[Rolling Stone] VERY WEEKDAY AT 5:30 a.m., while most of his San Antonio, Texas, neighborhood is still asleep, Albert Martinez gets into his silver Nissan Sentra and starts the drive to Uvalde, 70 miles to the west. That early, U.S. 90, which starts near the Mexican border and ends in Florida, is infinitely dark and leaden, the tiny farms along the way covered in shadows.
Martinez is a 50-year-old music teacher in Uvalde. Usually, he drives in silence. The radio would be a distraction — it’s almost impossible for him to listen to anything without counting in time or wondering why an instrument wasn’t tuned more tightly. Instead, he makes plans, deciding which song his kids might learn next or thinking through upcoming performances. By the time he arrives in Uvalde, the sun has come up.
The rest of the city is starting the day, too: Cars move up and down Main Street, a short strip dotted with a leafy park, an H-E-B grocery store, and an old-school soda fountain with a mural on the side of it, proudly honoring Uvaldeans like Oscar regular Matthew McConaughey and the Grammy-winning Tejano band Los Palominos. There’s an immigration checkpoint in town, but Uvalde isn’t a border town, as it’s often painted — it’s more than 60 miles from Piedras Negras, Mexico. Still, many families, even those here for decades, have held on to their roots, contributing to a culture that’s distinctly Mexican American. Uvalde’s identity is best understood by longtime residents, who agree that this is a small, quiet community — 15,000 people in all — bonded by time, proximity, and routine. "Everybody knows a relative of everyone," one local tells me. "It’s like we’re all connected somehow." 
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