Know History…or No Future

All hope isn’t lost, it just has a different address.

‘“To destroy a people,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted acidly, “you must sever their roots.” The wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon called them, have been shorn of any ideological or cultural cohesion. They are cut off from their past. They live in crushing poverty, numbing alienation, hopelessness and often terror. Mass culture feeds them the tawdry, the violent, the salacious and the ridiculous. They are rising up against these forces of modernization, driven by an atavistic fury to destroy the technocratic world that condemns them.’ ~ Christopher Hedges, “The Age of Anger” Nation of Change

By understanding our histories and respectfully listening to the those of others, we, as a global people, can not only withstand any disruption, but also grow stronger — together — into a shared future.

I lived in LA from 1987–2000, surviving earthquakes, fires, mudslides, riots and the OJ Simpson trial. When I moved back here in 2000, Austin was experiencing the beginnings of the economic dot ‘bomb’ and there were a lot of questions about the future. It was a different Austin than the one that tops every ‘best of’ list today. With the technology engine reduced to a quiet hum, people had the time to connect, explore and envision new possibilities. During this time Richard Florida was finishing up his book Rise of The Creative Class that came out in 2002 and gave Austin a new identity. [He’s since rethought some of his messaging with his latest book The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class — and What We Can Do About It. Unfortunately, it might be too late to undo the damage done in Austin by the policies built around his original premise.]

I was fortunate to be introduced to the incredible creative life of East Austin through the artisans I got to know. As I met more people and got to know the neighborhoods, it inspired the Texas Legacy Arts Incubator concept, which is a learn/earn model using building/cultural legacy arts to teach math & science (this was before anyone talked about STEM or STEAM). Although I lived in far west Travis County, I was in East Austin every day learning about the neighborhood, meeting with community groups, building connections and trying to convince investors that East Austin was a great place to invest in the community. I would have done so myself if I had the financial bandwidth to do it at the time. But, as we have all experienced, those with money are risk averse and only get into games that guarantee that they win.

It’s now 16 years later and the location that we had envisioned for TLAI is going through brownfield remediation so that the developers can build high-dollar housing with retail on the bottom. This is the land between 4th & 5th Streets just east of I-35, on which Reji Thomas had her Graphic Glass studio that became Pine Street Station then the Levi’s Fader Fort during SXSW and, finally, a memory that will disappear as those of us who spent time there let it go.

In 2005, at the last meeting I attended about the potential location for TLAI, I was flat out told that I was the wrong color to do anything in East Austin. It was Reji who stood up and said “you’re fools if you think this woman doesn’t care about your future, because your future is *our* future, if we don’t work together, they’ll tear us apart”. And she was right, the only color that matters in East Austin is green, which is apparent in the lack of affordability and the local paper writing about the ‘Latin atmosphere’ instead of the cultural roots. The kind of roots that Lench Martinez has going back over 6 generations. In his song, What Happened to Austin (My Beautiful City) he sums up the core story of the gentrification that now makes it a ‘hipster paradise’:

“You seen what they did to the Fran’s on Congress,
now they wanna do the same thing to Montopolis.
Make it all spotless; take out the Tom Gro,
raise up the taxes, build up the condos.”

I absolutely know that if the Texas Legacy Arts Incubator had come to life on the Cap Metro land, the opportunity landscape of Austin would be very different today. But, as was done in Austin’s City Plan of 1928, the story and the checks were written far from the people it affected. We are all poorer for the loss of the wealth, both in money & cultural identity.

All hope isn’t lost, it just has a different address.

TLAI will happen, it will just be under a different name and in partnership with people that have the visceral knowledge of the past and the intellectual curiosity in the present that’s needed to inform the wisdom economy of the future.

I’ve learned so much in these 16 years, most importantly who to trust with our shared future.