speaking it."