by Cameron Wallace (sophomore, English major)
I am from Louisiana, so I have spent a lot of time on the bayou. The field trips started as early as middle school, and seemed to be compulsory for all levels of education afterward. Part of the functions of these field trips, of course, was to instill in students a sense of pride in the culture from which they originated, their culture, one that has historically been highly invested in the bayou as a central site of economic, social, and political exchange. The port city of New Orleans, the quintessential Louisiana town, became a focal point of regional politics in the colonial era precisely because of its strategic location as an entry point to the Missouri-Mississippi river system from the Gulf of Mexico, leading to a series of power struggles between France and Spain for control of the region, and, eventually, this location would play a major role in the developing United States’s interest in the acquisition of the city. Partly as a result of this complicated history and partly in spite of it, Louisiana developed a profoundly unique culture based on its bayous and access to the Gulf. It is no surprise, then, that a major focal point of Louisiana students’ primary education is the history and culture of this area.
In class field trips to the bayous of Louisiana, I learned a great deal about their distinctive cultural and ecological components. Ultimately, however, the ecology and biology of the bayou became the history, culture, and politics of southern Louisiana. The bayou became our bayou, a complicated assemblage of Cajun dialects, crawfish boils, French-Louisianan architecture, and the remnants of Native mound-building cultures. The bayou shed its ecological-scientific location and became a deeply personal place. As a result, at Rice University when I was faced with the notion of traveling to the bayous of Houston to kayak, I was a bit skeptical. I assumed that a “bayou” in Texas would simply mean a river or bay, a skepticism intensified by the highly urban nature of Houston. To make matters more complicated, as a result of everything that I had read about the Houston waterways, I was terrified of being anywhere near the Houston gulf. I could imagine the water covered with a thick film of slime and ooze running straight from the drainage pipes of industrial petrochemical plants, the water hidden by a thick cloud of strange chemical fog and mutated bugs. I knew that I would come out of the bayou with a horrible infection.
When I got there, however, I was surprised to find that it reminded me a great deal of some of the bayous that I had been in as a child. To be sure, the architecture surrounding the water was different, there was much more industrial activity buzzing around, and there were more signs of human habitation near the banks. There were also no fan boats zipping over the water, and even the banks seemed to be naturally constructed differently, steeper with more large vegetation and different grasses. But ultimately, it was much the same as my beloved Louisiana bayous. There were alligator paths through the banks, and locals fished on the banks. The water was dark, brackish, and shallow, and everywhere there were visible networks of thick, intertangled root and vine systems. Even the guide gave me flashbacks to those middle school field trips because of his genuine love for the bayou, and immense practical knowledge about it, though he certainly had no kind of a Cajun accent.
The influence of prevailing cultural biases against the Gulf, then, was not the most fundamental barrier to my ability to physically and intellectually access the Houston waterways, because I grew up with the gulf, though I still struggle to completely overcome that bias. I was also confronted with a complex southern tribalism and rivalry, “What right does Texas have to claim any sort of bayous? Louisiana, Cajuns, are real bayou people.” This paradox cuts to the heart of the very practice of place-building. Geographer Tim Cresswell notes that place can roughly be defined as a location that has special meaning and to which one is emotionally attached (7). The notion that place is location with a dash of emotional attachment, personal interaction, and social and political engagement is well-documented, and is certainly part of the story, but part of the definition of place has to account for the way in which a location is transfigured into a place, which happens within a context. Places are embedded, not mutually exclusive. Just as one can be in many different locations at once–i.e. a bedroom, a home, a city, a state, a country, and so on–one can be in many places at once, which can have conflicting significances, connotations, and implications. Each place also comes packaged with a cultural and symbolic system that is associated with different values and beliefs in a person’s mind. A person’s experience of one place can be tied to understandings of another place, as a place. If a person is simultaneously invested in multiple places with conflicting value systems or beliefs, they must reconcile the differences between them somehow.
My personal disdain for the Houston bayou was a result of exactly this phenomenon. I grew up in two places: the bayou and America. I loved the bayou, and I knew that it was a place intimately tied to my identity, but I aspired to an identity based on the value system of another place, America, which, in my mind, was defined by textbooks, literature, and other cultural artifacts I consumed regularly. I hoped that in the future, the place in which I would be would not be Louisiana, though I knew it would always be important to me. So, I compartmentalized my conception of the bayous in which I grew up, defining it against the popular conception of bayou or Southern culture circulated in popular media. It is as if, for those who live in elite, educated cultural spaces but have also grown up in southern states typically thought of as “stupid” or “backwards,” it is expected of them to distinguish their experience from other similar experiences, propagating prejudice against other cultures in order to legitimize their own experience. According to Cresswell, “The identification of place usually involves an us/them distinction in which the other is devalued” (27). For example, if you are from Louisiana, you should still consider Texas, Mississippi, or Alabama “backwards,” “stupid,” or “dirty,” but your experience is different because you grew up in rich Cajun culture, rife with historical significance, unique traditions, and good food. In other words, locations play only a minor role in their transition to places; rather, preexisting allegiances, beliefs, and associations are used to integrate new places into already extant place-systems. Place-building is a holistic process that cannot exist in isolation.
This realization is important because the theory and practice of identifying and eliminating barriers to legitimate cultural and recreational access to water will always be counterproductive if it results in the deferral of those barriers from one population onto others. At its heart, increasing water literacy is a function of place. In fact, water literacy as a concept simply signifies the conscious manipulation of the interplay between location and place. In some places, it means aligning place-conceptions with land-realities. In California, for example, the surf as a historically male place is exclusionary of women. Increasing water literacy, then, requires aligning homosocial ideals of male-dominated surf culture with the reality of the genderless sea, the sand, the surfboard. In other places, it means developing new senses of place out of a location that is not generally intimate or emotional for those living near or in it. In Texas, this is the case for the Gulf. To many Texans, the Gulf is an important economic powerhouse and a great sense of pride, but it is an intimate, emotional part of the identity of very few. This may be in no small part due to the same paradoxes of place-building that stifled my ability to engage with the Gulf.
The Gulf is intimately tied to the petrochemical industry, and Texas is urbanizing, developing its technological and medical industries, and growing more green. The Texas Gulf area, and the water system that is a part of it, are progressively becoming more and more grotesque as a result. This barrier to water literacy is made all the stronger by the sheer size of Texas. Its history is long, complicated, and rich, and covers a vast geographical area, with a variety of different cultural narratives playing out simultaneously over the course of history, even as those narratives continue to exponentially multiply and diverge over time. Rather than field trips to the Houston bayou, classes can travel to the Alamo, or the space center, or any number of other historically significant markers. In short, the historical cultural significance of the bayou for Texas is large only for a very small portion of the population, and the modern culture and sensibilities of Texans simply make it more practical and useful to focus on other components of Texan culture in school. This effect is compounded by the grotesque nature of the Gulf’s petrochemical importance, which is tied to problems of class, politics, and broader cultural accessibility. For example, many people around the nation, and especially environmental activists, will have heard of Magnolia Park or Manchester in Houston, two low-income neighborhoods that are each flanked on every side by major refineries and chemical plants. They are two of the most polluted neighborhoods in the country. Few, however, are aware that they are only a few miles east of the center of the urban hub. The risks of such carelessness are enormous. Water pollution, chemical disasters in the case of extreme weather, increased levels of chemicals in Houston’s air and water, and more. Most importantly, those that are bearing the brunt of the cost are those with the least access to alternative options.
Increasing water literacy in the gulf is a crucial step to recognizing the dangers reliance on oil, gas, and other fossil fuels poses, and beginning to make those dangers a reality in people’s lives, rather than a theoretical concern. In order to transform the Gulf from an inert location into a place, it will be necessary to confront many thorny issues that may often be uncomfortable, including the dangers inherent in practices of place-building themselves. The rewards have the potential to be just as gratifying as the obstacles are difficult, however. Aside from the political, social, and ecological benefits of water literacy in the Gulf is the simple fact that the Gulf is a beautiful place with unique vegetation, culture, and recreation opportunities.
Works Cited
Cresswell, Tim. From Place: A Short Introduction (Wiley, 2004).