Cityscapes - A Response by Andrew Sandoval-Strausz

         The political economy of empire has emerged as the leading theme in this roundtable, and any synthesis of urban and imperial histories will have to contend with the intertwining of strategic and commercial imperatives across borders. The challenge of interpreting how these imperatives shape the urban landscape is, I think, implicit in two of Dr. Bender’s comments. “Wars of empire have had a huge impact on cities,” he points out, citing how “war production and military bases and military research have transformed cities and regions.” He also mentions the “global system of cities,” highlighting Saskia Sassen’s influential work on how “global immigration patterns emerge after and in the same channels as capital.” The simultaneous influence of strategic power and immigration on the cities of the United States is apparent when we look at the growth of the Sunbelt (see, for example, Sunbelt Rising, the forthcoming volume edited by Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk). Historians have come to understand the importance of the Cold War-era military-industrial complex in the expansion of cities from southern California to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the South. As we continue to think about the Sunbelt, though, we need to clarify the simultaneous influence of geopolitical and more strictly economic causes of the massive Hispanic and Asian immigration to the region.

         I would hypothesize that a closer look at the Sunbelt would suggest greater emphasis on imperial geopolitics as a builder of cities. Whether in the era of the white “silent majority” or the dawning of the multiracial “new urban majority,” Sunbelt cities display a palimpsest of empire. In the 1950s, 1960s, and part of the 1970s, the U.S. government poured billions upon billions of dollars into defense research and production and its civilian offspring, the aerospace industry and the space program. From the military contractors in San Diego and Los Angeles to the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers in Houston, Texas, and Orlando, Florida, the exigencies of the Cold War shifted urban growth to the south and west, greatly increasing the population of these regions. Meanwhile, in the wake of the civil rights movement, widespread “white flight” gave rise to vast tracts of racially homogeneous suburbs throughout the nation, including the Sunbelt. Then in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, immigration dramatically changed the region’s demographics, with its biggest cities becoming “minority-majority” municipalities in which non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than half the population. The key here is that this immigration was not an even flow of people from throughout the developing world—it was particularly pronounced in certain regions. While more research will be required to verify all the details, it seems very likely that given the prominence of Mexicans, Cubans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians, this wave of immigration is better explained by empire than by finance, though to be sure these two factors are complexly intertwined.

         One example of how these factors interact can be found in North Texas. While Houston is more commonly cited as an example of government spending-driven urban development and diversity of recent immigrant populations, Dallas also offers an important instantiation of these phenomena. In the Oak Cliff neighborhood, located just southwest of the Trinity River, the population grew from 90,000 in 1940 to 158,000 in 1950 to over 200,000 in 1960, in substantial part due to employment opportunities in nearby defense plants. The area was centered on a thriving commercial main street on Jefferson Boulevard, around which residential districts quickly expanded; demographically, it was approximately 95% white. Beginning in the 1960s, white families frightened by the prospect of school segregation began to flee the neighborhood; while the area saw none of the more than two dozen bombings that greeted the first black Dallasites who sought to move to previously all-white districts, a significant proportion of Oak Cliff’s population demonstrated their opposition to integration by moving to nearby suburbs. The neighborhood only began to regain population in the 1980s and 1990s with an influx of Mexican (the most recent episode in a long history of labor and capital exchanges across the Rio Grande) and Salvadoran (many driven from their homeland by a civil war between a U.S.-backed military government and rebels supported by Cuba) immigrants. These newcomers revivified main street commerce and repopulated the surrounding neighborhoods by starting businesses in empty storefronts and renovating vacant houses; the area is now about 90% Hispanic, and a local newspaper report has dubbed it “the Latino Main Street of Dallas.” Oak Cliff thus reveals the complexity of empire and capital, which together drew two populations to one neighborhood through two eras; it has been and continues to be a harbinger of a new era in the U.S. in which transnational dynamics strongly influence the shape of the urban landscape.