Sinkhole

I’m spending the holidays in my home town of Austin, Texas. It’s a city that is cyclically purged of successive populations born to it– currently by rising rents and property taxes. The Austin airport is filled with functioning museum-versions of restaurants that have been forced out of business in the city itself, and live on only as simulacra valued for the residual branding they offer the city. I’m old enough that I’ve seen several waves of people pushed out of the city along with their businesses and arts venues, so it’s hard to get angry about it now. I only feel a sort of dim, directionless displacement here. With friends and relatives scattered and having been in Los Angeles a few years for school, I don’t really feel at home anywhere.

In the next few days we are anticipating a cold snap that brings back memories of the winter storm that hit Texas in 2021, which resulted in a massive, prolonged power outage and a handful of deaths from exposure and smoke inhalation. The state is assuring us that the power grid will withstand the usage surge this year, but this promise may hinge on the voluntary actions of Texas’ massive infestation of parasitic cryptocurrency miners, who were paid by the state’s energy provider ERCOT to reduce their energy consumption during this summer’s heatwave (Chiu 2022). Texas is both a site of fossil fuel extraction and of energy wastes that flow from that extraction, a symbol of entrenched petrochemical power with a puppet state government that seems to exist primarily to serve that power. I’m staying with my elderly mother who lives in a small, somewhat dilapidated house in northwest Austin surrounded by two-story luxury homes that have sprung up around it. The other houses seem embarrassed of hers, waiting for her departure so that the plot of valuable property can be liquidated. The home was a HUD foreclosure that she and her father purchased for $32k after her divorce in 1988. In Austin’s current housing market the property is probably worth twenty-five times that now. Her faucets leak, the roof over the porch-slab slumps. “You’re sitting on a gold-mine,” one of our townie relatives tells her with an edge of urgency.

The house may be a little run down, but it is a house, and it’s no small thing that we had it when I was growing up, her father was a WWII vet who moved up in class from a wilderness subsistence farmer to a skilled laborer after being trained in construction during his time in the Navy and then benefiting from the G.I. Bill. He was able to step in when we needed help. In the years that followed WWII, G.I. Bill benefits were notoriously earmarked as white-only, creating a compounding disparity in multigenerational wealth between white and minoritized soldier’s descendants. The promise of upward mobility, now dwindling for anyone in the working class, was often predicated on its exclusions.

My mother lives frugally off of social security and sporadic small checks she receives because of her share in the mineral rights from a family farm. My family on my grandmother’s side were Moravian immigrants to Texas who arrived here after the civil war. They worked as laborers and then managed a plot of farmland in the town of Kurten Texas for a hundred years. After the last generation of our family living on the farm died or were moved to assisted living, their heirs (including my mother) parceled the land out and sold it after years of disagreements. While the property held little residential value (electricity had been connected but there was a well and an outhouse rather than plumbing) or value as modern farmland, the farm became valuable instead for the trickle of oil that had been found on it sometime in the 90’s. The mineral rights and revenue stream from the haphazard spurts of oil were divvied up among the families, who drifted further apart. I think sometimes about how many generations of family lived together and worked the land on that farm. Certainly I would have found a life there stifling, but I wonder about how the land and its history was traded away for abstract value. But again, we were lucky– while some could sell their land, others simply had it taken away, or their rights to it delegitimized. -12/21/2022