San Antonio Rose
I used to think my hometown was a sleepy, slow-moving place where nothing much would ever happen. But forty years after I left, the city is a bustling, economically vibrant, progressive place I hardly recognize—in a good way.
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In fact, there are fewer and fewer people who recall how difficult San Antonio’s growing pains were. I was a teenager in 1970 when NBC focused on San Antonio’s abysmal poverty in a report on hunger in America. The story was a turning point in the life of the city because it shined such a powerful light on what was then the status quo: families like mine had maids who may or may not have been legal immigrants, whom we drove home down caliche roads to tiny, listing frame houses that may or may not have had electricity or running water. It was accepted because it was the way it had always been. At that time, the most common work for Mexicans—that’s what they were called, even if their families had lived in Texas since the nineteenth century—was as maids or yardmen. It was very hard for minority kids to get any sort of leg up: as late as 1989 the poorest school district, Edgewood, had $2,900 to spend annually per student, while Alamo Heights School District had $7,200, even though the former was taxed at a higher rate. This is why, decades after graduating from Alamo Heights, I still answer with a hint of shame when people ask where I went to school.
Castro grew up poorer than Cisneros, whose family is descended from Mexican aristocracy, but he and his twin brother, Joaquín (who was sworn in last month as a U.S. congressman), had ringside seats for San Antonio’s fierce civil rights battles; their mother, Rosie, was one of the most vocal activists for Latino rights. Thanks to her and others like her—and some pretty substantial demographic shifts in town—the last decades of the twentieth century saw growing numbers of San Antonio’s Latinos finally heading for Ivy League schools and living in big homes in pricey north side neighborhoods. By the mid-nineties, the Anglo power structure was crumbling as old-line leaders were forced to admit that the world of San Antonio could turn just fine on its axis when run by Latino doctors, lawyers, teachers, and politicians. When I asked Castro how his San Antonio childhood differed from that of older Latinos, he winced just slightly before saying, “There was a significant difference. You could see somebody like you who was doing great things.” Cisneros had a vestigial eagerness to please his Anglo constituents; Castro, who got his BA at Stanford and a law degree from Harvard, has an ease with himself and others his predecessors could only dream of.
Yet Castro knows that if he doesn’t make big changes in San Antonio, his political ambitions will come to nothing. For decades, the city owed its healthy economy to a seemingly infinite supply of cheap labor. Now the companies here—like companies in all of Texas’s major cities—can’t find workers ready for twenty-first-century jobs. (A mere mention of the call centers that once passed for vibrant new business here can make Castro’s irises darken and his nostrils flare.) For this reason, Castro risked some of his valuable political capital last year by pushing for a small tax increase to fund broad-based pre-K in San Antonio (research shows unequivocally that it’s easier to keep kids on track if they never fall behind in the first place). That victory last November could prove pivotal for the city’s future. “We need education and innovation,” Castro explained. “It worked for Houston in the twentieth century.” The only time Castro let an edge creep into his voice was when he noted that these changes were needed to help Latinos who continue to lag in terms of “wealth creation.”
As we were leaving La Gloria, a tall, thin, young Anglo, also in a good pinstriped suit, waved to Castro from the parking lot. He looked to me, as did so many people I’d gone to high school with, like one of those handsome, well-tended boys whose futures were set before they were born. I figured he was going back downtown to a law office or a bank. “He’s going to work for my brother in D.C.,” Castro told me, giving me the biggest grin of the day.
One of the most exciting things to happen in San Antonio when I was little was the construction, in 1964, of the Sky Ride in Brackenridge Park. By then the park proper bored me—I had exhausted the zoo and the Brackenridge Eagle train, and I was too young to appreciate the stolid elegance of the buildings constructed by the Works Progress Administration. The Sky Ride seemed impossibly modern to my ten-year-old sensibilities, especially when the gondolas lifted me high into the air on a slow, creaking wire until I could see the limitless horizon just beyond the city skyline.
I had forgotten about the Sky Ride completely—it was closed in 2002—until I went to visit Rackspace, the $1.1 billion company that is currently the most talked-about business in town. Located in, yes, a repurposed north side shopping mall, Rackspace is essentially a souped-up IT service, providing companies around the world with everything from web hosting to cloud computing. Visiting the headquarters can feel a lot like journeying to Seattle or, uh, Austin, with battalions of food trucks parked out front, dozens of multiethnic employees in jeans and fleece, miles of open cubicles delineated by the names of breakfast cereals and game shows, and a coffee bar serving locally roasted product. On a tour, I noticed some brightly colored metal structures used as funky “conversation pods.” They were the gondolas from the old Sky Ride.
“The city is becoming indistinguishable from what it was,” Rackspace’s CEO, Graham Weston, told me. Tall and blond, bespectacled and very pale—his ancestry is genuinely Anglo, as in England—Weston, age 48, is a San Antonio native and an Aggie. His name is spoken around town in the same reverent tones as Castro’s, which makes sense, because his company now has close to 200,000 customers globally and 4,100 employees, and Weston is a billionaire. Much has been made of the fact that he lives with his wife and children in a double-wide trailer on the Guadalupe River. Weston met me in a small meeting room with a jumbo-sized computer screen on the wall and a desk made of whiteboard. He wrote on it frequently.
Weston’s other space—at Geekdom, an ideas incubator located downtown—was once the office of the most powerful attorney in town, Wilbur Matthews, who served afternoon tea on a silver service well into the nineties. It is impossible to imagine the assiduously casual Weston doing anything like that, much less serving as King Antonio, dressed in the Texas Cavaliers’ powder-blue military-style jacket and plumed hat, handing out play money to poor children on the West Side, like the city fathers of old used to do. Weston’s company, after all, fired a client after its leadership decided to burn Qurans on the anniversary of 9/11.
It’s easy to see the economic surge that’s benefiting both Castro and Weston as a kind of perfect storm. A lot of San Antonio’s success is due to its long-standing relationship with the federal government, which always kept the city relatively recession-proof. Even when military bases were closed or combined in the past few decades, civilian aircraft maintenance and cyber-security companies moved in to take up the slack. Then, too, military medicine teamed up with the civilian variety, which was already thriving thanks to Cisneros’s ability to lure biomed companies. Fort Sam Houston, for instance, recently got $2.2 billion from the government to build the country’s largest medical training center for the military. The city’s obsessive commitment to conservation and preservation, once so derided, now looks prescient: when AT&T left town for the Dallas area, for instance, San Antonio “barely missed a beat,” Weston said, because so many of its executives and employees chose to stay—they liked the quality of life here. San Antonio is also the closest big city to the Eagle Ford play, which, thanks to enormous oil and gas finds courtesy of fracking technology, means that companies like Weatherford and Halliburton are starting to build or buy a lot of office space in town. The proximity to Austin’s tech businesses also makes for useful synergy. The two cities would already be one, Weston assured me, if plans for an Austin–San Antonio regional airport had ever gotten off the ground.
Finally, there has been a change in local philanthropy—it’s become local. In the old days, many of San Antonio’s wealthiest citizens tended to send their money elsewhere. Weston, for one, keeps his money here—not just by adopting the high school next to Rackspace but by forming a public-private consortium of San Antonio’s leaders to redevelop downtown and beyond. The goal is to draw workers from outside San Antonio while keeping locals from leaving for opportunities elsewhere.
I guess that might have been me. Listening to Weston’s descriptions of San Antonio’s future, I could envision a place for myself here, or, maybe, a place for my 21-year-old son, an irony that was not lost on me. Nor was the fact that much of what I heard took me back to Houston circa 1976, when the whole world seemed to be beating a path to its door. I’ve learned since then that a lot can happen to a city with promise to make it less promising: the most creative politicians can move on, leaving work unfinished; technological changes can render what was once so new obsolete; a shift on the other side of the world can bring on fiscal crises here. Then too, a headlong push forward can sometimes leave a lot of people behind. But San Antonio has always been slow to change, and while that characteristic has historically been both a blessing and a curse, such care and thoughtfulness might now spare it some of the problems other Texas cities have ignored at their peril.
Sometimes, no change is still the best change. A few weeks ago, my dad and his girlfriend—yes, both repurposed in their eighties—took me to a restaurant in Alamo Heights called Bird Bakery. It was a lovely sandwich shop: locally roasted coffee, gluten-free options, and so on. My dad mentioned that the place was run by “some Hollywood people.”
“Who?” I demanded, curious to know who would leave Los Angeles to serve lunch in San Antonio.
My dad didn’t know. I asked his girlfriend, Pat; she didn’t know either. “Just some Hollywood people,” she said, dismissing them with a wave of her hand as she bit into her sandwich.
I couldn’t stand it, so I got up to ask the cashier about the owners. She handed me an article about Elizabeth Chambers, an actress lately of L.A. but originally from an old San Antonio family, who had moved back with her husband, Armie Hammer, who starred as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network and as Clyde Tolson in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar.
It was nice to be home again.
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