As a white person working in technology you tend to not think too much about why the SOMA (South of Market), Market Street, and the Tenderloin look like they do, let alone why West Oakland is in the state that it is. Audrey and I just finished The Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal, which in my mind reveals why these places are the way they are, but more importantly it reveals the deal we’ve all made with the devil to look the other way when people of color and other working class people and their communities are ground up in exchange for being able to buy cheap shit at Walmart and Target from overseas.
I have read Hella Town, Palo Alto, and other books that overlap with the stories Alexis tells, but they do an amazing job at weaving together the history of the docks in both San Francisco and Oakland and the impact capitalism and technology has had on these places since WWII. I have spend a lot of time walking the piers along the San Francisco waterfront in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, as well as West Oakland during the four years living in Oakland during Covid. While working in the tech industry and being one of the gentrifiers in Oakland, I was hyper aware of my impact on the city as I walked the streets of downtown and West Oakland. However, I was captivated the story Alexis spun about the realities behind the Pacific Circuit.
From the centering of the story around Miss Margaret Gordon to way that powerful men in the shipping industries view towns like Oakland, I thought the story captured the racial and class blind spots that unknowingly but also intentionally exist in our world. I thought Alexis connected the dots well between the cheap television in our apartments and the homeless camps on the streets when we leave our apartments. The throughline Alexis provided when it came to labor from the longshoreman of last century to the truckers working the dots of this century, but more importantly the Uber and delivery Gig workers of today was powerful, and the stories of longshoreman brought back memories of being in the Merchant Marines.
The Pacific Circuit isn’t just a story about the Bay Area. It is a story about all the connections that have been made across the Pacific, but also really showcases the racial, class, social, and labor tradeoffs we have made in exchange for cheap shit from the east. It paints a clear picture of how we’ve been bought off. I was aware that the East Bay was literally built on the bones of the Ohlone tribes, but Alexis added a layer of sediment from the hydraulic mining, subway tunnel excavation, and exhaust and soot of the cars passing over West Oakland on the freeway and the trucks coming in and out of the neighborhood to my mental map of the East Bay.
Oakland and San Francisco will forever be imprinted on my mind regardless of if I ever move back there. Alexis’s storytelling has added another layer to this imprint. I’ve long been captivated by the docks in Oakland, and developed a strong bond with West Oakland by wandering the streets on foot and getting to know each block. You will always see Oakland in my Algorotoscope images and storytelling, but some of the characters and stories in The Pacific Circuit are also beginning to color some of my fictional storytelling. I am adding the book to my list of books that have helped deprogram me because of what it added to the stories of Oakland and San Francisco, but helping me better understand the role of capitalism and technology in shaping the geographic region in ways I never quite understood while living there.
