Walking (and busing) San Antonio
A depressing mix of the desperate, the hopeful, and sprawl.
I didn’t want to write this post today. I wanted to write it tomorrow after spending another day walking San Antonio. But it’s raining now and I have no car. Stuck in a corner room of a motel that empties after 7 am, beyond the desperate. I’m here with ex inmates clasping vouchers and addicts who’ve lucked into temporary shelter.
There is only one car in the parking lot, with a woman sitting in it for a few hours now, listening to the radio. Scattered around the edges are men looking for temporary work, sitting on upturned buckets, their tools at their feet. They spent all yesterday and all this morning doing that. Chatting with each other in Spanish, only jumping up to surround work trucks that whisks a lucky few away.
The adjacent McDonald’s, which shares the parking lot, is designed to keep trouble out. It’s guarded by a large slow man, who’s quick to eject anyone he doesn’t feel right about. Inside the three TV’s blast a cooking show, each timed slightly different. Only the numbest can ignore the jarring cacophony.
San Antonio’s historic downtown is steps away, just beyond an elevated expressway that encircles it. Eight elevated lanes of pillars and fumes. A modern day gated city — with the stench of urine as its moat, and solitary men, some barking inner thoughts, others throwing garbage at pillars, as the sentries.
Inside that gate of cement pillars is history and tourist. But they are confined to a river-walk. A sliver of the good life — cafes, bars, speciality shops — sold by its proximity to one US’s few foundational folk myths.
Outside of that sliver, it all goes downhill fast. History can’t put a shine on whats a stereotypical struggling US town. A place where the energy pulsates from the outer beltway, and the center’s on life support — one failed urban renewal project after another. Like an archaeological strata of past bulwarks against the decline.
Those cities are a dime a dozen in the US, so it makes sense San Antonio embraces its history as a source of pride. As a way to distinguish itself. Baltimore with the Alamo.
But the Alamo is a quirk, a notable one. A small building in a very big city. What really distinguishes San Antonio is its Mexican-American culture.
It’s a minority majority city, and that’s why I came.
To show that my cartoonish description isn’t entirely fair. That San Antonio isn’t just an outer ring of suburban sprawl with a hollowed out center.
That between the two is mile after mile of functional working class Mexican-American neighborhoods.
Simple homes festooned with American flags, crosses, and yards of ceramic frogs. Fathers playing soccer with their kids. Mothers juggling babies. Families heading off in minivans and F150s to Sunday mass.
The American dream, written in Spanish.
That functionality, that American dream, is there, yet it’s riddled with fissures.
The middle of San Antonio is poor, and the scourge of American poverty — homelessness, drugs, and crime — is right there out in the open. At risk of taking it all down.
Go inside the Basilica of the Little Flower and you see all that’s right with this new American dream.
Go outside, walk about half a block down, and you see an intersection of chaos. Homeless camps, open air drugs, and people walking around with open wounds, hair matted with vomit, and eyes emptied of hope.
Walking from downtown to the beltway is an emotionally draining exercise. One second you’re high on the sweetness of a family run restaurant, a place where a father with a “Proud to be American” shirt patiently cut up their tiny daughters food. The next second you’re navigating the mumbles and yells of broken people1.
One second you’re giddy seeing people embrace the American dream, the next you’re reminded how many fail to achieve it.
It gets better, at least emotionally, the closer you get to the outer beltway (I-410). The violent ups and downs gives way to the constant of urban sprawl.
A success of malls, franchises, apartments, brick homes, immaculate yards, and access roads lined with things everyone wants to access.
While it’s not my favorite version of the American dream, for most people it’s theirs. Being able to spend a Sunday watching the Cowboys at the Twin Peaks (Park North edition. There are four in the city), or the Longhorn Steakhouse, or El Potosino, is living. Especially compared to what their parents had.
They’ve made it. They’re American, and rightfully proud of that.
They’ve worked hard and this is the payoff. A home, a family, a few big cars, and enough money to tool around the mall splurging on stuff.
Being out around the beltways isn’t all highs though. It isn’t all about success. Riding a bus around it, or back to downtown from it, is a stark reminder of that.
Only a very few choose to ride a bus, rather than drive. They use it out of legal, physical, or economic necessity. Not having a car in San Antonio means being broken somehow.
On one ride I was alone for five stops, except for a young women in a fleece jacket so matted and covered with leaves I initially thought it must have been intentional. Like some artist who bedazzled their jacket into the bespoke. No. The leaves were glued on by dried vomit. At the sixth stop a man tried to escort a squirrel on the bus. Enticing it with peanuts as he fished around for the $1.35 fair he never found2. While it made me laugh, darkly, the bus driver was well past seeing any humor in it.
That was yesterday. Which for the most part was a good day. Had I written my piece after I’d gotten home from my long walk, I might have written something a little more upbeat.
But sitting here now, in my room, watching day laborers and homeless cluster under the awning of an abandoned building across the street might be getting to me. Being told last night by a man a few doors down, who was tweaking from drugs, that he didn’t like the way I looked at him, that I was either the devil, the FBI, or both, and that should I look at him ever again, bad stuff would happen.
That might be warping my perspective.
I didn’t want to write such a negative piece. I came to San Antonio because I love working class Mexican-American culture.
Not only because of its food, music, and faith. I love it because of its optimism. The excitement at being American, and all that brings with it — the freedom and security to build a life where your kids will have it better than you do.
I wanted to have another dose of that before I went abroad again. To remind myself not all US cities are about soulless consumption, jarring inequality, and a deep deep loneliness.
To remind myself the American dream isn’t entirely broken.
I did see lots of that here, especially near the beltway.
Yet downtown San Antonio, a place emptied of hope beyond a tiny sliver, is a reminder that after the euphoria of “having made it” wears off lurks a deep discontent. A vast pit of failure that draws far too many Americans into it.
A reminder that the American dream, even when written in Spanish, is failing.
Note: I have lot more pictures and things to write about San Antonio. Mostly good things. Will make that in another post. Tomorrow I bus off to El Paso. Hopefully I will be in a better mood.
And dogs. There are a lot of unleashed dogs roaming around the streets. About half of which don’t seem very friendly.
Yes. I paid for him. Which didn’t seem to make the driver too pleased. Also. I try not to take too many pictures of homeless when I’m travling as quickly as I am now. Without some relationship, its not right.
Don't get too down Chris (says she, sitting in her comfortable air-conditioned office). That photo of the church at mass was beautiful. Yesterday we made the mistake of parking our new-ish Tesla next to our table at breakfast. Our Central American host/restaurant owner remarked on it, and said "Someday." I wish I could have told him that my husband's lifelong dream was to own a restaurant, so here we were even-steven.
Thanks for this window into San Antonio Chris. I have lived here for 3 years and while there is more to SA than you have described, you have also captured an essential aspect of the city that is too easily forgotten or ignored. There is a complexity to the culture here that has arisen across 300+ years and is very much regional and very different than Texas north of San Antonio - lots of intersections that are better understood on foot than by car or airplane. If you are ever in San Antonio again, I hope we can take a walk together...