Patton Dodd

Anyone wanting to get a taste of the economic and social changes affecting people in San Antonio would do well to take a drive down Zarzamora Street. It runs only 12.5 miles, but that short distance covers a lot of ground.

Here it is:

In that trip, you can see what’s churning in our city. Gentrification? Check. Aging public housing? Check. Boarded up businesses? Check. Struggling traditional schools? Check. Newer charter schools? Check. Historic churches? Check. Distressed houses? Check. Middle-income neighborhoods? Check. Big new developments? Check. Untouched fields? Check. Plus plentiful taquerias, old-school factories, local artist murals, and more.

Start in the Deco District. Open the Zillow app and click around the listings, and you’ll catch the tell-tale language of gentrification: “up and coming neighborhood!”—“popular area”—“recently transformed”—“restored to original glory”—“income-producing property.” Per square foot, this is some of the priciest real estate in San Antonio. Here’s a listing for $160/square foot; here’s one for $161.

Zarzamora runs that way for about 7 blocks, or half a mile. Then you cross Woodlawn, and things suddenly shift. Woodlawn Lake is within walking distance, but now we’re in not-yet-transformed territory. The real estate listing lingo changes: “great opportunity” — “great potential.” The prices per square foot nosedive: This one is $108. This one is $71.

(Every now and then, you’ll find a pioneering property, if “pioneering” is the right word, and it’s not. What I mean is that you’ll find someone who has ventured into an area they expect to gentrify, but they’ve ventured alone. “WOW COME SEE THIS HOME,” says this listing, which is asking $120,000 for 864 square feet. That’s $139/square foot on a block where most of the homes are severely distressed.)

 

Retail changes in this area, too, as does the density of it—more aging businesses, and also more boarded-up businesses.

Eventually, you cross Alazan Creek, and then Apache Creek. You’re near big public housing complexes like the Cassiano Homes, and venerable nonprofits like Good Samaritan Community Services.

Keep going south, and at some point you’ll realize you’re in what we call the Southside. Development is less dense here, and it’s more visibly middle class. You’ll see a Starbucks. You’ll see both a Home Depot and a Lowe’s. You’ll see the South Park Mall. Palo Alto College announces itself in the distance.

 

Passing under I-410 brings another dramatic change. Open fields abound, but there is an anchor institution: the Texas A&M University-San Antonio. It’s a commuter campus, and I imagine most students come via 410, but I recommend the Zarzamora route—especially to the sociology students. It’s easy to imagine the fields around this campus filling in as the years go by. For Sale signs are positioned at the edges of some fields as Zarzamora runs southward until it abuts Route 16.

Take a drive of Zarzamora. It’s all here—the city’s historic heart, its churning present, and its future in flux.

 

Over the last year-plus I’ve had dozens of conversations with people working to address inequity and inequality. They are scholars, nonprofit leaders, politicians, activists, ministers, business owners from a range of political, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Some make well into six figures doing what they do; others get by only a little better than those in the underprivileged communities they serve.

When we talk about the wealth and opportunity gap in San Antonio, we talk about a dizzying range of problems and a just-as-dizzying variety of potential solutions. But one idea, one theme, one solution comes up more than any other: “It’s really all about relationships.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that line come from the mouths of one of those people. And again, it doesn’t matter what their station in life is, their skin color, their political commitments. I’ve heard it from middle-aged, white, ultra-conservative Christians who live in all-red suburbs; I’ve heard it from queer activists of color who live in urban cores. Often it’s after we’ve discussed everything else—solutions that are promising and already working but are also big and complicated and slow-moving. It’s a line that brings things to a close, or adjusts perspective, or delivers a caveat to whatever else has been said. It’s really all about relationships.

What these people share is a conviction that the reason inequity and inequality are so bad in this country and getting worse is that we’re almost never actually confronted with the problem in any meaningful way. We hear data about inequality and injustice. We read stories. We form opinions. But we never personally interact with the problem—we don’t have physical, embodied, personal experiences of people who are not like us. Our neighborhoods, and thus our lives, are socially, economically, and culturally homogeneous, and we’re tricked into believing that the world basically looks like whatever our lives look like. This is particularly true in western cities that have been built for cars and where there is almost no opportunity to have a significant encounter with someone who is not a lot like you.

Still, it’s hard not to hear It’s all about relationships as soft, sentimental. The kind of thing people say when they’re not sure what else to say. Or even a cop-out, because the chances of wealthy and poor actually forming meaningful relationships are so slim.

But usually, the folks I’m talking to have operationalized this issue. They’ve experienced the power of unexpected relationships themselves and have realized how that experience reframes everything. One has moved into an extremely low-income neighborhood. One chooses to pastor a church in a low-income area. One runs a program that delivers food and other support to the poor, and she requires all (usually white and wealthy) volunteers to become mentor-coaches for people in her program. (She tells me that she’s pulling a trick—the wealthy people are the ones who end up feeling coached as they enter into these relationships.)

This is slow work, a person and a relationship at a time. But it’s a strategy that people who think about, write about, and work on inequity should take seriously. If people who are on the front lines of this issue are saying this, how do we make sure we’re hearing what they’re saying? How do we scale a solution like this?

Texas is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, and it’s growing in ways that belie its national reputation: it’s both an incredibly youthful state and and incredibly non-white state.

In his (utterly fantastic) new book God Save Texas, Lawrence Wright points out that in the city of Houston, for example, almost 40 percent of the population is under 24 years old, and “more than half that youthful cohort are Latino, and nearly 20 percent are African Americans.” Similar demographics (though trending more Hispanic) can be found in San Antonio, where I live.

But Wright points out another fact of this youthful cohort: this group is “the most likely to be undereducated.” Also, they’re often poor: “One in four Texas children lives in poverty.”

I find this state of affairs troubling to the point of terrifying. People talk a lot about how much Texas is booming — lots of good jobs, growing industries, open for business and all that. A couple weekends ago I drove from San Antonio to Dallas, passing through Austin and Waco, and in all four cities cranes dot the skylines. The growth narrative is real.

But our growth is uneven, which is to say inequitable — the increases we’re experiencing are not going to be good for very many people, relatively speaking. We’re investing in growth with tax incentives for developers and jobs creators, but we’re not also investing in our children by ensuring they are educated, well fed, and living in safe homes and neighborhoods. In these measures — how much we spend on education and attending to the needs of the most vulnerable — Texas ranks near the bottom.

We’re building roads and buildings and new neighborhoods; we’re remaking our urban cores. A lot of this work is good and necessary. But if we don’t change how we plan for a future Texas led by today’s young people, we’re also laying the groundwork for a future tragedy.

And as Wright puts it: “These failures will have national consequences, since one out of ten children in the United States is a Texan.”

 

A Quiet Place is a family movie. We’re hearing that it’s a post-apocalyptic horror movie, and it’s really effective at being that, but it’s real power–and its potential for staying power–is parabolic. It’s a taut depiction of the challenges families face, and even more so the unique journeys of individuals within families. Whether you’re a son or a daughter or a mother, father, brother or sister, A Quiet Place might have something to say to you.

Plot summaries and full reviews are plentiful elsewhere, so I just want to articulate a few (spoiler-filled!) reflections on what A Quiet Place has to say about families, especially about traditional family roles, the strength of mothers, and how we treat our most vulnerable children.

It’s surprising initially how much the husband and wife in the film, played by director John Krasinski and his real-life spouse Emily Blunt, fall into traditional male-female roles. From the very opening sequence, the film establishes that the father is a protector and provider, while the mother is a nurturer and caretaker. We don’t yet know a lot about what this family of five is going through, but we know they’re in a post-apocalyptic landscape, fending for themselves. They may be the only family on earth — or even a first family of a new earth, which reinforces the symbolic weight of each of their roles.

The husband/father, Lee, is almost a paragon of manliness. He reminded me of Michael Landon in Little House on the Prairie. Rugged, handsome. Tender toward wife and kids. He’s something of a scientist, but also something of a farmer. A skilled hunter-gatherer. A strategic thinker. It’s amazing how little of this comes off as corny or over-done — even his beard and broad shoulders are idealized types. But again, this is a parable, and parables work in types.

Meanwhile, the wife/mother, Evelyn (note the first three letters of her name), also falls into a traditional role. She cooks, she cleans. In a pivotal scene, when Lee goes off with his son to do some hunting-gathering, Evelyn stays behind with her daughter. (They are now a family of only four.) We see Lee teaching his son to trap and kill; we see Evelyn pinning shirts to the clothesline.

So the film had me thinking: Is it really embracing these old-school gender stereotypes?

But by the end of the film, much of this is upended. Not contradicted, but rather extended and complicated. The father remains heroic, even as he reaches the final limits of what he can do for his family. But the mother emerges much more fully by the final frame.

Indeed, a huge portion of the third act is devoted to Evelyn and to depicting her struggle and her strength. Again, she’s been left behind, and it becomes clear why the film arranged to leave her alone. It’s not only to ratchet up the tension when the monster inevitably terrorizes individual family members, one at a time. It’s also because it’s crucial for us to experience Evelyn in her solitude.

Things work differently for different families, of course, but for so many mothers, the experience of motherhood involves considerable loneliness. Much of the work of mothering happens alone. Perhaps there’s pleasure in this solitude; there’s also undoubtedly pain in it. At one point, we see Evelyn sitting alone in a room, reflecting on the loss of her son and weeping. We’ve not seen her mourn before now, when everyone else is around—her agony is private.

Later, Evelyn goes into labor, and she has to fend for herself and her new baby against the monster. (Emily Blunt is always good, but her performance in this sequence is  stunning.) Labor pangs start right as the monster is on the prowl. Because the one rule with this monster is that you can’t make a sound, she has to endure the suffering of childbirth in absolute quiet. She’s also injured her foot and is bleeding profusely. Evelyn has to suffer some of the worst pain a body can suffer–all without making a peep. And she does it, with an awesome display of determination and power.

Watching her wore me out.

Because so much screen time is invested in depicting her strength, the finale makes sense. In the last moment, she cocks her gun to take on the coming monsters, and we do not doubt that she has the power to protect her children and survive.

Finally, there is the daughter, who is deaf and who is the center of this story. (The wonderful actor who plays her, Millicent Simmonds, is deaf, too. Much of the dialogue in the film occurs through American Sign Language.) This movie has a lot to say about how we regard our disabled children — how we care for them, and how much we have to learn from them, and how ultimately, in the end, they might save us.

Go to see a well-made horror flick. That’s what I did. But unlike a lot of horror films, there’s not much sinister here. On the contrary, there’s a benevolent parable about people who find themselves in families, and what people in families can do for each other.