on Houston and the Land Beneath it
I have family in Houston, I won’t tolerate Houston slander. But I think this is important to remember. The land now called Houston had no people in it for a very long time. It’s hard to know exactly who emigrated there first. Most anthropologists would tell us that people followed herds of animals from North Asia, across an ancient bridge of glacial ice, and down into the lands we call the Americas. Others might say that even before anyone came on foot, Pacific Islanders made their way to American shores by boat. Thousands of different cultures were born on these continents. You could spend a lifetime dedicated to studying and exploring just the Maya, just the Pottawatomie, just the Arawak, just the Inca. Humans built their lives here over the course of tens of thousands of years.
Viking explorers visited a northern chunk and eventually called it Vinland. Columbus marked the first of too many who set out to colonize, and paint over the art of the continent as if it was a blank canvas. Some came willingly, others against their will. Houston was no person’s home. Then, Houston was someone’s home. But eventually, Houston became someone’s property. Then that property became something to steal, to kill for, to defend, to develop, to extract from. Except, Houston never stopped being someone’s home.
One of the stories I tell in my song “Maryam, Maria, Mary”, is of a Mexican-American woman living in Houston. She’s holding her son in the home they share, but her husband was just taken away by the American government the previous night. This is what happens when we look at land, not as a shared home, but as a thing. People become intruders or vermin that threaten to ruin or take the thing away. There are hundreds of different border lines drawn around the land that eventually became Houston. But in any conversation we have, about Houston, about Texas, about the United States, or about land- we can’t forget we are talking about a home. A shared home with children, with kitchens full of good food, with libraries full of good books, and with neighbors.
