hi substack subscribers! this is my final project for one of my classes, African American Ecologies & Energies. I hope you enjoy, and back to regular programming soon <3
In many ways, Palo Alto feels like a ghost town. The shops all close at 9 pm and University Avenue is silent at night. There is a railroad separating Stanford from the rest of the world that dozens of young people have used to kill themselves. There is a decades-dry lake that was resurrected, like Jesus, after historically unprecedented flooding this winter. We start many campus events with a land acknowledgment of the people who once lived and died here. The lush ecology of Stanford, so green it feels fake, carries ghosts of its past; although students turn over every four years, its history stays in the ground.
In her text “Plantation Futures,” the Black scholar Katherine McKittrick argues that ecology contains ghosts. More specifically, we can find “spatial continuity” in how pieces of land or environment are used by, or against, communities across history. McKittrick identifies how “plantation logic,” after the age of state-sanctioned slavery, permeates the use of space in rural and urban areas today. For example, McKittrick argues that plantations were instrumental in the settler colonial process of the Americas, “transforming the lands of no one into the lands of someone.” She further points out how plantations necessitated the creation of webs of transportation to ship enslaved people and products, the same webs that transmit globalized laborers today. McKittrick also discusses how plantations led to the “necropolitical technologized and militarized management of chaotic bodies” — very familiar to those of us in Silicon Valley — and the creation of a “racially incongruous economy” where people’s fates can be attributed to their zip codes.
In this project, I will demonstrate that the land we currently occupy at Stanford and Palo Alto follows a historic and geographic pattern that I term “railroad logic.” Although Silicon Valley did not historically contain plantations of enslaved Black labor, it was birthed by, and is the birthplace of, the transcontinental railroad. Similar to the plantation, the railroad transformed the region, and the world. Just like a plantation, the railroad necessitates the genocide of indigenous people, the importation of exploitable, racialized labor (Chinese people, since Black slavery was abolished), and reorients communities unevenly around its geographies. California’s “railroad logic” is one of continual expansion, optimization, war, and conquest. The “railroad logic,” furthermore, is reliant on mobile, exploitable communities of color that can be imported and then deported, segregated, or incarcerated as needed.
To illustrate “railroad logic” in Stanford University, I decided to create a series of visual, multi-layered map gifs, inspired by Imani Jacqueline Brown’s mapping of former slave plantations atop hotbeds of environmental racism in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. Like McKittrick, Brown argues that “plantation operated according to consistent spatial and operational logics, determined by the overlapping priorities of a complex which was at once industrial facility, farm, prison, death camp, and luxury estate.” I will use her visual methods to show how Silicon Valley is geographically oriented by “railroad logic.”
Each map gif I’ve created is centered around a specific theme, with layers proceeding in chronological order. Every layer is placed atop a Google Maps screenshot I took in June 2023, the present day. Each map gif will open with an introduction to orient the viewer towards the themes and logics I am attempting to illustrate. Throughout, I urge the viewer to visually orient themselves around the transcontinental railroad — now the Caltrain, illustrated in red, and later Highway 101, running parallel to the railroad and illustrated in green, which officially segregates Palo Alto and its Black neighbor, East Palo Alto.
My analysis is indebted to Manu Kuraka’s conception of “railroad colonialism” in Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Rose Wilson Gilmore’s abolitionist text Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Herbert Ruffin’s vital Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990, Wendy Liu’s prescient Abolish Silicon Valley, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which discusses redlining in Palo Alto, and Malcolm Harris’s comprehensive new history of the area, titled Palo Alto.
This is a work-in-progress, and by no means an exhaustive account of the histories of capitalism, empire, and liberation rooted in Palo Alto’s railroad. For example, for the sake of scope (I’m focusing on indigenous, Black, and Chinese Ecologies here) I omitted the histories of Japanese incarceration and Mexican labor in the Bay Area. I also hyper-focused on Palo Alto, which required the omission of Black history in the East Bay and Oakland. Nonetheless, I hope the maps will convince viewers that our present-day homeland and geography contains raw memories of exploitation and resistance, and that the railroad’s history echoes in our current capitalist system of exploitation of Black and brown people globally.
Map I: Haunting
My first map reckons with the genocide of the indigenous people upon which Stanford is founded. I open with a reconstruction of the lands of indigenous people, who were not actually uniformly known as the Ohlone, but rather were small and distinct communities like Ramaytush and Tamien. I also try to visualize burial and haunting. Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, which is explored in Map III, was the site of a historic indigenous burial site called Yuki Saksumi Saatos Inuk. After student activism and indigenous protests in the 1980’s, Stanford returned the remains to the Ohlone people, although they complained about wanting to study them further. Stanford has had a recent fit of renaming buildings, although the buildings still stand on stolen land. The very railway that brought hordes of colonialists, who then destroyed the indigenous way of life, remains haunted. I end the map with markers for the spate of student suicides on the Caltrain tracks. Cyclical violence continues to impact the land where we live.
Map II: Railroad Valley
My second map establishes the railroad motif that underlies “railroad logic.” Unsurprisingly, Stanford has a very comprehensive archive of mid-nineteenth century maps that show the scientific, geographically-precise enterprise to plot the railroad. According to Stanford’s archive, the maps “were printed to accompany the different editions of the Pacific Railroad Survey Reports. These states show the rapid growth in topographical information from government exploration and mapping.” I open with an 1871 map made by Haasis and Lubrecht. The entire map, reproduced below (the gif only shows a snippet) celebrates the connection of the union and the forward march of progress, with trains replacing buggies.
I included a flashing sequence of images, location, and times that illustrate the exploitative “railroad logic.” The famous painting of Leland Stanford Jr. hammering the final spike into the transcontinental railroad — currently at Stanford’s own Cantor archives — notably contains zero Chinese laborers (although there are a couple of distressed looking native people). Because Chinese labor history has been intentionally left out of narratives of the transcontinental railroad, I map its ghostly remains in the contemporary Bay Area.
First, I show the location of erased remains of the Chinese laborers who were brought as cheap, pliable workers. These remains were uncovered by archaeologists in 2017 underneath Stanford’s lush, ecologically stunning Arboretum. A photo taken in 1881 shows Chinese laborers toiling on Stanford’s own property — a chapter that is usually left out in history. I also show the location of Fremont’s Kearney Street, named after Denis Kearney, one of the Bay’s earliest influential labor organizers, who led the campaign for Chinese exclusion and cemented the railroad logic of using and then dumping racialized laborers.
I also show the flip side of “railroad logic”: capitalists rapidly accruing wealth. I show the Stanfords’ fantastic mansion in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, built with railroad wealth. They abandoned the mansion after their son died and it was later destroyed in the great fire, like nature’s own retribution.
Map III: The Farm
My third map shows the development of Stanford University from Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, a rural agricultural getaway he built to escape labor strikes in the city. The Farm, also built off of railroad wealth, exemplifies its own form of “railroad logic” — relentless euphemism, and relentless optimization. On Stanford’s idyllic farm, he developed the Palo Alto system of rearing horses by culling the best from the pack and riding them hard until they broke.
Leland Stanford was obsessed with horses and optimizing their speed, by any means necessary. His Stock Farm included a “kindergarten” where the fastest colts were made to run before they could walk. (His training methods were cited as an example of what not to do in child rights’ and school reform movements.) His desire to genetically optimize horses echoes in the long history of eugenics at Stanford. There is an obvious metaphor to be made here between overburdened young horses and the pressure put on premature young geniuses at Stanford. But I’d also like to draw attention to the idyllic greenery of the map, both then and now. Stanford, which maintains a sunny persona, plenty of green lawns, and the nickname “the Farm,” represents “railroad logic’s” self-disguising, euphemistic emphasis on progress, adventure, and conquering youth in the West.
Map IV: Racial Formation
My fourth map shows how communities of color are manipulated under “railroad logic” — brought in to serve white communities, and then deported, redlined, or gentrified as Silicon Valley develops into a wealthy suburb, based on military contracts designed to exploit the Global South. The map is oriented around the North-South axis of the railroad.
My map shows the development of small communities of color in Palo Alto. The Crescent Park neighborhood was a historically Black neighborhood of laborers fleeing the South who worked service jobs for wealthy Palo Altans, the university, and its frats and sororities. Compared to the Black community of San Jose, the Black Palo Altans were disproportionately less likely to own their homes and more likely to rent in large groups, thus increasing residential density. Art Fong, the first Asian engineer in the booming firm Hewlett-Packard which put Palo Alto on the map, was not allowed to buy a home in Palo Alto because of racist zoning laws and instead set up on what was then the town’s outskirts, by the railroad.
The construction of the 101 Highway, parallel to the railroad, was a marker of suburbanization and separated the neighborhoods of Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, which had significant white flight in the 1950s when the first Black family moved. Despite efforts to create affordable housing — most notably the Palo Alto Housing Association, a group of Black and white families who tried to build a co-op in the 1940s, but failed — the towns continued to grow in separate trajectories. Palo Alto was beefed up by military contracts, which funded the Stanford Research Institute and major tech companies we still recognize today. The burgeoning suburb required a new shopping center in 1950, and rules against dense housing and multi-story buildings to retain the idyllic feel. Meanwhile, East Palo Alto had only one segregated school, Ravenswood High School.
The map shows the slow encroachment of white tech settlers over communities of color. Crescent Park, I note, was razed, and is now the location of the “Zuckerblock,” aka Mark Zuckerberg’s house and the properties he bought around it to maintain privacy. Art Fong’s house on the outskirts now lies underneath the expensive downtown area. The Peninsula Housing Association is replaced by the expensive Ladera suburb. Ravenswood High School was closed and replaced by a shopping mall, which contains the IKEA where I shopped for my own school furniture.
Map V: Liberation Struggles
Because of all the exploitation and dispossession, Palo Alto has understandably been a site of liberation struggles against capitalism and white supremacy, oriented around the dividing line of the railroad/highway. I explore two sources of struggle on either side of the railroad — student-led activism on the Palo Alto side, and Black community organizing on the East Palo Alto side.
East Palo Alto was involved in the long summer of 1967. Although Black students historically had to “sneak” over the railroads into better schools in Palo Alto, Black power schools like the Nairobi Day School were formed (and later bombed.) (East Palo Alto, frequented by revolutionaries like Stokeley Carmichael, even considered renaming itself ‘Nairobi’).
Meanwhile, on the wealthier Stanford side, I identify growing awareness among students of “railroad logic” and a desire to disrupt it. Quite notably, radical students identified a list of bombing targets in the 1960’s and 70’s to disrupt war research, including Stanford’s own Hoover institute, Business School, and nearby tech companies — all offshoots of the original conquering railroad. Students even successfully bombed SLAC in 1971, which makes me feel like we are very tame today.
Map VI: The War on Us
My sixth map explores continuing backlash and oppression against communities of color in Palo Alto, following the segregation of “railroad logic.” Although East Palo Alto was the site of Black self-assertion, the Reagan-style backlash from the rich suburbs continues to take the form of a war on drugs, environmental racism, poverty, and incarceration.
In the map, I identify sites of environmental racism, including a trash heap/burning dump and toxic waste facility built in Palo Alto, which were finally shut down in the 2000’s due to community activism. Stokeley Carmichael predicted in the 70’s that communities like East Palo Alto would be “flooded with drugs” and “eat ourselves up from the inside,” and he was right — due to high levels of poverty and drug-crimes, in 1992 EPA was named the murder capital of the country, a distinction which has stuck. The so-called Million Dollar Spot was a drug-exchange corner that was raided by the police in 2009, raising moral panic.
On the flip side of the tracks, I show the acceleration of suburban and tech inequities out of Palo Alto. Stanford’s Hoover Institute was a Reagan-era brain trust that personally authored Reagan’s agenda, a book called America in the 1980s. A need for new tech labor required mass immigration of Asian H1B visa workers, including my own mom! While Asian Americans have flowered in the Bay Area, we are complicit in the model minority myth and gentrifying out of Black communities. Our competitive, precarious guest role in the structures of “railroad capitalism” has led to a massive mental health struggle among youth, culminating in the famous Palo Alto Caltrain suicides.
Wow, this was excellent. One part I found interesting was the “Zuckerblock” a term I have never heard of before. I am more familiar with gentrification and its affects on the east coast, especially in DC, but I will look more into this.