Alexis Madrigal on Globalization and the Battle for Oakland’s Soul
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim, in today for Alexis Madrigal, because Alexis is on book tour. That's right, my co-host and your regular 9 a.m. host has written a book called The Pacific Circuit, all about how Oakland's port has played a central role in global commerce and how global commerce has helped create the problems that Oakland and so many other U.S. cities experience today.

So join Alexis this hour, not as host, but as guest, to talk about why Oakland, as he writes, has a way of concentrating the power and problems of our country. Forum is next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim, in for Alexis Madrigal, because today's Forum guest is Alexis Madrigal. Alexis has spent the last nine years or more researching and writing the book we'll be talking about today, called The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city.

It takes a step back from what Alexis calls the usual storyline of Oakland, quote, great migration, urban renewal or Negro removal, crime and crack, gentrification and displacement. And it looks at how global trade and commerce have shaped the city and the problems it grapples with, all while Oaklanders have worked hard to keep the city vibrant and honest forever.

Alexis, congratulations on the book. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. It is so, so genuinely fun to be on with you. So great. Really, I was going to ask you because I think the last time we did this four years ago was on your first day as forum host in 2021. So I was wondering after four years of

of interviewing guests if it feels weird to be the guest. It definitely does. It's given me some more empathy for everyone launching a book out there. If you've ever been on Forum, you've launched a book. Man, it's tough. Thank you for coming on, you know? It's a lot of people, yeah. So then all the years you've been hosting, you've been writing this book since it took you about nine years, almost 10. So I'm sure researching it informed your hosting, but was it also the other way around? Did hosting inform the book content?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think hosting brought me into contact with so many different kinds of civic leaders and people on the street, people who are directly serving like all of our communities and thinking about them.

And I do. I think it all kind of made its way into the book, sometimes officially, like there's a few, even one actual scene from Forum in it. And sometimes just in the way that it made me think about what our entire region is going through in this kind of post-pandemic era. What's the scene from about Forum? People may have heard it. It's it's we broadcast from the site of the former Wood Street encampment.

And there was a crew of people who came through there and who had lived in Wood Street for a long time. And they just, their, the intensity of bonding and community and purpose that they had kind of rewired the way that I had been thinking about homelessness. And I will always remember one of the guests on that show, one of the people who's homeless said, you know, I need a, I need a door so that I can unclench my fists and think my hands can build something again.

And I was just like, no moment on the show has affected me more than that. And so that's in the book. Yeah. I was really struck by this central question that you talk about in the book, which is that there's so much money flowing through Oakland, enabled by the port and the role that it plays in the global economy, but it doesn't seem to stick around. So talk about that sort of realization and how it sort of inspired this whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I don't know if people remember high school physics class, but there'd be these like arrows showing like different forces on an object. And I kind of wanted to do that economically, specifically for West Oakland. You know, the part where when you're driving over the Bay Bridge and you see all the, you know, all the gantry cranes and all the containers, and then you get to this neighborhood that's filled with sort of empty lots and other kinds of things. Like that neighborhood right there, I was like,

How can this be 10 minutes from downtown San Francisco? How can this be attached to this economic engine of the Port of Oakland? And yet those forces somehow drive away the money from this beautiful, vibrant and very historical part of town.

And that realization, just like trying to figure out, like, what happened here? Like, what happened along 7th Street in West Oakland? That really drove the beginning of the book and led me to all these different places, from Silicon Valley's role in global trade to the, you know, kind of urban renewal history of Oakland and even further afield. But it was all basically driven by those, like, on-the-ground questions of what happened. Yeah, and of course, you really highlight

a lot of the impacts and not good impacts of this kind of central role and central spot that Oakland has as a port.

But I noticed the book is also a love letter to Oakland as well, especially to its residents. And there was this passage on page 25 that I was hoping you might be willing to read just to give our listeners a little bit of a sense. Sure, sure. Well, yeah, people know that I'm a Bay Area maximalist. I love the whole region. But Oakland is my home. It's like the only place that I have felt at home. And I also live there. So here we go.

Oakland people are just different. We don't agree on everything, but I do think living here suggests a certain deep Oaklandish politics. Oaklandish technically is a clothing brand here in town. They once made a shirt showing a cargo ship stacked with containers, which throws up a shadow of the city skyline.

I'm not talking about the brand per se, though, but you see what I'm saying about this place. We attend to the back end of industrial society. The first thing most people see of our city is the port and its massive cranes, containers stacked in the yards. Infrastructure is alive here, not just this technological sublime of steel and concrete, but cut through with the labor of individuals doing all the things that connect us physically to the production of the global economy.

Oakland is polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-racial. While for brief periods one demographic group held sway, Oakland has generally been a mix of people. Oaklandish people are highly conscious of the ways that institutional discrimination has structured every aspect of American society and also of the tremendous cultural ferment these circumstances have produced.

The pain and pleasure of belonging and not belonging. Of longing for some other home and making a new one. Of forgetting and of remembering. While Silicon Valley and San Francisco have dedicated themselves to the new, to the future, Oakland is not so sure. Ambivalence is a respectable position to take about new technologies. Oaklanders people want to pick and choose what innovations structure their lives. We want to shape some of them to our ends and leave other ones alone.

Our proximity to the fountainhead of technology means that we are deeply familiar with the new stuff, but we are not fully inside the logic of its producers. Our futurism is a necessity, not a luxury. Oaklandish futurism has to be intersectional. When exactly would the 70% of Oakland residents who are Latino, African American, or Asian be better off in these United States of America? Oaklandish people are looking around and listening to the place itself.

Some of this is not by choice. The bay and hills define the city seismically, meteorologically, economically. The landscape is impossible to ignore. It's so beautiful that anytime I'm high up in a building or on a freeway overpass or on a hike in the hills, I can be stunned into silence by a glance at the land and water.

The hills are also our connection to the original stewards of this place, the Ohlone people, and to the internal processes of the earth, over which all of life is but the thinnest film over deep time. But in parts of Oakland, the history embedded in the ground and the form of pollution can hurt you. The air gives your kids asthma. The water is not for swimming. But what beauty and possibility in the degraded landscape. Healing these places unlocks civic space, giving life

A perspective level up the whole planet climatically and otherwise is a degraded place. This is where we live. There is no virtue in setting out to find a pristine wilderness or live apart from this world. Oaklandish people in so many guises are trying to create collective space and action. Cooperatives, gardens, event series, community archives, dance crews, homeless camps, ad hoc committees.

When everything in the economic order is trying to blast yourself into monetizable particles staring at a phone, the Oaklandish solution is to ground down into the place, its people, the flows of labor that move everything, the historical guide wires that structure, dampen, and amplify the present.

That's my guest and your Forum 9am host, Alexis Madrigal, reading from his book, The Pacific Circuit. And listeners, join the conversation. How have you seen the forces of the global economy affecting Oakland or your life in the Bay? What do you want to ask or tell Alexis about Oakland?

Especially where you see Oakland's resilience. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram threads. You can call us 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

The Oakland-ish solution is to ground down into the place. I feel like that is such a metaphor for what you did. And through that process, really coined the idea of the Pacific Circuit. What is that? Yeah, it's the set of relationships that exist between the manufacturing economies of Asia and the West Coast of the United States. And it has an origin point. That origin point is Oakland.

It's where things got started during the Vietnam War as containerization, which is this process where we started to ship goods in boxes instead of stacked inside ships where the ship itself was the container. That process kicks off an incredible change in the global economy using Silicon Valley technology to control production in Asian countries, all as part of kind of the U.S. foreign policy push to make sure that sort of the Pacific was American.

So then remind us why Oakland became the site of a major port and not, you know, like San Francisco. Yeah, yeah. San Francisco, if you look at the city, it still has, you know, piers all around it, you know, like a crown. But you need right next door to a big container port, you need hundreds of acres of space to store containers. So what's behind those piers in San Francisco is downtown San Francisco. So you can't put it there permanently.

Where can you put it, though? And you need hundreds of coastal acres. You happen to find it in a neighborhood that has been marginalized and disempowered in West Oakland. And that's one reason why the Port of Oakland took off and why it grew where it did. Right. This is right next to a very large black community in Oakland. Right.

Talk about the effect that the port had. It had so many, but there are a couple you're really keying on. Yeah. I mean, one of the key ones for the people of Oakland is that it generated tons of diesel trucks running through the neighborhood. You know, those containers don't move themselves to Target, right? They got to go somewhere. And they go via diesel truck. And usually those diesel trucks, particularly in the past, were the oldest, dirtiest trucks in the trucking fleet ever.

And what that meant for people who were living, you know, directly next to the port, surrounded by three freeways, was diesel particulate matter in their lungs and in the lungs of their children. You know, that part of West Oakland has also had a major industrial history. And so there are also pollutants in the ground. So people are living in this area.

physical environment that is pretty bad for people. And we know that from research that, you know, takes many years off people's lives to live in a neighborhood that has been made into an environmental sacrifice zone for the purpose of, you know, growing global trade and the economy. Yeah. And it's so stark when you read about it in the book, just how it is physically racially segregated so, you know, intensely at the same time that it's also being declared, I mean,

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the city of Oakland developed a way basically of targeting black communities that was declaring them blighted. And there was a sort of kind of algorithmic decision making process that went into that. And one of the things that was fascinating in this book was to realize how much that, you know, kind of automatic decision making was in place even in the 1950s.

We're talking with Alexis Madrigal, 9 a.m. host of Forum, about his book, The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city, which looks at how global trade and commerce have shaped Oakland and the problems it grapples with. And we'll have more with Alexis and with you after the break. Stay with us. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

With reliable connectivity, enhanced cybersecurity, and advanced fiber solutions, Comcast Business is powering the engine of modern business. Switch today and ask how to get a $500 prepaid card on a qualifying gig speed package. Offer ends 4-21-25. New customers only with a two-year agreement. Other restrictions apply.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Nina Kim, and I'm talking this hour with your 9 a.m. host, typically Alexis Madrigal. Alexis has written a new book called The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city. And you, our listeners, are invited to join the conversation because he's talking about Oakland. And I'd love to hear how you have seen the forces of the global economy affecting Oakland.

Thank you.

And Mike writes, great to have you on as a host. I love how passionate you are about the Bay and Oakland. Uh, I should also mention that KQED is hosting a book launch party for the Pacific circuit on Thursday, March 27th at seven at KQED in San Francisco. And we'll feature Alexis along with Jenny Odell and town win and Meryl Carbis. So you got to come out to that as well and look for information on that too. Um,

You know, we were talking about just the politics and the calculation around where to locate the port. And a lot of that story is pretty well known. But there is a part of this that you say is often overlooked.

And that is the role that Silicon Valley has played in the kinds of effects that we have seen based on this real emphasis on, you know, really going big on containerization and the digital economy and so on. Yeah. And this is something that really grew out of hanging out with longshoremen, reading what longshoremen were saying and how they thought about what containerization did and where it came from.

The containers are kind of the physical embodiment of global trade.

But you need to be able to control those things. So there's a guy named Herb Mills, who's an old longshoreman. And that was his thing. It's like the modern global economy is essentially containers. And then all this stuff that Silicon Valley is producing, the information technology that allows you to know where those containers are to direct production in other places and create these highly interconnected global supply chains. And the...

And Silicon Valley didn't just make the stuff to do that. It also was making its own stuff in Asia, like in some industries, right? They were domestic industries totally first, and then they sort of outsourced to other countries.

The silicon in Silicon Valley kind of comes from semiconductor companies, and those semiconductor companies from the early 1960s were already setting up pieces of their operation in different places in Asia. So the most famous of those semiconductor companies called Fairchild in part because it spawned a bunch of other ones called the Fairchildren, one of which was Intel, and has, you know, all the... It keeps going, that tree, all the way to NVIDIA, new semiconductor companies.

And they're set up all across Asia so that by the early 1980s, half of the people working in export zones and free trade zones in Asia are working for what we would now call technology companies. And you say that this is something that can be hard to sort of wrap our minds around because in some ways it feels pretty invisible. But you say some people did notice, right? Like people like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers. What did he say? What did he see? I

Yeah, this is fascinating. This is a time in the early 1970s where Huey Newton is living in that tower by Lake Merritt. I think people might know that. There's only one tower on Lake Merritt on the sort of port side. I mean, you can literally look down at the port. And I found this incredible essay by him called The Technology Question, where he was trying to think through what global supply chains are doing to us and

One of his key observations is that by building these global supply chains that span, you know, oceans and countries, it actually is changing the nature of what a country is. And so he comes up with this new way of thinking about the world called intercommunalism. And he basically says, you know, he cites a Ford executive who says, you know,

You don't like Americans? Well, who do you like? The British? The Germans? We have a lot of flags, right? Kind of trying to say that like transnational corporations and transnational production was really changing the way the world worked. And I think he was about 30 years ahead of the rest of the world in kind of realizing how deeply important this would be to local communities as well as to the kind of nature of modern life.

Well, we've got some calls coming in and let me go to Andre in Oakland. Hi, Andre. You're on. Hello. Thank you so much. I appreciate KTD covering this super important subject. So I'm from Oakland. I'm wondering what is the Port of Oakland's responsibility to West Oakland community, particularly the residents that live there when the port expanded in 2008?

into that area and then also Caltrans, California State Department of Transportation building that highway through West Oakland. What are their responsibilities to help revitalize and repair the harm that was done?

I mean, Andre, absolutely. I think they have a responsibility. And I think it's been the role of the community to make sure that they take that responsibility on. You know, I think a lot of these institutions were built essentially to be invulnerable to these types of requests from the community. And so, you know, the spine of the book is really the story of Miss Margaret Gordon, who's an environmental justice leader in West Oakland, whose life has been heavily impacted by

by Bart, by Caltrans, and then living in West Oakland, has been able to kind of hold the port's feet to the fire, both like as an external environmental justice leader, but she actually got onto the port board and was able to effect pretty major change in cleaning up the air.

The issue is that I don't know that those particular organizations alone can do enough to make up to repair that harm. And that's kind of where the book actually drifts towards there at the end, eventually arguing really that we do need to do major repair in West Oakland. And we need to build a multiracial coalition that can figure out how to do that and make sure that everybody benefits from the revitalization of those neighborhoods.

Andre, thanks so much for the question. This is where Margaret writes, I'm not so enamored by the city of Oakland. Oakland pushed out Google despite the tax dollars the company could have brought to a city in desperate need of money. I've worked in group homes and live in Berkeley and understand the need to be open-minded and liberal, but Oakland governance takes it to an extreme. Curious to get your reaction to Margaret's assessment. And also, you know, what you would say have been

impacts that this positioning of Oakland as like a central node in global commerce has had in the globalized world we live in today if you attribute positive things to it.

Yeah. I mean, I take Margaret's question a couple different ways. I mean, one is, and thanks for that, Margaret. I think you got to separate out the city government from the people of Oakland. That's pretty clear. That's a love letter to the people of Oakland, not to the city government of Oakland. And there's a deeper question in there, which is about what is the model of economic development that's going to work for a city like Oakland? I think

And that really is a central concern of this book, right, is if you bring in a big business, whether it's, you know, something out at the port or whether it's, you know, Google or Uber or Stripe in the in the city, does the rising tide of wealth that that brings, does it actually lift all boats?

And I think one of the answers that you would hear in West Oakland and that, you know, one of the leaders of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project makes in the book is that he calls that sort of big, he didn't say stuff, but big stuff. And big stuff benefits a certain set of people in the city. It makes the city maybe wealthier on paper. But for many, many, many people, a rising tide doesn't lift their boat because they don't have a boat.

And they drown in the economic turbulence that comes with a bunch of wealth coming into the city. And I think if you look at what has happened in Oakland...

You look at the still high levels of crime. You look at a lot of the problems that the city government is having. And then you say, but this place has been heavily gentrified over the last several decades. Oakland kind of can be the poster child for you. You can't actually gentrify your way out of a lot of other problems to our earlier caller, Andre. You have to repair what was done. You can't just spread money over the top and hope that that fixes everything. You've also connected the Pacific Circuit to our community.

Very high housing costs. So how? Make that connection. Yeah. So one of the most fascinating bits of research that I did for this book was trying to figure out the relationship between kind of financialization, which is having a huge effect on the American economy and really did have a huge effect in the aughts in West Oakland with the housing boom and bust. So I was trying to kind of like track that down. Like what happened there? Another one of these kind of street level up sort of things.

investigations. And one of the arguments that economists have made is that as we built these export-oriented economies in Asia, working with these Asian countries to bring more goods over,

They need to work within this kind of American financial system. And so they end up holding a lot of dollar-denominated assets. So they end up holding funds that fund things in the United States. And that's one reason why there's so much money sluicing around our financial system. And a ton of that money, over time, went to these mortgage-backed securities back in the global financial crisis because...

people thought that was just holding a dollar denominated asset. And when all that money came through, that giant pool of money, as This American Life famously described it, it went looking for people to make loans to. It wasn't like people in West Oakland were looking to get a reverse mortgage, you know. But what happened was many, many people took those loans when these institutions went trying to drum up business in, you know, historically redlined places like West Oakland and

And that's one of the key kind of connections is that that money that comes in from the giant pool of money is driving a lot of our real estate in the Bay Area and all across the country.

People hearing this might already get the sense that your book goes wide, Alexis, real wide to touch on, as you put it, the ramifications of a compulsively digital future. Was there any point when that started to feel overwhelming where you were like, wow, how do I put boundaries on all this? Yeah. I mean, the boundary was really to make sure that this was really connected deeply to the on-the-ground circumstances in West Oakland. Like everything that's, that was what I wanted to do. I was like-

I'm on the ground, I'm walking around, I'm talking to people, I'm riding my bike. And so often people think that the real battles are happening between the people and like the city government or the people and whatever. But the real battles are happening between the structural changes that have occurred in our economy and the

conditions of people's lives that they don't like, you know? So it was trying to figure out like, what is doing all this stuff? You know, what, what are these structural forces that people like Miss Margaret are up against? Because it's just too often that you don't get to see both pieces. You either have a big ideas book. That's like,

here's the structure of the world, you know, or you have like a like a close focus, like, here's a leader in a city trying to do the best that they can, you know, but I wanted those things to feel as connected as I think they are in reality. Yeah, I can see how that would be really helpful. But still, like it seeps into so much that you have to try and account for. And there's this one point in the book where you talk about the theory of liquid modernity. And I thought, oh,

Oh, was that something that also super helped Alexis wrap his mind around all of this? Yes, I think so. I think Liquid Modernity, you know, it's a theory by a guy, a Polish theorist named Zygmunt Bauman. And he basically says like,

You know, there is power exists in the world, but it no longer has the kind of democratic handles that it used to. It's kind of some of the some of the same stuff that Huey Newton was seeing, too. Right. And so what it means is when you go to try and change some condition of your life, you can't do it. And it makes it feel and this is sort of paraphrasing Bauman that, you know, anything can happen, but nothing can be done, right?

And man, don't the last 10 years in the Bay Area feel just like, man, anything can happen. You can have a pandemic. You can have this unexpected election of Donald Trump. The mayor of Oakland can be indicted. But like nothing can be done. We can't seem to fix any of our big problems. You know, no one seems to have either the ideas or the capital or the political organizing to fix these big things.

And I was really looking for people, I realized, who were trying to find an answer to that, who were trying to find a way to get some handles on that power and change conditions for people's real and actual lives. Yeah. And I really want to dig into some of the people that you met along the way and learn a little bit more about them. But in the meantime, let me remind listeners that.

that you get to talk with Alexis Madrigal today as a guest. You get to put your questions to him because he is the guest of today's show for the book he wrote called The Pacific Circuit, A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, which looks at how global trade and commerce have shaped Oakland and the problems that it grapples with. Listeners, have you seen those forces acting on Oakland? What would you like to say about that? Where have you seen Oakland rise up and

Oakland's resilience. What do you want to ask or tell Oakland, uh, tell Alexis about Oakland? You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on blue sky, Facebook, Instagram, and others at KQED forum, our social channels. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. And also a correction, the event that, uh,

And the book launch party that Alexis is going to have is going to be in Oakland, and you can find more details about that at kqed.org. This listener, Stephanie, writes, I can't wait to read this book. I've only lived in Oakland since 2010, but chose to live here because of its diversity and edginess. However, I have always felt like the city, its civic leaders and residents seem stuck in the past. What is their vision for the city? How do we honor the past and move forward? Great.

That's a really good question. I think it's partially, I felt haunted by this book and I felt haunted by a lot of things that I learned in this book. And on, actually on forum one time we had Ingrid Rojas Contrerasan, you know, San Francisco novelist. And she was talking about the role of ghosts in her work.

And one of the things she said was that ghosts provide a way for people to kind of to do something about the past. You can appease the ghost. You can bring offerings. You can do all these things. And I kind of feel like when people are thinking about the future of Oakland, they need to let themselves be haunted. They have to think about what are the actual histories that could be remedied. And I think one thing.

One place where that seems very obvious to me is we have a lot of polluted areas along the coast in Oakland. We know from, you know, KQED's Ezra David Romero that there's going to be these toxic tides that as sea level rise begins to occur long before the actual land is flooded, it's going to push those toxins up into people's lives again, even if they've been buried in one way or another.

And we got to clean that up. We really have to clean that up. And that's like a concrete way we can begin the process of remediating a lot of this land, creating new civic space.

And I think like putting that land into the hands of communities themselves is a really important piece of that. So I think there are solutions to at least some of these problems and ways to use that history to guide the way that we think about the future, as opposed to think of that history as something that's dragging us down or something that is impossible to deal with.

Well, Linda writes, does the Oakland Port Authority add anything to the Oakland community in the way of programs or developing neighborhoods near the port? I think there's probably, I think the Port of Oakland would say they are.

You know, the Port of Oakland owns a ton of stuff just by the strange historical vagaries of how the Port of Oakland was created. I mean, they own a big chunk of Jack London. I mean, they own lots and lots and lots of stuff. And of course, they do do economic development. And I think they are much more responsive to the community than they were, you know, decades ago. I mean, decades ago, you know, the strange piece of land that you can kind of see in the bay. It has this incredibly artificial shape that

That's a Nutter Terminal. It's at the very end of 7th Street. And that place was the very last piece of Bay Fill. There was a place called the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission. People may know that, BCDC.

And literally they broke ground on that thing one day before the BCDC could, could have regulated them. Like the port used to just not care at all what people thought of what they were doing. They saw their goal purely to increase economic development. And they have been, thanks to people like Chapel Hayes who worked early with the port and early environmental justice leader and many, many others, they have become more and more responsive, I think, to what the community wants to see. And I, I,

think that's good. I also think, you know, that community pressure is a necessity too. Yeah. We're talking about the effect of the port on Oakland and on global commerce and the effect of global commerce on all of us and very much so on Oakland and how Oakland illuminates so many of those things when you take a closer look, which Alexis Madrigal has done with his book called The Pacific Circuit. And

And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation, as always, at 866-733-6786 on our social channels at KQED Forum, at the email address forum at kqed.org. Now's your chance to ask Alexis Madrigal as guest your questions, especially about Oakland and its resilience and what you love and what you see as the issues Oakland faces. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about a new book called The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul out of an American city, which looks at how global trade and commerce have shaped Oakland and the problems it grapples with, and also how Oaklanders have

have worked hard to keep the city vibrant and honest. And it's a book that's written by my guest and your usual 9 a.m. forum host, Alexis Madrigal. Join the conversation by our usual channels, the phone number 866-733-6786. And we've got Pete on the line in Oakland. Hi, Pete. Thanks for waiting. You're on.

Thank you so much. Hey, Alexis, I really appreciate what you've attempted to do. I haven't read the book yet, but anybody that's willing to write a love letter to Oakland has got my heart already. So thank you. Thanks, Pete. And it's complicated. Yeah, sure. I was born here and I've been watching a lot of shifts as a

And especially maybe even in the last, I don't know, 10, I'm going to say 15 years or so, the Occupy Wall Street movement, when it kind of showed up, it changed a lot of the energy that was here. And then some really, you know, and then like kind of things moved in a direction. Once COVID happened, we actually sort of had a strange renaissance in Oakland. Super cool. Brooklyn Basin was just going off, roller skating, salsa. It was so vibrant and fun.

Then, you know, I feel like we're, you know, as one of the previous callers or emailers wrote in saying, like, something about the politics. I think it's right to say, like, yeah, it doesn't actually reflect who we are, but in some ways we are ping-ponging around and there's a lot to track. And so I can't wait to read your book because I want to track what's happening. And I guess I'm wondering how you got your arms around politics

so much of what we're calling Oakland. Yeah. Oh, man, yeah. And I think maybe, thanks so much for that. I think one of the things you're kind of alluding to is Oakland is struggling a bit, particularly on that sort of commercial side of things. You know, you go walk around downtown Oakland right now,

And man, there's a lot of empty storefronts. Like it's, you know, something I've always thought about Oakland is that, you know, really concentrates so many of the problems of not, you know, San Francisco and the Bay Area, but also like the country, you know, and I think the country really is still struggling in many ways, too. And I think one of the things I'm not sure about and that I certainly kick around in the book and think about is,

Did the pandemic, was it just a blip and we'll go back to the previous trend line and things will be better, like that there will be restaurants can stay open and we'll have stores again everywhere? Or did the pandemic actually like pull forward the future a little bit? And people got so used to, particularly in the Bay Area, got so used to doing things on their phones that

that we don't really have the same kind of vibrant commercial space that we should given the kind of people we have and even just the amount of wealth that's like that's in the city, you know, and

And I think about this a lot, you know, people used to kind of pride themselves on having a guy and that guy could be a person of any gender, but people used to pride themselves on having a guy. Like if you need a part for a fish tank or you needed like this certain, you know, specific kind of service, you'd have like a guy who could help you do that, you know, and they'd get, get that thing for you. Bookstore, you know, you'd go to a specialized bookstore, but

And now, instead of having, you know, this network of trusted people spread out across your city, you have like a pile of Amazon boxes and like a row of apps on your phone. And I think that's just fundamentally worse. You know, I think it is like just that you can run the city both ways, but like it's worse to have the latter. So yeah.

I do think there's a part of this that we can begin to fix by trying to live more fully in the places where we are physically located. It's another dimension of kind of pulling ourselves out of our phones. It's not just looking away from social media. It's actually also remembering that if you want vibrant goods in dense neighborhoods of people having a good time, you need to contribute to that too. You've also discovered sort of

how people were able to carve out spaces where they could push back on something that often felt like it was hard to get, you know, your handles to grab any handles on. And that is where you say, yeah,

and all of the things that it has to do ultimately and eventually has to touch land. And we have this comment here from Aaron who says, my late father came of age in Oakland during the Depression and World War II. He often spoke of how vibrant union activity was in Oakland, particularly the general strike in 1954. What is the state of union influence today? And you really do home in on the longshoremen's union. So I don't know if that's like, but talk about that a little

but it's just like a site. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I think ILWU, which is the Longshore Workers Union, has actually done a pretty amazing job, you know, since the 1930s of like taking care of their workers. I mean, people may not know this history, but it's actually a pretty...

amazing history. I was talking with a guy in Baltimore just the other day who covers the East Coast Union, and we have a totally different story. You know, we have a totally different story on the West Coast, in part because the union integrated in 1934. And so there has long been this incredible racial solidarity that existed on the waterfront in

in the West. The other thing that's really fascinating about ILWU is like, they were a pretty radical union. I mean, they were kicked out of the other union partnerships as being too radical. They have what's called a coastwise contract. So they have, they have control of the ports along the entire West coast. And one of the key realizations is that when that power, when that capital like touches the land, those,

Those specific spots, the ports of the West Coast, provide an incredible amount of control and power. And the longshoremen have been really good at taking advantage of that and being able to shut down ports if they need to over the years. I mean, I think to the deeper question, though, the truth is that containerization was kind of like automation. It was a form of automation. And as a result, there's a lot fewer longshoremen than there used to be.

Many more of them, you know, they don't they used to work down in the holds of ships These guys used to work in what was called a gang, you know, and they'd be working a coffee ship and

They'd go clanking up the gangplank. They'd go down into a hold. And then, you know, two guys would have hooks, you know, and they'd drop them into the burlap of the coffee sack and they'd throw the coffee bags onto a pallet and it would come up out of the ship, you know. That generated, I think, a lot of solidarity and a natural politics that maybe when you're not working in quite those same kind of conditions, maybe the union loses a little bit, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, this other listener, Dan, writes, Alexa said that Ms. Margaret Gordon got on the port board, but no, Mayor Ron Dellums put Margaret Gordon onto the port board despite massive opposition to give voice to a West Oakland port activist. That's also true. And she then also got booted off the board as well by the next mayor. And, you know, Mayor Dellums made some fantastic appointments.

Do you want to say more about Margaret Gordon as a central figure in your book and why? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Margaret Gordon's story and her family's story is really representative, I think, a lot of Black people in the Bay Area. You know, most Black people in the Bay Area have their roots in the kind of western parts of the south. So, you know, like Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and, you know, her family's from Arkansas and Texas, right?

You know, she was born in Richmond, you know, in shipyard housing up there when it still existed before the government bulldozed it. And then her family grew up both, you know, in Hunters Point near the shipyard and also in Ingleside when that neighborhood was first integrating. And so, you know, she's experienced a lot of that great migration experience. She had kids very young. Her life took some really difficult turns there.

and really hit a low in 1989, which is also kind of the low for Oakland when we have this massive earthquake.

And so from there, West Oakland and I think Oakland in general has tried to like build itself back. It's like in fits and starts, it goes well and we pull back. But I feel like there's a kind of a before and after specifically in West Oakland. It's 1989. And that's true for Miss Margaret's life as well. And, you know, I've been really blessed and feel really lucky. I've gotten to spend so much time with her and her family over time. The nerve she was really able to touch was coal, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a...

We've done some shows about this over the years. And, you know, there is, as part of this massive Army base redevelopment in Oakland, there is a bulk export terminal proposed by Phil Tagami, who some people may know, very prominent developer in the Bay. And it is one of those areas of activism that has been quite successful. That...

would take coal from Utah and send it to Asia. See, Pacific Circuit just coming back around again. And Miss Margaret and many other community activists from other places going under this kind of umbrella organization, No Coal in Oakland, said,

have successfully stopped that terminal from being built, even though the city of Oakland has lost many legal battles and other things have happened around it. It still doesn't exist. And what that means for the climate is that that coal is still in the ground in Utah, thanks to

to them as well as, you know, thanks to many other activists up and down the West Coast who have prevented this kind of large scale terminal from being built. And that's kind of another way that you can see that local power executed, you know, in this way can have these kind of global repercussions. Yeah. Let me go to caller Robert in Santa Rosa. Hi, Robert, you're on.

Thank you very much. And Alexis, what a treat to be able to ask you a question as an author rather than as the emcee. I love your show for the years that I was in Richmond, and I love it now on my app here in Santa Rosa. And thank you also, Nina. So real quickly, it's a bit off the topic maybe, but...

When I was in Richmond in the Bay Area, I watched the A's basically get, you know, sold or sneak out of town over the clear objection of everyone, I think. Well, not everyone, but many of us in the Bay Area. So I'll just ask off the air, what's your take on how that could happen given the strong, you know, current of support?

And, I mean, forget the Warriors. I mean, that was a different era. That's the one that broke my heart. Although it's still nice. Chase Center's nice. I'm not trying to hate them. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good broken so many times, but my heart's been broken so many times by the East Bay sports industry. But I don't think you're off topic because we're getting actually a lot of questions and comments about this. Alexis, we've got another listener on Blue Sky who writes Oakland once was vibrant enough to lure the A's from Kansas City and the Warriors from San Francisco as well as persuading a local businessman to greet the Raiders. What happened? Yeah.

It's interesting how the sports teams have become this kind of like metaphor for the city, though, you know, they kind of left us holding the bag in many ways financially. I think that at least some of it has to do with, you know,

Oakland is less in kind of freestanding part of the Bay Area than maybe it once was. I think many... The Bay increasingly, as Silicon Valley has grown, as San Francisco has become such an important node in the kind of global archipelago cities, it's like Oakland is more, you know, an organelle inside the Bay Area cell, you know? It's no longer maybe quite as distinct as it once was. But it is interesting because it's...

by any account is like a much wealthier place than it was in the heyday of those teams and it just goes to show maybe that like money isn't everything you know there's more to a city than you know median income and the price of the average house yeah

Well, Rich writes, please discuss the role of increasing real estate prices and rents and the factors that have driven those. Talk about that, but also, you know, in this context of also wanting to talk about these touch points where there are ways that you can push back. And this is literally with land, but yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think if you just look at the way the American system is set up,

as a property market, as real estate markets, there isn't really a way within a market framework to stop prices from going up in a place where wealthier populations are moving in or even there's just more wealth around. I mean, it is just what is going to happen and we've seen it

all over the country. We've seen it most intensely in the Bay Area because there is so much wealth now in the Bay Area and the repercussions of that. But I do think that there are some emerging models. And one I found totally fascinating, and I end the book with it because I just think it's so interesting, is there's a woman named Noni Session working on a thing called the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. And what this does, EBPREC, is it

It pulls land out of, it kind of separates the two things that real estate does, right? It acts as an asset and it's a roof over your head, right? And like we all need housing. We all need a roof over our head. But also there's this weird thing in the United States that it also tends to be the biggest holder of value for people, of wealth for people.

And so I love that model of EBPREC being able to be a place that can unite different members of a community, rich and poor alike, to join this cooperative, which can then hold property in perpetuity through this variety of kind of legal structures that they've developed. And in my mega happy scenario, you'd clean up West Oakland with local remediation, with banning the box, with getting all kinds of people to work on this property.

And then that land would be turned over to community groups in these cooperatives that would permanently take that land out of the market. I mean, we've seen it work in other contexts, like look at land trusts.

You look at what they've been able to do in terms of like preserving land. But this would be this would allow local residents to have control over what happens to the land permanently outside of the market. And that became my core belief about real estate was that the only way to fix some of our problems with rising prices are to pull things out of the private real estate market in these different ways.

Well, this listener, Genevieve writes, whenever people ask me where I'm from, I say sunny, beautiful Oakland, California. It continues to amuse me how many people respond by laughing or averting their gaze in confusion to the idea that Oakland is beautiful. If we all identified our city in this positive way, we might make a dent in Oakland's perceived stigma.

Rocky writes. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I love Oakland. I mean, I hope that's clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really do. For all of its things, all of its complexity, being this incredible meeting place between, you know, the power and wealth of San Francisco and Silicon Valley and the kind of radical ideas and frequencies that are, you know, around Berkeley and also just in the ground in Oakland. I think it is. There's no place like it in the world. I'm sure of that.

Noelle wants to know, did Alexis use information from that other Oakland book, Hellatown, Oakland's history of development and disruption? I love that book. That's a wonderful, like one volume history of Oakland. I think everyone should read it. Mitchell Swartzer's book, Hellatown. I did, you know, I'm going to, I

I'm in a different research trajectory a little bit. And so most of my stuff came from a bunch of archives, African-American museum in Oakland, different archives, the FHA archive out in Washington, DC, talking to people in the streets, the Oakland history center and Dordley Lazard, you know,

I went all, all over the place to try and figure out what happened. You did. I think Randy's question is getting at a lot of sort of maybe what your book is pointing to or wanting us to think about. Randy on Blue Sky writes, you said that a rising tide doesn't raise all the boats in Oakland because not everyone has a boat. How would you suggest we get boats to the communities that need a life raft? Yeah. And I,

A lot of that has to do, I think, with changing the model of economic development that we've all kind of imagined would happen. I mean, I think people... You look at what happened in West Oakland. $250 million went into improving the infrastructure of the Port of Oakland. And as one of the characters in the book says, the city of Oakland hasn't spent $250 million on West Oakland in its entire history. And so there's this...

You know, kind of fascinating way that we all seem to have had drilled into us that the way to give people boats is to, like, build some new building, to, like, go to a large developer and have them put in a big building. And I think at least part of what this book is arguing is that these more community-centered solutions need more support, that it can't just be, you know, a local community group that has, like,

It needs to be official and serious support needs to go to this community basis and build people up from where they are rather than, you know, handing money to someone who's already tied into City Hall and then hoping that that trickles down to those folks. Well, Rocky writes, I'm passing along a reminder that the Oakland Roots kickoff is this weekend at the Coliseum. The next evolution of sports in that town will lift up our institutions even when pro sports tries to beat us down.

Alexis, you already had a strong connection to this book before you wrote this, but, but does it this place before you wrote this book, but, but I'm wondering how it's changed your relationship to it in, in any way if it has. Yeah.

And we just have 20 seconds. Yeah, it's deepened it. It's deepened it and it's made it extend much further across the whole city. Not just my little block. Shout out to the Colbyverse. Yeah. Yeah, it's close, but it's deep. Alexis Madrigal, the book is The Pacific Circuit. Thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you, Nina. Thank you, listeners, as well for your questions and comments. And thanks, Caroline Smith, for producing this segment. This is Forum.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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