Tripod
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Tripod
West Side Rising: Floods and Forging On
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On this episode of Tripod, join us for a discussion with Char Miller, former professor of history at Trinity University, current professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, and prolific author and editor of a variety of titles, including his most recent Trinity University Press publication, West Side Rising. Char discusses San Antonio’s 1921 flood, the power of individuals to affect change, how disasters leave a lasting impact, and our responsibility to remember these moments.
Tripod, the official Trinity University Press podcast invites authors, journalists, community leaders, and other guests to engage in exploratory, informative discussions on the subjects of people, places, and the planet.
SPEAKER_00:I'm Lily Brennan, and welcome back to another episode of Tripod, the official podcast of the Trinity University Press. Joining me today is Char Miller, former professor of history at Trinity University, current professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, and prolific author and editor of a variety of titles, including his most recent Trinity University Press publication, West Side Rising. Char is here today to discuss San Antonio's 1921 flood, the power of individuals to effect change, and how disasters leave a lasting impact and our responsibility to remember these moments. Welcome, Char Miller.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. It's good to be virtually back in San Antonio.
SPEAKER_01:It's been nice chatting and getting prepared for today's recording. But if you want to start off by just giving a brief introduction to yourself, I have been teaching now, as it turns out, for 45 or 46 years.
SPEAKER_02:So West Side Rising was a book that actually occupied my brain for about 30 years, 25 years or so of those 46 teaching, which means I would like it to mean that it's really good because I just let it gestate. I think what it actually means is I was doing other things, but always thinking about it. But it in many ways, it is like other things I have done, love letters back to San Antonio, as a way to talk to a city that I adore about some of the issues that environmentally and politically and socially are really critical and about which there's not a lot of discussion, but healthy discussion is how democracy functions. And the book was designed to sort of feed that process.
SPEAKER_01:What does it mean to be a professor of environmental analysis and what drew you to that subject?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's actually, and again, I I credit San Antonio with doing that because when I moved to the city in 1981, I realized I did not understand it. I didn't understand it as a landscape. I didn't understand the way the city was put together, I didn't know its history, which is part of the dilemma. Um, and I kept getting lost. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would drive somewhere and it's like, wait, how did I get here? That road didn't go, it's not a gridiron. I know a gridiron. Um but I actually realized that that was a good thing. That is, to get lost, you can get found, but you have to think about it and be deliberate. And one of the places that I kept running into, but not intentionally, was the almost dam. And I kept trying to think, like, why am I why am I ending up in this place? And what is this place? Um, because it seemed odd at some level, because it at least in 81, when I arrived, we didn't have a lot of floods at that point. So there was a couple of years where it it just stood there and it stood in my imagination. And I finally asked um another one of my colleagues, Don Everett, who had written a lot about San Antonio, and I said, okay, tell me about the dam. And he started sending me and giving to me articles that he had clipped years ago about all sorts of subjects that were somewhat related. And I just held on to them. And at some point in the mid-80s, I started to think, well, wait a second, there's this new field environmental history, and I've got this dam that I don't understand. Started reading early issues of what was then called the environmental history review, and realized there were people who were working on stuff, but they weren't doing rural stuff. They weren't doing not rural, but urban stuff. They were all sort of concentrated on the rural. And I thought, well, here's a story. Maybe this could be something. You know, floods taught me a lot about how a city is developed, and that's partly how I came to understand San Antonio, looking at its watersheds, its creeks, the river itself, and that started to gel.
SPEAKER_01:Have you always written nonfiction, or was writing always a part of your teaching career and things like that?
SPEAKER_02:Um what I loved about Trinity is that it wanted its faculty to be great teachers and also engage scholars. And that meant you could do both things simultaneously if that was your ambition. I mean, you had to do some of it, obviously, to get tenure and then to get promoted to full. It I actually went to graduate school because I was convinced I could be a writer. I didn't really think about teaching, didn't think I'd like it, didn't think I'd be good at it. And then I got to Trinity and I was like, oh, this is fun. Right. In part because they're great students, in part because we had a younger cohort of faculty who are now all senior professors at Trinity. We bounced ideas off about teaching and writing, and how do you how do you do these two things simultaneously if you're able to? And so, I mean, part of what I learned in San Antonio at the university, in part was about subjects. I could study San Antonio, and there were very few people doing that at the time. There were friends up at UTSA and at Trinity who were sort of thinking about this place in a way that um was different than earlier generations might have written about it. And so for me, it was it was eye-opening to be able to walk into a classroom in my city and history class, for example, and say, I just got lost on the west side. And what I think happened. Um and and then you know, riff on flood control that did and did not exist on the west side. So at the heart of the book is that that inequity. And it was pretty clear to me that there's a huge dam for one set of town, and then there are all these little channels, some of which have were earthen and not well developed on the other. And that became pretty obvious, but I would not have known that unless I got lost and just started trying to figure out how to get through this landscape. I would say I stumbled into the field by living in San Antonio.
SPEAKER_01:That's a great connection. I mean, I figured that just being interested in environmentalism maybe brought you to this subject, but the fact that the city itself kind of spoke that to you is really interesting. Before we get into kind of the more process elements of creating West Side Rising, what about the cover image of West Side Rising stuck out to you of all the images in the book and I'm sure collected through your research? What made that one stick out to you as a cover image?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it was immediate. I found it in years ago, maybe in the late 1980s, I realized that the Red Cross had come to San Antonio. I mean, I already knew it, but I it suddenly had this insight. I said, well, wait a second, if it's the Red Cross, they have to have an archive. Well, in fact, they didn't. They had they had shipped all of their archival material to the Library of Congress. So, you know, I got a small grant from the college to go up and start pulling through material, and I found these photographs, most of which are in the book. And I saw the moment I saw the one that's the cover of this young girl holding what I assume to be a sibling in her arms and looking that stare right at the camera, I went, if I ever get this book done, that's the cover. You know, they can mess around with it how they want to, but I want that because I wanted this to be not a story about a flood alone, although it is that the sort of physical thing that happened, but the human dimension. And I wanted to locate it on the west side, a story that many of my Anglo peers had never heard, um, who grew up in San Antonio. They said, we knew about downtown, we never knew about the West Side. It was never talked about. And I went, okay, so that's a message to me. Yeah. If we're going to do this right, I have to center it where, in fact, the greatest death and destruction actually occurred. And that photograph seems to embody both the loss, but also, for me at least, in my projection, the resilience of the folks on the West Side. And she's not the only one who went through that disaster and both survived, but there's also a strength there that, again, maybe just my projection onto her. But it uh when I sent the manuscript in, that photograph went in with it, and I said, cover.
SPEAKER_00:Enjoying this discussion with Char Miller, check out his book, West Side Rising, and his other titles now available for purchase on the Trinity University Press website and anywhere you buy books. Use tripod's discount code C H A R20 to save 20% on your purchase of any of Char's titles at tupress.org.
SPEAKER_01:I would 100% agree. Picking up this book and I mean it's in a great, beautiful, like blue backdrop as well. But the images also included in the book as well with many others. Did you have a reasoning behind having so many images in the book or in your process?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I did. In in part because I used the images as I wrote to remind myself there were real human beings and they were real houses that were displaced or destroyed, that there was real death and damage. Um, and I I've got a bulletin board behind in front of me where I'm sitting today. And some of them were sort of prominently there as I was writing, just as a, you know, remember what you're doing this for, remember whose stories you're trying to tell. And that gets complicated being a white middle-aged historian writing about a Latino neighborhood. But I had, I my sense was that if I told it in the voice that was authentically mine and used as much data and material as I could locate from the West Side, and especially journalism, which um many of the Latino journalists in 1921 just really did enormous work talking to flood victims and the like, to try to put it in that voice is a little appropriative, but I also think it ultimately does what I would have hoped to do, which is to decenter downtown in the world that had once been talked about as the place that had suffered greatly. It hadn't, relatively speaking. It was just goods and materials, and relocate that that story in the population that was most devastated, for whom the flood was most fatal, and in a landscape that was already a sacrifice zone, uh, in part because of social inequities. The other photographs were also a way to say to me, and I think to white readers, Anglo readers, um, this isn't our story. It's stories we have to know.
SPEAKER_01:I think in addition to the reminder that the images pose as to who the story is really about and the human value, not necessarily that they're you know a number on a page or a name on a page. They're real people, real communities. I think it defin definitely serves that reminder. But I found it really interesting you saying that you just kind of looked at the images yourself just to remind you as a as a writer. I think that's something that more people should maybe try. On the note of me being a reader of the audience, do you have an ideal audience for this book?
SPEAKER_02:The quick answer is I have always written with my mother in mind. She's been dead now for 25 years, but she was an amazing reader, had stacks of books by her bed the day she died, and that was true my entire life. Actually, sort of called me on my first set of academics writing academic writings when I sent them to her. She said, Who's reading this? I said, Well, maybe five to ten people. She said, Well, why would you do that? You know, I sort of tucked that away because she was hypercritical about everything, of course. But okay, you know, sort of uh reflectively later in the mid-80s, as I'm starting to think about San Antonio and how to write about it, that's when editorial pages opened up. And there was a thing now called op-eds, opposite of editorials, uh from readers. And I started writing for the San Antonio Express, the San Antonio Light, the San Antonio Current emerged roughly at the same time. Suddenly I realized, because those editors helped me realize this with heavy editing, that there was a different way to write. That if you're going to reach an audience that isn't the ten of us locked away in our libraries, that you really need to tell stories and you need to help shape those stories in different ways. And so the interesting thing for me is that doing that, and I've written hundreds of op-eds at this point, it's really bled into and best in the best ways to my professional writing so that I think about the reader all the time, which is maybe more less aware now, because that's just what I do, as opposed to when I was trying deliberately to figure out how to pitch an essay that would reach academic readers and they go, okay, would reach my mother, who would go better, um, and then might reach other people who are neither of those groups, and and um in the very generous way you described West Side Rising, that that for me was if that book was going to work, it was going to have to work for people who were not like me.
SPEAKER_01:I think it definitely accomplishes that with the combination of the images and the importance placed on the story. Is there any particular takeaway or message that you want that broad scope of readers to have after reading West Side Rising?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot, about that book, but also now the devastating flood in the Guadalupe this summer, which is that we are responsible for the disasters. Disasters are not natural. Disasters are human-caused. They're human-caused in the part of West Side Rising by building into floodplains, turning areas of the city into spaces, and particularly the poor and disempowered, into areas that everybody knew flooded, but nobody cared. That meant that certain people would die as opposed to other people, that they were mostly brown as opposed to mostly white, that they were mostly poor as opposed to the rich. And so what did the rich do? They went for high ground. So the first sort of message is these disasters come from political, cultural, and social inequities. And I think part of what I wanted to do was both identify the injustices that are scored into the environment, into the landscape, but also articulate, because it's true, that the West Side rose. And it rose up in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, and that that's an activism that's directly linked by genealogy in some cases. Their families had gone through the 21 flood and were activists in one way or another. Um, and here we are 40 years later, with similar last name folks doing similar kinds of um political activism. But also because environmental justice as a concept, though, they didn't use it, was actually what they were advocating for better streets, better drainage, cleaner housing, better housing. So some of it is to show the design so that we can demonstrate why the design is flawed and must be repaired in some fashion. And the repairers in this case were cops, the communities organized for public services, the very name of which identifies what they were going after. And their success in sort of breaking Anglo power in the city is unlike any other place in the country. It's kind of amazing. And I thought, you know, I'm going to tell this story about the 21 flood. Do I want to let end it there? And you can't. End it there, it's a story of devastation without regeneration.
SPEAKER_01:Trinity University Press is a mission-driven publisher committed to civic engagement with timely ideas, facilitated by the publication of print and digital books, related media, creative and educational programs, and other activities that help us all better understand our place in a crowded world. For more than 50 years, Trinity University Press has published more than 225 titles and organized thousands of events, all focused on broadening our understanding of many impactful subjects, from human relationships with our physical environments to social equity and justice. For more information about Trinity University Press, visit tupress.org. Branching off of that concept with the grassroots organization. One I don't know where in the book this quote is from, but this is also very much related to the cops and the grassroots organizations of the quote is the power of everyday people to effect change. And I was just curious what that kind of meant to you and what that means in the context of West Side Rising.
SPEAKER_02:There's a long sort of historiography, the study of history argument about grassroots mobilizing, social networking that then produces social change. But it was also a way to celebrate, I thought and I still think, the degree to which human beings have agency and understand that they have that capacity to change the world. If the world is set up by other human beings to look in a certain way, then another set of human beings can take that apart, reform it, change it, radicalize in whatever way that happens. Students in environmental studies and environmental analysis are bearing the brunt of knowledge. And part of what I've been trying to do for the last 12 years or so, and there's a series of projects that came out of this. You don't just tell these moments of disaster and then leave the people foundering in the water. That's not what happened. They picked up their lives, they figured out a new way to live, and you know, maybe some of them built back in the floodplains. My bet is most of them did not. So what about that story? What does that help us see? Which is A, people have resili are resilient, they have some kind of hope to better their situation under pretty dire circumstances. Um they have agency, they have control over their circumstances to the degree that that's possible. And what if they acted on that? So everyday people have the capacity to define their lives to an extent. And the book is designed, like several others I was working on simultaneously, to sort of invest that argument with human beings so that when my students read things like this, and I have colleagues who who write similarly, they go, Oh, they did it, I can do it.
SPEAKER_01:I like that silver lining in the sense of it gives you a perspective on an event that can inspire resilience. And you see the people rebuilding, that help was given freely, and just the power of I mean, even in the title of just the fact that it's sparking an environmental justice movement.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Is just shows that there's always that human element to survive and build better after the fact. I kind of wanted to move more about the messages in the book related to place and just environment in general.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:As a writer who covers environmentalism a lot, how would you define place?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so um there's there's two ways of doing it, uh, and they're intertwined. The first is what's the site? Physical location, give me latitude and longitude, and that sort of pins you into a map, right? There's a cartography here. But you also want to look at situation. What's there that makes that site valuable? And it was one of the things that I loved about living in San Antonio was watching the Spanish military engineers and the missionaries move across those grasslands in South Texas and come to the place we now call San Antonio and go, oh, this is a site that has a situation. And what's the situation? Water. Right. And every one of those military engineers or military officers whose records we have, and there are a lot of them, says almost exactly the same thing. There's enough water here to build a city a quarter mile wide or a half a mile wide, depending on their ambition. And you you read that and go, that makes perfect sense. And yet they didn't totally pay attention to it because although they built their first establishment around an indigenous settlement up around San Pedro Park, above the floodplain, well above the floodplain, they decided that if they were going to do sedentary agriculture, which is what they knew, plows, you'd better be down where the water was more accessible and you could actually build irrigation ditches, asaquias, and create this pretty robust agricultural environment, which they did. And then they flooded. And they flooded again. And then in 1819, they got walloped by a flood that was actually bigger than the 21 flood, or at least retrospective analysis would suggest as such. But if your foundation is sedentary agriculture, you're going to have to go back. And so here is where the site tells you everything you need to know. It's a floodplain. That's great for ag. Turns out that it's really great for floods. And the reason why it's great for ag is that floods come in and renourish the soils by pulling all of this other material nutrients down from the hills and into the flatlands. Same thing happened in Los Angeles. The San Gabriel Mission, which is not far from where I'm sitting today, got wiped out in a flood. The only thing they did, which was smart, was to move uphill enough so that they could sort of recenter themselves. They didn't do that in San Antonio.
SPEAKER_01:As you say in the book, that the built landscape is not without a voice, being that like those wounds and those changes are so apparent in how we build our communities, in how we do our infrastructure, and all of that. But I was very curious about how people who live in San Antonio or other locations, how do you recommend people discover that voice of the landscape with that history?
SPEAKER_02:I can only say how it works. For me, and that is to walk. It is, it was a practice I started in San Antonio, partly because like I got I had to get up and walk around, but also became more deliberate, intentional to walk in a community, whether it's in the central part of the city, walking the streets of San Antonio, where I used to lead tours for friends who were coming in, to show them, okay, okay, look, this is a 20th century city. That's what you see. Let me show you the 18th century city because it's still here. So to know this, like an archaeologist, what the layers are, some of it is about self-discovery. And you can only do that by, you know, riding a bike around San Antonio or walking in different neighborhoods to get a feel for that. Uh, it works for me because it part of what that does is also give me stories. Because I get puzzled. Like, why is that thing the way that thing is? But I think it's also true that writing West Side Rising, writing about on the border, doing deep in the heart of San Antonio, all of those books are also reflections of my effort to understand the place and my place in it.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Well, this is kind of a two-part final question. One, what is dangerous about forgetting these tragedies? And two, what is important to remember from the experiences shown in West Side Rising?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell I think the danger is that we lull ourselves into believing that what once happened can't happen again. The concept that lightning doesn't strike twice is actually wrong. And secondly, your your other question I think is at the heart of this, which is if we replicate the places that have just been damaged by flood or fire or earthquake or hurricane or tornado, then we're gambling. It's hard to be the person who constantly points out not a good idea. You know, I've tried to do that with West Side Rising in a way that it isn't my voice. It's a lot of other voices that are really making these cases. And I think that it's a more nuanced way to go about it, but it also means that there's a collective responsibility, even as there is an individual one, to look at a situation and go, maybe that street is not where I want to live. But collectively, we also need to be thinking, well, should anybody live there in the place that you imagine can either burn or flood, or, you know, it's built over a fault line. Everybody knew it was on a fault line. Nobody talked about it, but it was known by engineers and others. And it's like, why are we doing that? Right. You know, they're big, tall buildings in Los Angeles that are beautifully engineered. Really think that's gonna work? Maybe it will, but also maybe it won't, in which case it becomes a disaster because human beings made it a disaster. So trying to be proactive about this is far more important than reacting to things. But if you don't do the first, you better do the second.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that was my last question. But thank you so much for making the time and you know, showing up today to talk about the stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, your questions were fantastic. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining Char and I for another episode of Exploring People, Places, and Our Planet with Tripod. Come back soon.