Premiering at SXSW, Uvalde Mom tells the story of a mother who saved her children during the Uvalde school shooting, only to face retaliation from her own community.
Anayansi Prado’s searing documentary, Uvalde Mom, which debuted this week at South by Southwest (SXSW), will sit with you for a long time. It follows the story of Angeli Rose Gomez of Uvalde, Texas, who made global news in 2022 when, in the face of police inaction, she rushed into Robb Elementary to save her children during the deadliest shooting ever at a Texas public school, which claimed the lives of 21 people. The documentary fills in the gaps on Gomez’s life as a survivor, daughter and mother; explores the community’s attempt to reckon with the senseless loss of life; and displays the failures and outright retaliation of local and state leadership during and after the shooting.
A lifelong resident of Uvalde, Gomez was a high-achieving high school student with a bright future. She enrolled in college with hopes of becoming a police officer like her father, who was the first ever Mexican American chief of police in Uvalde (despite the town being over 78 percent Hispanic). But an abusive relationship derailed Angeli Gomez’s plans and changed the trajectory of her life: Months after meeting the man who would become the father of her two children, Gomez was pregnant. Soon after that, the relationship turned violent. Gomez reached out to Uvalde police many times for help, to no avail. One day, an altercation with her children’s father resulted in Gomez hitting him with her car—a way of protecting herself and her children, she says. Both were arrested, and within 24 hours, Gomez was facing six felonies, including family violence. Understandably, Gomez did not finish college or become a law enforcement officer. She was working in a field on the outskirts of Uvalde on the day of the shooting.
On May 24, 2022, Gomez heard about the shooting from her mother. She raced to the school, where she and other parents were refused entry and told to get back. Gomez says she remembered how the cops failed to intervene to stop her “beatings,” and had no faith they could intervene to stop a mass shooting—so after being briefly handcuffed, then uncuffed, by police, she sprinted away from them, jumped the three-foot fence around the elementary school, ran to her sons’ classrooms, and removed them from school grounds (along with another young family member, a classmate of her oldest son). In the end, 19 children and two adults died at the hands of the 18-year-old shooter. Gomez’s children survived.
The film covers a “tough topic,” Prado admits, “but it was told through the story of a mother. I always looked at that as sort of a safe vehicle for the audience, almost like people had to go with Angeli into this topic. … She was our safe container.”
In the days following the school shooting, Gomez’s feat made global news, and soon she found herself in the middle of a media storm. In interviews, Gomez’s pain and frustration is palpable; she blasts police for their failure to act, calling them “cowards” that “could have saved many more lives.”
To many around the world, Gomez is a hero. But to police and elected officials in Uvalde, she was a noisy reminder of their failures. And so, like most women who refuse to accept the status quo, she became a target. Uvalde police harassed her for months: urging her to stop talking to the media; digging into her past criminal record; showing up repeatedly to her home or simply parking outside, which she says scared her children; and threatening jail time. And they were sometimes successful: A little before the one-year anniversary of the shooting, Gomez was back in jail for alleged marijuana consumption.
“Some of my obstacles as a filmmaker were actually keeping the film on the down low, because at the time, Angeli was still being harassed by police,” Prado told me, “so we had to be really careful, especially being outdoors with her and equipment and cameras. We had to be sort of invisible within the town, and really be protective of the project.”
In the end, Gomez’s charges were dropped—a relief to her, her children, her mother, her grandmother, and her cousin Rhianncé (who is like a sister to Angeli)—but the trauma of May 24, 2022, will reverberate throughout the community forever.
The film is dominated by women, from Angeli herself, to the outspoken mothers and Uvalde residents through whom the viewers experience the shooting and the fallout within the community. “We are mothers,” Ina Fichman, one of the film’s producers, told me. “I’m a mother. My son is a lot older than the kids in the film, but you identify with Angeli and her mother and her mother’s mother as this powerful force in our society, and we can’t forget that. [Women] care about our kids very deeply, and we want them to live in a safe space.”
