Surely there are many folks around here who wish this acreage
were empty, and likely many folks in the Sumiken Building (headquarters of the
Electric Utility) who wish the plant were truly invisible. Unhappily, its
brutal self is quite visible (and audible), squatting lakeside like a rhino at
a watering hole, ugly enough to actually cause discomfort in the viewer. The
effect is made worse by the fact that, as you stroll these leafy and
picturesque streets, Holly is invisible until you’re right on top of it –
surrounded, often, by children at play, people walking dogs, old folks sweeping
their porches and tending their immaculate gardens. As an actual environmental menace, the Holly Street Power
Plant’s effect on its neighborhood is undetermined and disputed, but as a
symbol of such menace, the plant has few rivals. The semiotic appeal is made
more piquant by the neighborhood’s ethnic character, which is not just
Mexican-American, but – at least historically – Mexican-American to the bone,
where families who’ve lived in the same houses for 50 years or more are easy to
find. This heart of Austin’s Hispanic community and culture is also the
breeding ground of the most assertive defenders of that culture, or so
self-styled. In this light, Holly’s 35-year career as an eyesore and fear
factory is not just an enviro-racist thoughtlessness but a direct and
specialized insult, seemingly calculated to keep the neighborhood from getting
too uppity. (The rich heritage of Holly Street also precludes the most obvious,
at least in the minds of many Northwest Austin types, option for dealing with
the plant – buying up and relocating the surrounding homes, thus creating a
buffer zone between the remaining neighborhood and the plant.)
Over the last year, the what-about-Holly question has moved
higher up the city’s To Do list, with council work sessions and task forces
studying our options, all of which seem to be expensive and unpleasant. The
issue has been helped along by the energies of East Side activists whose other
issues (tank farm, airport, etc.) have arrived at some sort of closure, and for
whom closing Holly is the only acceptable alternative. A sense of urgency has
been stoked by the plant’s recurring safety mishaps, including two fires in two
years and a $1 million cleanup of PCB spills from years past. These have
reinforced public concern that Holly is not only noisy and ugly, but obviously
dangerous – made even more so by the latter-day advent of another menace to the
commonweal, electromagnetic fields – and the plant’s closure has begun to seem,
if not imminent, at least inevitable.
Maybe. “I don’t see them moving the plant in my lifetime,”
says Rudy Mendez, director of Ballet East Dance Theatre and coordinator at Metz
Recreation Center, from which one can look right up the posterior of the plant.
“It’s going to cost too much, and… I’m not sure how many people here feel
themselves to be in any danger. I don’t feel all that threatened by it.”
Mendez arrives at this position after much careful tromping
through the dense undergrowth of neighborhood politics, which around Holly
Street inevitably leads one to the door of Paul Hernandez, Austin’s most
legendary and controversial neighborhood activist, and his allies, rivals,
lieges, and satellites in the multivisaged coalition known generally as El
Concilio de Town Lake Citizens. Life has not been kind recently to El Concilio,
with financial embarrassments, internal squabbles, repeated defeats at the
ballot box (including the defenestration of Hernandez’s trusty sidekick, former
Precinct 4 commissioner Marcos de Leon), and Hernandez’s protracted recovery
from a near-fatal stroke. So the city’s slothlike crawl toward relocating Holly
– one of Hernandez’s major issues for years – has done a fair bit to rejuvenate
the movement, as well as having given common cause to both El Concilio and
other activist camps (including the Holly Street Neighborhood Association)
whose relations with Hernadez et al. have been somewhat rancorous in recent
years.
As is usually the case when Hernandez’s name comes up, many
folks around Holly Street prefer to keep their anonymity. “I think the radical
circle is dwindling, especially now that Paul is sick,” says one of the plant’s
neighbors, “and they need to find issues to keep them alive. El Concilio has
definitely had an effect on the neighborhood’s view of the plant, but I think
it’s just because the radicals tell some of the folks around here what they
want to hear. The ones who don’t care still don’t care, but the ones who do
care are fighting harder than before.”
It would be unfair not to concede that a lot of people who
couldn’t give a damn about Paul Hernandez are nonetheless working double time
to get Holly closed, but it would be untrue to hold that every one of the
thousand or so families in the Holly Street neighborhood (formally defined as
the span between I-35 and Pleasant Valley Road, and between Cesar Chavez and
the lake) is ready to man the barricades on this one. The general level of
uproar about the plant is less than, say, the background level of anti-airport
sentiment in the Flight Path, and despite the relish with which Macro Austin
drags oldsters out on their porches so they can scream into the microphone
about how the incessant background noise doesn’t bother them, there are many
Holly Streeters who indeed do not seem to care about the industrial monster
before their eyes.
So what are their big issues? According to Mendez, the usual
East Side stuff: “Drugs, crime, gangs, what’s happening to our young people. We
have seniors’ activities at the center, and that’s what they talk about. Both
the problems themselves, which make them angry, and the fact that the West Side
media seem to think this stuff only happens in East Austin, which makes them
furious.”
At first glance, it’s hard to believe that this stuff
happens
around most of Holly Street. Even before you see people, the landscaping –
elaborate floral displays and fences around every house – tips you that the
neighborhood is 85% Hispanic, and the homes at the lower end of the
neighborhood’s socio-economic array confirm that about one-quarter of the Holly
Street households exist below the poverty line. But there are far scarier
neighborhoods in Austin, some of them 100% Anglo, and one suspects that – as is
the case in many East Side districts – any miscreants found on these streets
were not born and raised here, or else their butts would have been soundly
whipped long ago. Certainly, this is the perception of the locals, with “the
illegals,” and often “the Salvadorans,” getting the brunt of the blame. “Go out
to the washateria on First Street,” says one, “and you’ll see the nicest cars
in Austin – Mercedes, Jaguar, you name it – lined up to get their drugs. The
buyers are coming over from the West Side, the sellers came up from Central
America, but everyone in town thinks we’re some sort of drug den.”
As is likewise happening throughout the old Eastside, Holly
Street is becoming a popular destination for Anglo homeseekers, priced out of
the rest of Central Austin, repelled by the Milburniana of the suburbs, and
attracted rather than terrified by the Eastside way. “The old folks have owned
these homes for 50 years and now they’re dying out,” says one local, “and their
kids live somewhere else, and every home that’s gone up for sale in the last
two years has been sold to white people.” (Or, as Mendez takes care to point
out, “white liberals.”)
The relationship between the Anglicizing of Holly Street and
the newly escalated war against the power plant is imprecise, but it seems
likely that this Eastside shift has made more Anglos citywide aware of Holly
Street’s neighborly virtues, and thus more appalled by the plant’s presence.
Otherwise, says Mendez, the influx of new residents – in this context,
“gentrification” would be an insult to the original homeowners – “hasn’t had
much of an effect, because it’s been slow and sporadic. Right now, the Anglos
that I know over here have no desire for the neighborhood to be `different,’
except for the plant. But that may change.”
What this means for Holly Street’s own symbolic role as a
center of Chicano life in Austin is unclear, made even less so by the fact that
the ultimate bleaching of the neighborhood isn’t assured. “What we’re seeing
now,” says Mendez, “is a lot of young folks, especially single folks who can’t
afford rents elsewhere in town, coming back to live with their families. So
those houses may never be sold. There’s definitely a demand here for the chance
to stay in this neighborhood.”
This article appears in June 2 • 1995 and June 2 • 1995 (Cover).