On the island
In the last golden age of globalization, at the turn of the 20th century when John Maynard Keynes or his contemporaries could summon “by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep,” a grand opera house was opening in Galveston, Texas. A four story palace of steel and stone for a Civil War colonel, his wife and their nine children had also just been constructed in the Chateausque style, complementing the other grand homes on the Broadway, and a French Romanesque Cathedral was being built to complement the original Cathedral, which was made of half a million bricks imported from Belgium. It had been standing as the head of the diocese for some 50 years. One can assume that the weather was as humid and tropical as it is today when the city was home to the premier port in the United States for the export of cotton; that it was equally humid and tropical in the 1830s when it briefly served as the home port of the independent Texas Navy, or in the 1820s when it was the site of an important Mexican customs house.
If Keynes or his friends in London were looking to buy American cotton, wheat or maize, or Caribbean sugar, they may have used that famous telephone to call a trader based on Galveston Island. Perhaps that trader would have been a relative of my grandmother, who passed away yesterday at the age of 93, and was a proud B.O.I. (“born on the island”).
Galveston, despite the ravages brought about by the Great Storm of 1900 (a hurricane which destroyed much including the partially constructed new cathedral, and claimed more than 6,000 lives), was one of the centers of the golden age of globalization, and one far less well known than London, New York or Hong Kong: an enormous and important port, but also a financial center, with a large exchange for cotton, and all the trappings that come along with both, including the aforementioned Bishop, grand homes and centers for performing arts.
Anyone who has had the chance to go to Galveston since the 1980s — either as a tourist looking for quick access to beaches near Houston, or more recently as a jumping off point for a Carnival cruise to the Caribbean, may not recognize much in the description above. Galveston’s decline has been as grandiose as its rise, and it’s a story that encapsulates how American towns and cities have adapted, or failed to do so, in this more recent age of economic globalization. In fact, what the story of Galveston tells is that globalization’s role in the downfall of American industry is massively oversold. But the symptoms have been as disastrous as the spin-doctors and propagandists would lead us to believe.
***
During summers of the 1980s, my family and I would take a two week holiday. The first week was typically spent in Dallas with my mother’s large Italian-American family, and then we would make a five hour drive down towards Galveston. The memory of arriving to Galveston is formed of two halves: first, the gravity-defying climb and stomach-lurching decent over the steeply curved causeway that connects the long, narrow island with what locals call the Mainland. Second, my mother’s voice from the front seat of the car, commenting, as we drive down Galveston’s wide central avenue, Broadway, about how much Galveston had gone “downhill.” I thought that the first had something to do with the second, the metaphorical use of the word escaping me.
For me Galveston was exotic: palm trees and pelicans, the frothy, army-green Gulf stretching out towards the twinkling lights of the oil platforms. At age seven and eight, I didn’t pay much attention to the closed-up store fronts, graffiti or overgrown medians; I even ignored the tar on the beach (there thanks to a heavily polluting oil industry).
But for my dad (also B.O.I.) and my mom (with her encyclopedic memory for people and details), the state of the island where they met and married (in the original of the two cathedrals) was something to be mourned, or at least gossiped about with family and friends still there. So-and-so’s business had closed, the nice family that used to live on Avenue O (Galveston’s streets being named after letters, half letters and numbers) had moved closer to Houston, the Flagship Hotel is looking even more bedraggled than last year. After a day or two, the verdict delivered by my mother over coffee in my grandparents’ kitchen was inevitably the same: “Galveston is depressing.”
***
In 1981, the Coca-Cola bottling plant which had been established in 1939 shut down, eliminating 100 jobs in the plant itself, and various others that were affiliated. Jobs like my grandfather’s, who used to work a shift staring at 4am delivering bottles of Coca-Cola picked up at the plant to the rest of the island (his home “ice box” always had at least six small glass bottles of Coke, a rare treat for my brother and I who under non-tropical meteorological conditions were not allowed to drink Coca-Cola). But Galveston was already losing out: in the late 1970s, Houston opened a container port, solidifying its role as the more important city, which had been slowly becoming the case since the early 1900s when the Great Storm convinced people that Houston would be a safer port than Galveston, which was subject to periodic destruction brought by hurricanes.
But this was just one small part of the story of decline. There’s also a story of financial capitalism at play here: the port of Galveston issued a number of bonds during those same years of the 1980s to finance projects meant to bring them up to date with things Houston had done at least a decade before (i.e. a container terminal), and found itself deeply indebted in the 1990s, forcing take overs and “down-sizing” by the end of the 20th century. In 1997, 300 manufacturing jobs were lost when the manufacturing part of the port closed for good. “Houston-based office jobs,” a local newspaper story noted at the time, “will not be affected.”
The decline of manufacturing and blue-collar jobs in the port of Galveston then, were undone in part by weather, and in part by financial capitalism, and have almost nothing to do with globalization or the rapid expansion of immigrants from all parts of Central America. The bifurcation of jobs, and income inequality along with it, arrived even to this tiny island in this new century of globalization: good paying jobs with benefits, mostly for professionals, remained for those who work for the premier university hospital in Texas; low-paying and low-social capital building service jobs to feed the tourism industry for everyone else, selling goods made in China along the seawall or the town’s Strand.
In November 2016, Galveston County voted for Trump in large numbers. Addiction and hopelessness remain high, the rate of poverty is higher than the national average. Make America Great Again seems just the right slogan for a city which has gone “downhill.”
***
On the back steps of my grandmother’s garden (enormous and magical in my mind’s eye, filled with mango and fig trees, lined with oleanders and containing a satisfying number of snails and rose bushes), my grandmother told me a story: inside of every sand dollar, there lived five white doves. We had spent the day collecting sand dollars from the beach several blocks from her house, but most of them were fragments. I had just one prized and fully intact sand dollar in my bucket. I didn’t say anything, but when she and my mother went up the stairs that lead through the storm door, past the magnetic hurricane tracking map to the kitchen, I decided to do it. To liberate the doves. I got the bucket ready to catch them so they couldn’t fly away.
Breaking it open — slowly, carefully — I found five pieces of shell. They were white and vaguely shaped like doves, but there was no risk that they were going to fly away. I cried and cried — so upset to have broken my one intact sand dollar for nothing.
I have often wondered how, at age 8 or 9, a child with a strong grounding in science and logic, I could have thought there were going to be tiny, live doves inside of my sand dollar. A quote that I read in a memoir about a British author’s own childhood (which takes place in another exotic world of oleanders) helps me understand: “The childhood view… is anarchic… without preconceptions. When you do not know what to expect of the world — when everything is astonishing — then anything is possible and acceptable.”
Childhood is not only an anarchic period, it is also one where memories slip and slide like bare feet on a tarry patch of Gulf sand. For my grandmother’s 90th birthday, the whole family travelled to Galveston to celebrate. The kids, M. and I of course flew in as well, and I had packed in my carry-on a rather unusual gift for her: a handmade cuckoo clock which I found in a shop specializing in woodwork in the Italian alps. I bought it earlier that summer because one of my strong memories of my grandmother’s house was a cuckoo clock on the wall above my grandpa’s chair. But when my grandmother opened it, just after telling me she loved it, she told me that there was never a cuckoo clock in her house, just lots of clocks that chimed the hour. Nonetheless, before M. and I headed back to Houston to catch our respective flights to China and Colombia (#peakglobalization), we mounted it on her wall.
I haven’t had the time to mention to my dad yet, but if no one else wants it, I will become the guardian of that cuckoo clock. And every time the little door opens and the chimes start, I will think of my grandmother and her house built after the great storm on Avenue M 1/2, forming my own anarchic view of childhood memory.
