The Pitchfork

I've always been drawn to ruminations on the cities that I've lived in, their patterns and cycles. How one feature makes one city so much more livable than another. How another makes it a nightmare. The weird transformed Austin of my childhood, car-culture imprisoned Arlington Texas and Phoenix, the strange two-city feel of San Antonio, the desperate ruins of Detroit have all been so starkly different that I can't help but get caught in the comparisons—and in impossible dreams of what cities might look like if they were transformed and liberated. Knocking doors 6-7 days a week for an extended period of time—as I have in this election cycle--also starts to give you a certain intimacy with the city that you just don't get any other way. You feel the rhythms of people coming and going, get minute-by-minute glimpses in how they lead their lives, and gain an immediate knowledge of just how walkable and livable their neighborhoods are. The majority of the l...

A list of suggested readings I drew up a while ago for political education purposes inside the San Antonio Progressive Alliance  reprinted here for public consumption. Vaguely in order of relevance. Refinery Town by Steve Early. A readable account of the Richmond Progressive Alliance in the context of the history of the city and the fight against the dominance of the oil industry. For obvious SAPA inspiration reasons as an independent political organization of the local left.  The Illusion of Inclusion: the Untold Political Story of San Antonio by Rudy Rosales. A political history of San Antonio told against the backdrop of class and race dynamics. A good account of the rise and fall of the Good Government League, the pro-business, white-dominated de facto party that controlled local politics until Latino community and political organizing forced changes in the 1970s. Solid sections on COPS/Metro, the Committee for the Betterment of the Barrio, and the local C...

[You can find Part 1 here and I fibbed there's a third part coming. Photos of DWG subsistence farmstead in both posts all courtesy of the Library of Congress.] As we left off yesterday Dalworthington Gardens, Texas looked to be on the ropes a bare year into its founding as a New Deal planned farm community. But slowly and stubbornly those 26 remaining families hung on and through their own self-organization and tighter administration from New Deal entities conditions start shifting from god-awful to livable. In 1935 the overstretched administration of the program (it's running similar colonies of varying scales all throughout the country such as this beautifully-documented one outside Dayton, Ohio ) is shifted to the newly-created Resettlement Administration headed by the magnificently-named Rexford G. Tugwell.  The shift in program administration accidentally and narrowly saves both the national program and Dalworthington Gardens as a few months later the Supreme...

The section of Arlington I went to grade school in is a crazy quilt of rapid urban development. The shining new tract of townhomes that we moved into in the late 1970s jostled with looming mysterious pecan orchards, lonely cowfields, straight broad new avenues, and a sprawling (and miraculously still thriving) sprocket factory. Just a quarter mile down the road stands the portmanteau-cursed enclave of Dalworthington Gardens. In that suburb inside a suburb, one could easily think it was a town planned wholly by non-medicated schizophrenics. Old wooden shotgun homes stand on long rectangle plots thick with livestock rub right up against gated McMansions, checkerboarded with scraggly patches of vestigial Cross-Timber woodlands. The only thing tying them together seemingly being the immensity and uniformity of the multi-acre lots and the shits not given to urban planning. Except for those spare few minutes ruminating in the car as I pull out of Mom's driveway, my brain neve...

What Is This? First and foremost this blog is about bottom-up politics. The kind of little “p” politics that places building and supporting social movements, the vital messy motor of real change, and left organization as one of its primary focuses. The blog is a personal call back to political writing and thinking having drifted away from a career in labor journalism. Expect windmill tilting on a range of subjects that tickles the fancy. The tremendous upsurge of the last year unlocked by the rising movement floating around and alongside the edges of the Sanders campaign carried me along and this blog aims to capture the fluid up and downs of that wave as it hits the tough existential challenges ahead. It's also a blog about Texas and the dogged resistance that has popped here in this big-talking old bird of a state with its long, bloody borderlands history. What's with the Name? The Pitchfork was a Dallas-based socialist/left-populist rabble-rousing ma...