THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT

Lessons to be learned from the history of Oakland, California.

In this expansive book, Madrigal explores Oakland’s ecosystem—from its storied past as home to longshoremen, Black Panthers, and the blues to its prospects as the epicenter of what he calls the Pacific Circuit—a “vast, powerful, opaque cultural structure” that controls the flow of consumer goods. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area city, Madrigal says, he sees “the marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity.” The book traces the rise of containerization, born of wartime need, how it links U.S. manufacturers to cheap Asian labor, and the ways it’s controlled by Silicon Valley. A journalist and author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, Madrigal argues that it is in Oakland’s port where one can best view these economic, environmental, and cultural effects. The external costs to people and the environment, which result from the instant gratification of one-click consumption, are laid bare. One of the Pacific Circuit’s features is to siphon money from around the world and concentrate it locally. Billionaires and elite tech workers benefit. This, says Madrigal, is “the simple answer for why the Bay Area got so expensive.” Unfortunately, as he notes, “the deepest, most haunting forms of American racism work through property.” Here, he explores racial capitalism and how it has affected Black families living in the port’s shadow; the book is framed by his admiring portrait of Margaret Gordon, a community activist and former Oakland port commissioner whose “crowning achievement,” he writes, is the Maritime Air Quality Improvement Plan of 2009. Madrigal’s writing can be poetic, even when he’s examining sediment: “The mining waste fell where it would somewhere on the floor of the bay. Great dredging machines chomped and slurped up this material, and builders mixed it with whatever else was around, and it became fill. Compact it hard enough and it became land, new land, histories mixed and buried.”

An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.