class Archives - Not Even Past

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city contributes to the growth of a largely white upper-middle class demographic who can afford living in proximity to Austin’s finest and natural recreational spaces. A look at Austin’s past reveals a pattern of racial discrimination as the city constantly places the needs of white residents, boosters, developers, and investors above those of Black and Latino residents.

Andrew M. Busch’s new book, City in a Garden traces one hundred years of Austin’s urban, environmental, political, and social history. Busch explains that Austin’s investment in big business and innovative environmental development projects was and still is an investment in the social construction of whiteness that has paid off beautifully for upper-middle class white people. Busch argues that no matter how sustainable Austin is, or remains, there is a troubling “shadow” constantly growing behind the “garden” that combines the urban and the natural. The shadow is a century of racial discrimination in the form of federal, state, and local urban development policies that built an environmentally sustainable and desirable playground for white upper-middle class people. Simultaneously these policies and city planning projects kept Black and Latinx people out of any real decision making processes, leaving them with the least desirable spaces in the city, spaces that remain underfunded and subject their residents to constant threat of removal and displacement.

Busch’s main purpose is to expose the complexities that arise when space is racialized through the process of urbanization. He foregrounds Austin as an exceptional case that further complicates the relationships between city leaders and developers, environmentalists, and the Black and Latinx communities as they all make claims for their ideas of how Austin’s space should be utilized. Furthermore, Busch suggests that the “history of human-environment interaction in Austin has revolved around managing water as well as enhancing access to and preserving unique environmental characteristics that have high use and exchange value” (14). This is apparent from the beginning of Austin’s city planning history.

From the late 1890s to the 1930s, city leaders focused on subduing the water system in and around Austin and successfully dammed the Colorado River. The project signified the capability of harnessing nature to provide residents, farmers, and especially companies with cheap power and flood control. In the 1930s, as the population grew, and new land became available to build on and to accommodate new types of labor, suburbanization and the Federal Housing Association (FHA) continued to place white communities’ needs above all others. While the FHA demarcated Black and Latinx spaces as “dilapidated” and ripe for redevelopment, the Home Owners Loan Corporation made sure that white neighborhoods remained white through restrictive covenants and other illegal methods that kept most people of color in south and east Austin. By the 1950s, rampant deindustrialization in Austin made working-class industrial jobs harder to get in the city. The process of ridding Austin’s inner city of heavy industry incentivized middle and upper-class labor and the companies that would employ them with new recreational spaces, the convenience of suburban life, and tax breaks for oil and high-tech companies. For Black and Latinx communities, the removal and redevelopment projects that resulted from mid-century urban renewal only served to exacerbate racial segregation as new housing was built on the east side of Austin.

Downtown from Austin’s Famous Zilker Park (via Wikimedia)

As the book enters the 1960s, Busch strengthens his argument. Austin’s environmentalists started to challenge urban and environmental projects that posed a threat to the natural environment and recreational spaces. The best example here is their fight to ban motorized vehicles from the west side of Town Lake while the east side had to contend with massive motorboat races that drew thousands of people throughout the year and posed a threat to Latinx communities. Destroying the east Town Lake community’s park to build a stadium for the races sparked the organization of people in the community as well as organizations active in the Chicano and Civil Rights Movements. After six years of protest, the city finally moved the boat races without the aid of white environmentalists who never considered the negative effects that their efforts had on Latinx communities. Overall, the 60s and 70s proved that liberalism fell short for marginalized communities and white environmentalists only considered natural spaces as an environment in need of protection from city development projects.

In the 1980s, Austin leaders began to aggressively diversify the local economy as defense, oil, and high-tech industries effectively sparked the process of globalization. The University of Texas was integral in this economic transformation and supplied these new industries with skilled labor and state-of-the-art research capabilities funded mostly by federal defense contracts. This massive shift caused the city’s white population to expand residential areas in the north and the west. While these residential areas began to threaten physical spaces that environmentalists considered pristine and worthy of protecting, Black and Latinx residents living to the east and south saw production facilities move in to their neighborhoods making life more hazardous.

In examining the 1990s, Busch focuses on the bifurcation of the environmental movement in the fight against aggressive private and federally funded urban expansion. Traditional white environmentalists took on the encroachment of private development in pristine and untouched natural space. For this group, unchecked development threatened the Edwards Aquifer, an essential source of water and important part of Austin’s ecosystem. East Austin environmentalists agreed that the aquifer needed protection but added that their communities needed just as much protection from both old and new environmental hazards facing Black and Latinx people. For eastsiders, environmental injustice was a civil rights issue. They constructed “the environment as a hybrid landscape, one where natural and built reinforced one another and combined to undermine minorities health and access to jobs, education, and recreation…” (226). But, as Busch argues in the epilogue, eastside environmentalists lost to their white counterparts as the 2000s saw an increased development in east Austin because building east would not disturb any protected environments, eased the increasingly expensive housing crisis, and proved to be extremely profitable. Using the epilogue as a kind of policy proposal, Busch argues for a more equitable city planning and economic structure by way of creating jobs that do not just serve a certain sector of Austin’s growing population. He asserts that historical exclusion should be met with contemporary inclusion in every aspect and that gentrification poses an immediate threat to impoverished communities who are already being pressured to leave because of a lack of economic opportunity. Busch suggests that rent control, direct subsidies, and other mechanisms should be employed to create “a holistically livable environment” for all Austinites.

Busch’s book is important for students in a variety of disciplines, residents interested in city development and planning, city planners, housing and economic justice activists, as well as environmental activists. City in a Garden also leaves the history of Austin ripe for further research. In what ways did Black and Latinx residents challenge, participate, and/or survive the growing spatial disparities of their white counterparts? A research project on the historically Black Wheatsville community could provide some answers. What was life like in pre-WWII Austin for residents living in areas affected by environmental changes and hazards? An inquiry in to Mexican agricultural workers living in colonias around Austin might shed light on how changes in Austin’s economy – transitions from agricultural, to industrial, and in to oil and technology – affected where Latinos’ in Austin lived and worked over time. Readers interested in education might also be intrigued by the brief mentions of educational segregation and its lasting problems in Austin. With a hundred-year historical sweep the questions this book fosters seem endless, which is an excellent problem to have.

Overall, City in a Garden reveals a complicated past littered with good and bad decisions in hopes that people in the present and future might reckon with and correct the inequality literally built in to Austin’s city limits.

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

By Nathan Stone

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals. Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick. Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement. When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended. In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble. By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it. So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages. They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French. They brought their cattle and their vineyards. They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize. It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich. It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it. The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy. They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other. A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash. If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional. They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods. Building a canal is no joke. It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up. In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being. Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map. Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places. Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer. That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga. No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules. Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face. As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation. Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside. The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining. What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing. The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots. Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream. That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below. It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them. That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo. It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties. The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level. Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash. There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons. The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped. One day, the ball bounced close to the opening. As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save. It’s a passion, comrade. When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered. He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth. No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do. They found him the next day in the Mapocho River. His clothes had been ripped off. His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable. He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way. I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in. They told the boys to be careful. That was part of their education. They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten. That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that. We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy. That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room. Everyone pretends it isn’t there. And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén. That means a happy copy of paradise. But it’s just a copy, not the real thing. And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?

You May Also Enjoy:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

Civil War and Early Life: Snapshots of Early War in Guatemala by Vasken Markarian

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones (2016)

By Diana Bolsinger

Robert Jones interprets many of today’s most contentious political and cultural battles as the product of shifts in America’s demographic make-up. He convincingly shows that ongoing demographic shifts in America’s ethnic mix are accompanied by unprecedented changes in religious affiliation. White Christian (by which he means Protestant) Americans dominated American politics and social life for most of our nation’s history. Jones dates the shift away from this dominance to the election of John F. Kennedy – a Catholic– in 1960, with the change accelerating through the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans surged, along with increases in the numbers of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and others. The last year that Protestants represented a majority was 2008. Jones uses survey data to identify a generational shift within Protestant mainline and evangelical movements, finding younger believers to be far more accepting of gay and interracial marriage.

Jones argues that it is this demographic shift that has driven the furor over several key issues in recent years, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and a number of initiatives to infuse politics with “Biblical values.” Jones cites polling data indicating evangelical white Protestants are the least likely group to have black friends to explain their alienation from movements such as Black Lives Matter. He likens the passion driving the religious white conservative reaction to the “anger and denial” stage of grief, predicting believers will eventually refocus their energies on strengthening their own community of believers.

(via Jeff Kubina)

Jones’s interpretation of today’s culture wars is shaped by his own liberal outlook, but his account should also be interesting to conservative readers. Regardless of one’s political views, the demographic changes he outlines are real and are changing America’s politics and culture. The data Jones provides derives from solid sources. Most of the explanations for the rise of the “angry voter” behind the Trump campaign have focused on economic issues. While Jones does not address the 2016 presidential campaigns, his work provides a useful background on how demographics also factor into the rise of Trump’s popularity. The results of the campaign should also prove an interesting test of Jones’s argument that “White Christian America” has lost the political clout to dominate national politics.

Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

Classic and New Reading on Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

by Ann Twinam

Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

While Morner proposed a more static view of the construction of racial categories in colonial Spanish America, his work is fundamental to understanding where we started.

Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Cope’s work complicates Mörner’s by emphasizing the fluidity of socioracial categories in Spanish America. He suggested that ““a person’s race might be described as a shorthand summation of his social network.”

Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Matthew Restall’s many publications highlight the repercussions of Native and African interactions, a theme less researched until recently.

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Joanne Rappaport provides nuanced understandings of the complexities of racial construction, exploring how Spanish Americans created their own socio-racial identities. (Reviewed in depth on NEP by Adrian Masters.)

Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves (1929)

by Jack Loveridge

Reflecting on his motives for joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the outbreak of the First World War, Robert Graves wrote: “I thought that it might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded.” So began a five year pause in Graves’ life, in which the main action of his autobiography unfolds. In Good-Bye to All That, Graves powerfully explores the horrors of the First World War, while also providing a compelling look at the inner workings of British society.

On the front lines at Cuinchy and Laventie, divisions between the men who fought became clear. Graves highlights the bravery of Welsh soldiers who, as former miners, prove pessimistic but particularly well-adjusted to the trenches, but he adds a Welsh comrade’s sentiments regarding Scottish battalions, noting that they, “run like hell both ways.” While stationed in Ireland near war’s end, Graves comes down with Spanish influenza and flees for London to avoid suffering treatment in a “horrific” Irish hospital. In this way, Graves also relays the prevalence of regarding class and racial divisions in imperial Britain.

Throughout, Graves drives the social analysis implicit in his work with a dark sense of humor. For instance, as though schoolboys at Charterhouse, soldiers roll a defused bomb through the trenches to play a cruel joke on a shell-shocked comrade. Graves finds himself naked in a public bath in Béthune with the Prince of Wales, who was “graciously pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was.” In a burned-out French village, the troops organize an impromptu cricket match using a birdcage as the wicket – with the dead parrot still inside. These vivid images reveal men far from home and in close proximity to death, struggling to maintain the regular routines of English life. With his humor and gently sardonic prose, Graves’s autobiography yields a depiction of the First World War and its domestic aftermath that says as much about British society as it does about the author’s own life.

English soldiers in the trenches at Nieuport Bains, Belgium, 1917. The sergeant in the foreground is watching the German line through a periscope fixed on his bayonet. (Image courtesy of the United Kingdom Government)

Following the war, Graves picked up his life almost exactly where he left it. He matriculated at Oxford and launched a long career as a writer, poet, and scholar of antiquity. Yet, like so many of Graves’s generation, the war years left psychological scars that would linger for life. Good-Bye to All That investigates those scars and gives readers a crystalline sense of the trauma that left them.

You may also like:

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson’s history of British involvement in the First World War.

Jermaine Thibodeaux’s piece on African-American soldiers in WWI.

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