According to the Census, every day officially more than 66 people begin a new life in San Antonio. It not only makes the seventh-largest city the nation’s fastest-growing currently but with an estimated 1.1 million people moving into San Antonio within the next 25 years, “the city on the rise”1 will nearly double its population and face the inevitable cacophony of progress. But yet, despite endorsements like Mark Twain’s, who considered San Antonio along with Boston, San Francisco, and New Orleans as one of four “unique cities,” or that of Frederick Law Olmsted, who described San Antonio as perhaps the only city “that can vie, in point of the picturesque interest that attaches to odd and antiquated foreignness,”2 one of the nation’s oldest cities continues to be “an often underestimated, predominantly Hispanic, American microcosm.”3
“San Antonio lives in the hyphen between Mexican and American, an in-between place where it is possible to observe multiple migrations of Europeans, Latinos, Asians, and natives of this land.”4 The city’s pedigree as a frontier city manifests in the Alamo. Long before, however, the fall of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Conquest, the emergence of Texas, New Spain, and Mexico established the city’s role as “the crossroads of all nations.”5 San Antonio has also proven to be a place that transcends history and determines the future. The battle of the Alamo was pivotal in the creation of Texas, and today, with a Latino population of 63.8 percent, many argue, San Antonio will be a decisive factor in the future of Texas yet again.
Fig. 2. Map of a possible South Texas Triangle in context of border and Texas Triangle (to the north).
Even Jean Baudrillard used San Antonio as the starting point for his journey through America and observed that the city’s destiny is not in the hands of its history. What he saw is a future unfolding along the frontiers of ancestry, labor, and geographic inequality. Lawrence Wright from The New Yorker contends the future of Texas intertwines with the nation’s future. In “America’s Future is Texas” he argues, “Texas represents so much of modern America- the South, the West, the plains, the border, the Latino community, the divide between rural areas and cities — what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation.”6
The future, however, is not about the narratives that illuminate geographic divisions; one lesson learned from the last presidential election shows identity politics are not exclusively a matter of east-west or north-south meta-geographical narratives but unfold based on how much space we have between ourselves and our neighbors. For a city like San Antonio that occupies ten-times the land area of Boston, questions about spatiality and geography are vital. It not only determines a missing link in a city, but the palpable absence of the geographic abbreviates the flow of social, economic, and environmental systems between San Antonio and Northern Mexico.
Fig. 3. Postage stamp of 1968 Hemisfair World’s Fair “Confluence of Civilizations of the Americas.”
As host of the 1968 Hemisfair World’s Fair, themed “Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” San Antonio extended an invitation for the world to come close and tighten the distance between its neighbors, placing the city in the center of the Americas. It also was an attempt to challenge the narrative from a city located at the most Southern edge of the United States to one in the center of the Americas aspiring to capture new social, cultural, economic, and geographic imaginaries. Most of all, however, the fair illuminated how the cultural proximity to our neighbors can also be seen as a matter of distance. In “Geographies of Ignorance” Marco D’Eramo argues, “the paradigm of our consciousness of the world was, so to say, concentric. We knew all about what lay around us and what we had contact with. But the communications revolution, both material (low-cost airlines) and immaterial (radio, tv, cellphones, the internet) has meant that the faraway has been brought closer, what was nearby has become distant.”7
At stake are the current political, cultural, economic, and ecological inflections the world is undergoing. With populations shifting, climate changing, and the fourth industrial revolution forthcoming, does region-making still hold meaning or what are the new bold ideas for the future? What are agencies needed to address the multifaceted networked territories that expose new patterns of urbanization? How does architecture respond to these challenges placed in front of us?
Fig. 4. Ethnographic study and mapping of the South Texas-North Mexico cultural environment.
Building on my research on the Mediterranean8 the constellation of “port cities” like Laredo — the nation’s largest inland port of entry — Eagle Pass, Rio Grande City, Hidalgo, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, and the Port of San Antonio — an entity with $5.3 billion regional economic impact — and Nuevo Laredo, Roma, Los Ebanos, Anzalduas, Donna, Los Indios, Matamoros, and Reynosa connected to Monterrey in Mexico could activate a newly emerging region. With the Texas Triangle to the North connecting Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, the Southern addition could combine two triangles into a megaregion of more than 35 million people. The centerline for both triangles is Highway I-10 that not only signifies a geographic division between the North and San Antonio on its most Southern edge but also separates credit-based economies in the North from cash-centric economies in the South.
The possibility of this connection from a transportation standpoint was explored by a federally funded study in support of a high-speed train service connecting Oklahoma and South Texas. “The Texas-Oklahoma Passenger Rail Study (fOPRS) covers an 850-mile corridor, broken into three segments: Oklahoma City to Dallas-Fort Worth, DFW to San Antonio, and San Antonio to South Texas” — including stops in Brownsville, Corpus Christi, and Laredo. The $7 million study legitimizes the possibility of high-speed passenger rail service up to 220 mph between DFW and San Antonio, determining passenger service between San Antonio, Laredo, and Monterrey, Mexico, “could be feasible,” according to the Texas Department of Transportation, the study’s lead agency.
Fig. 5. George Cisneros, “Cacophony” sound installation at the Witte Museum, San Antonio, as part of the San Antonio Tricentennial, 2018.
A South Texas Triangle is not calling for walls and morally catalyzed frontiers. Instead of compressing an already underdeveloped geography into a wall this region begs for refreshed morphological models, new hybrid infrastructures, and new modes of transportation connecting previously hidden, yet geographically logical relationships. This research seeks to listen to the cacophonous noise of an emerging metropolis and its hinterlands and decipher it to extract meaning while constructing new frameworks to activate inactive assets for the future. The goal is to not only activate a geography that is a missing economic, ecological, and cultural link between San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, South Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale — one of the most significant oil shales in the nation — and Northern Mexico, but foster engaged research and scholarship in urbanism, architecture, and humanities in a region that begs to be looked at from both sides of the border.
Since 1968, the Tower of the Americas is a San Antonio landmark and metaphorically perhaps even holds meaning as the city’s “North Star” signifying development and progress. There is truth to this analogy because San Antonio looks North for answers and solutions. This proposal, however, suggests looking at the Tower of the Americas as the city’s Southern Light, reminding us of the original purpose of confluence.
— Antonio Petrov
1 III, Lorenzo Gomez. “San Antonio: City on the Rise.” Rivard Report, https://therivardreport.com/san-antonio-a-city-on-the-rise/ .
2 Olmstead, Frederick Law. A Journey through Texas: Or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier: With a Statistical Appendix. Our Slave States. New York: Mason Brothers, 1860.
3 Chozick, Amy. “Is America’s Political Future in San Antonio? New York Times, 2019.
4 Russel, Jan Jarboe. “San Antonio Is the Mother of Texas.” Texas Monthly, no. May 2018 (2018).
5 Santos, John Phillip. “San Antonio Is a City of Metamorphosis.” Texas Monthly, no. May 2018 (2018).
6 Wright, Lawrence. “America’s Future is Texas.” New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas.
7 D’Erama, Marco. “Geographies of Ignorance.” New Left Review 108, no. November-December 2017 (2017).
8 My work on the Mediterranean inspires this research. Published as part of the New Geographies book series: Petrov, Antonio. The Mediterranean. New Geographies Vol.5, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.