From the lowest points in the plains of Charco, Texas to the rolling hills of San Antonio, the sounds of the wild follow you- morning into night. On early mornings, as the dew slowly creeps up and out of the ground and the sun peeks over the hills, the soft coos of mourning doves are alarm clocks. Against the blaring beeps of my brother's phone in the other room, these soft coos become quiet good mornings, invitations to step out of my room and watch the delicate Texas sun creep over the hills that my home is snuggled into. Invitations to watch the rich indigo night, as dark as a bluebonnet, slowly fade into bright orange, dazzling yellows, and rosy pinks. During the early mornings of summer, before the sun beats down at noon on the asphalt, warping the vision of those who dare step outside Before the pale sun reflects back the dusty white backyard, littered with pieces of limestone, there is peace. The peace of a morning in San Antonio, for me, can be felt in one other place in Texas- Charco. About one hundred miles southeast of San Antonio, Charco is a forgotten small town, home to love and memories, buried deep within cotton and corn fields. Across Texas, one is never alone, as the state motto may make you believe, from El Paso to Beaumont, Brownsville to Dumas, the doves and cicadas are constant reminders of the community around you. In the evenings, as spring fades into summer, evening into night, the lullaby of the cicadas begins. Accompanied by the rustling of foxes, the croaks of toads, and the hoots of barred owls, the South Texas symphony brings peace, for now.
You know the blasts are happening when the house shakes for a brief second, an artificial earthquake, the shaking of the earth as fleeting as the shaking of the legs of a student right before an exam. For San Antonians and me, the impact of quarrying is more than simple shaking, it is a major polluter, a means of increasing emissions and worsening the air quality of the city. In the mornings, as the song of the dove begins to fade away, the quarry begins its dance, a one-two step of crushing and blasting. On the drive to daycare, as the sun crested over the hills, alerting me of the day to come, so too would I crest the hill at the entrance to my neighborhood in the back of dad's car. At the top, for a brief moment, I would see a smokestack. To a young me, I thought this was how clouds were made, a cloud factory, in actuality it was and continues to be a sign of pollution and destruction. In San Antonio, for residential areas that are close to active limestone quarries, the amount of fine particulate matter in the air, the kind that scratches lungs and irritates more than a pesky mosquito, is double the national standard. The lungs of those closest to the quarry are clogged and filled with dust, a contrast to the hollowing of my beloved hills. The pristine Texas sky, that produces an art piece each morning, muddied by the quarry.
It’s under this sky, located about a mile from the quarry, that my brother and I discovered our place in the hilly landscape. As the ground beneath us shook, our young minds were abuzz with chasing grasshoppers, up and down our backyard. Our hands clapping and missing the small, pale-green critters by a second. It was not just the grasshoppers that caught my brother and I’s attention, it was the ants too. Raging, climbing, racing into our socks and shoes because we decided to throw heavy limestone rocks at their abode. Their abode, so many ins and outs, our curious minds could never be satisfied. The sandy, coarse soil, the pale color, their fiery bites, the secrets that our backyard held were endless. But there was an end, the oak fence that closed us off from our neighbors, from the greenbelt lined with cedar trees as far as the eyes could see.
This left us with no choice but to understand the backyard completely, take in each blade of grass, each rock, each bluebonnet, and truly learn about the importance of caring for each other and the ground beneath us. The hugs I know best are from my family and the Texas heat. Where we would spend the summers outside frolicking on the hillside, the sun beating down, wrapping its endless rays around us. When I was young, I used to collect leaves and rocks, from daycare to the backyard. It was me and my used sandwich bag, ready to gather and observe. In the backyard, I would take pieces of limestone or leaves and acorns and leave them behind my door to watch how they broke down or how time affected them. The leaves are what caught my attention the most, the sharp and pointed edges of the oaks, the ellipse shape of the Mountain Laurel, the red and brown of the maples. The differences in all of this made my mind buzz, faster than the bees that would follow me around during recess. Louder than the cries of the grackles that swarmed the grocery store parking lots. Hotter than the concrete on a sunny day. I had to know about the world around me, it held so many memories and secrets, I wanted to know it all.
Diego and his brother, Francisco, play at the top of the hill in their backyard in San Antonio.
But knowing it all meant knowing about the quarry and the havoc it was/is wreaking on families across the city. Besides impacting air quality, the emissions from limestone quarries are a significant contributor to the warming of Texas summers. San Antonio is a city of circles, highways that loop and enclose the surrounding neighborhoods. On the way to school, as the hazy mornings turned to heated afternoons, my brother and I would join the thousands of cars traveling from the suburbs to the inner loop, where urban is best understood. The most prominent vehicles on those roadways were the eighteen-wheelers that held crushed pieces of limestone, many originating from the quarry by our house. These monstrous trucks were not only polluting the highways by dropping rocks onto nearby cars, safety be damned, but by contributing heavily to harmful emissions. They travel from the hills to the flat downtown, but their connection to these two locations is more than the roadway. It is in the impact they have on making a warm Texas day hotter than a comal making fresh tortillas, it is the impact these trucks have on creating an urban heat island on the West Side.
It is not hard to imagine the West Side of San Antonio, about thirty minutes from my home, as an island, its swaying palm trees and lively dance scene could even fool my Puerto Rican mother for a brief moment. But an urban heat island is far more serious than any tropical vacation. This past summer, San Antonio had over seventy consecutive days where the temperature was over one hundred degrees, breaking many city records, a sign of global warming, fueled by the diesel emissions from the work vehicles. Recent reports have found that among major cities in the United States, San Antonio is among the top five cities that experience an urban heat island effect, where areas of the inner city, most often historically redlined neighborhoods, experience higher temperatures due to a lack of significant green space and large amounts of asphalt or a lack of tree canopies. For folks on the West Side, this manifests in days that are six degrees hotter than the rest of the city. While the palm trees that line the West Side are a beautiful marker of culture, they also contribute to environmental injustice, providing little to no relief to the largely Hispanic community below, with their skinny trunks and small fronds. As my dad puts it, there were very few spaces to experience nature when he was growing up, and the parks that he knew are now being transformed, and access by the large minority community of the West Side is being limited.
The West Side of San Antonio is flat, it's one of the first things you notice after taking interstates, highways, and surface streets to enter the cultural paradise of San Antonio. If you roll down the window of your car two things will hit you, the heat that enters every crevice and warms your body in a way a smile never could and the art that paints every building- pastel yellows and pinks, and the pastel blue of the house where my dad grew up. Public art on the West Side is a means of protest, of highlighting the beauty and struggles that this community has gone through. The pastels and art are replicated in the windows of the panaderías, filled with conchas, whose shells are a mirror of the homes, both protectors from destructive forces at work. Beyond the appearance of the West Side, the smells of the blocks will hit you with memories and stories- smoked meat marking family gatherings and diesel from trucks, adorned with lawn care equipment and stickers, reminding you of the perseverance of this community.
This community is rooted in forgottenness. Born from the struggle of Mexican and Latiné immigrants, the people of this community made their own life in San Antonio. As the city grew in the early twentieth century, this part of the city was neglected, the people left to fend for themselves as other, whiter communities received more investment, and in turn, attention. For my grandfather and grandmother’s parents, this meant building their own homes. When no one was there to help them, they took matters into their own hands and built homes for their families of ten and fifteen, respectively. Their story is not unique, across the West Side and generations, people have been making their own life, their own community, and re-imagining their landscape- from pecan trees to agave plants, reminders of their homelands.
The streets of Las Palmas, the neighborhood deep in the West Side where my dad grew up, are lined with palm and oak trees, offering a brief glimpse of the wild to a neighborhood surrounded by the downtown cityscape and expansive suburbs of San Antonio. The palm trees, in my father’s words, "make sounds of creaking and rubbing as they stand in the wind, offering little shade to the folks below." In his backyard, he remembers playing in the sprinkler hose that his dad would set up or attempting to climb the pecan trees before his mom yelled at him to get down, always concerned with safety. My dad, a Star Wars fanatic, took his corner of the world and transformed it into Endor, the forested planet where the Ewoks live, moving his action figures along the pecan and oak trees.
A young Gerardo Gutierrez alongside his father in the front of their home in San Antonio, Texas.
When I talk to my dad about his youth, stories of his father are brought up, from my grandfather’s time working in South Texas on a cotton farm as a sharecropper. The experiences of my father and his father are intertwined, my father often bringing up the smell of cut grass as his clearest reminder of my grandpa. Hard work, the lesson instilled through generations of my family, shines through in the stories of my grandfather and father experiencing the often-crazy Texas environment. The drive to Charco, Texas never seems like much, but to my dad, Charco is where the natural world of Texas comes to life. Highway 181 could be confused with a rollercoaster if your eyes were closed, the ups and downs through the hills of San Antonio and Southeast Texas. As you take the highway down, the landscape transforms from tightly packed homes to a mosaic of cactus plains and oak clusters. At an aerial view, it all blends into one another, but on the highway, the layers of green contrast with one another, a construction of pale, emerald, and forest greens that transport passengers from jungle to grassland and back again. From one to two then eight, slowly but surely, the human impact on these hills is brought back, pump-jacks bringing oil out from the earth, appearing like disjointed flamingos at the tops of hills, fishing for money down below. Bringing memories from the ocean that once conquered these lands to the surface, secrets that should never be told. Standing on the edge of Charco, a painting of this landscape comes to life, hills stacked against each other, layers of time and memories, combined in this small town.
Forty-eight people currently live in Charco, but looking at the decaying and dilapidated convenience store, you know that life was once teeming here. From the swaying grass on the abandoned fields to the lonely cows that appear unexpectedly, Charco, like other small towns, has been forgotten. Pete Cantu, the oldest resident of Charco at 78, and even then, too young to remember what it was like when my grandpa lived there, describes the change in landscape over his time living in Charco. The loss of the two cotton gins, the ones my grandfather used to take his crops to. The loss of the post office and grocery stores, signs of movement from this small town by younger populations to San Antonio in hopes of more opportunity. The most significant loss, to Pete, was the loss of chili pequín, a small, wild pepper, that lights up the landscape, a firecracker against the dense green forest, gone, a consequence of pesticide usage. In the absence of intense investment and development, the calls of the mourning dove, the crow of a rooster, the moo of a cow echo through the landscape, a call to remember the life that exists here. Even in its name, charco, meaning puddle in Spanish, it seems like this town was destined to dry up, leaving only a silhouette of what once was. For me, life and death get muddled in Charco, like when a rain shower appears with the sun still shining.
My grandfather was born here, his life a part of the history of this town. As my dad tells me, the only time he would come was to tend to the sinking grave of his aunt. Her grave, now surrounded by ants, her name fading away on the pearl white tombstone, slowly becoming gray. Gray, people say their memories go gray, another sign of age to match their peppered hair. But I have always struggled with the memory of Charco, for one, because I never met my grandfather. I know him through the stories my dad recounts as we take highway 181 through the hills to the plains of Southeast Texas. I know him through the shovel that has rusted over time but is still strong enough to help my dad and me plant a garden. The shovel that sits in my backyard, and has for the past twenty years, watching my brother and I grow up. I know him through the cotton I touch like he used to, picking this paradoxical crop soft and thorny. When my dad and I stand on the crunchy dirt road by the farm where my grandfather used to work, the kind that sounds like rice-crispy treats as your car traverses the terrain, staring out at the lone oak tree in a field of gold grain, I feel my grandfather and know that he still lives through us both and in the landscape that we observe. The memory of my grandfather is not a story that only Charco knows, it travels back to the hills of San Antonio, to a place visited in tandem with Charco, the cemetery.
To a young me, death, the wild, and love were too abstract to understand, but at San Fernando Cemetery, located on the West Side, these came together. The trips downtown were always filled with journeys down memory lane, reflections on a changing landscape, and prayers to my grandparents, offering thanks for the work that they put in for me to have the life I know. On those afternoons, we would celebrate the lives of my grandparents.
Everywhere I go, I look at the vertical trees that grow too high to be natural and remember the Tuscan-inspired trees that circle my grandparent's grave. These trees, browning at the base because of the eternal drought San Antonio finds itself in, are interwoven with copper statues of lambs, the Lord’s lambs. The circular pattern of these lambs was the perfect place to play while my dad would cut the grass around the gravestones, in the same fashion as how my grandfather cleaned the grave of his sister in Charco. While my dad worked, I would spend time with my mom and brother, jumping, skipping, and rolling on the small mound by my grandparents grave. I used to sit on the scorching back of the metal lamb statue, feeling. Feeling is funny, I could feel the heat from the metallic structure and the presence of my grandparents, guiding me, as they always have, one feeling so pure with emotion, the other just simple pain.
On April 2nd, 2022, I visited the grave of my grandparents to offer thanks. The day before, I had gotten into Stanford University and was struggling with understanding the next steps of my life. As I have often done with major decisions, I went to the cemetery to sort out my feelings and offer gratitude for even getting accepted. That day, my dad and I stopped by the flower shop to bring my grandmother red and white carnations, her favorite flower, in the colors of Stanford. Since I was a kid, I always said a prayer when I stopped by the graves, I had never understood where or who the prayer was going to, but, at eighteen, I began to understand the connection between these flowers and my grandparents. The day after setting the flowers for my grandmother, my dad got a call from a cousin. In a dream she had that night, my grandmother had appeared to her and thanked her for the flowers. At that moment, when I heard that phone call, love, death, and nature clicked like a puzzle I didn't even know I was solving. San Antonio is where my grandparents continue to thrive, where their memories are lived. I never met my grandparents, physically, but they know me and I know them through the landscapes.
However, the landscapes on the West Side are changing, in demographic and physical means. If succession is the process of a forest being made, San Antonio represents the opposite of that process. Month to month, a patch of cedar and oak trees will be thinned out, pink ribbons deciding who stays and goes. Then, the next steps begin, the removal, chopping, destruction of trees and habitats and the exposure of deep burnt orange soil, not a sign of support for the local university, but instead, a sign of development and strip malls that are soon to populate this land. The first signs of movement into pristine nature, and the movement away from green space. It is not just the access to green space that the minority communities are being pushed away from, it is their homes on the West Side too. When we pass by Toltec Street, my dad usually remarks about how his parents were just barely making it by, but had they lived in their home in today's economy, they could not afford to. The value of my dad's old home has doubled, placing it out of reach for the poor communities on the West Side, which constitutes over a third of the community. Per a University of Texas report, residents in San Antonio are being forced to vacate their homes or have their homes demolished at a rate forty times higher than all other large Texas cities combined. A community that has defined itself and made its own wild culture, is being taken away.
For my family, the landscapes hold the memories of loved ones we have lost, fresh-cut grass and my grandfather, and hills and trees that remind me of my grandma. But the landscapes that we hold these memories in are not stable, on the West Side of San Antonio, heat and gentrification are pushing families out of their homes, and in the hills of Texas, limestone quarrying is worsening air quality. With threats to our lands come threats to the memories of loved ones and what we hold dear.
I used to think that mourning doves were spelled like "morning", the setting where I knew them the best. When I learned that they were mourning, their song became too real. Every day, I mourn my grandparents. I know their spirit guides me and I see, feel, and hear them in the world around me. I have started to take note of the coos of the dove. What is it mourning? Is it like my dad, mourning those who raised him? Is it like all of us mourning the change in habitats, the blasting of hills, the loss of land, the intense heat? Or is it simply making noise, passing time, for soon, it may be mourning the silence that will fill my beloved lands.
Works Referenced
Gutierrez, Gerardo. Telephone interview. 6 May 2024.
Langer, William. “Potential Environmental Impacts of Quarrying Stone in Karst- A Literature
Review.” United States Department of Interior and United States Geological Survey, 2002, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=p df&doi=abfd65540c95d37c405aa8dd2b02ba0267abe21f.
Aggregate and Limestone Mining North of San Antonio, TX, USA.” Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 7, 7, Jan. 2022, p. 4288. www.mdpi.com, https://doi.org/10.3390/su14074288.
Rivard, Robert. “Record Temperatures Put the Heat on San Antonio to Act Now.” San Antonio Report, 6 Aug. 2023, http://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-urban-heat-islands- tree-canopy-public-transportation/.
Ura, By Alexa. “On the Margins of Downtown San Antonio, a Maligned Neighborhood Mobilizes to Save Itself.” The Texas Tribune, 8 Dec. 2022, https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/08/san-antonio-redevelopment-neighborhoods/.
Villalpando, Roberto. “As Texas Heat Breaks Records, Data Show 100-Degree Days Are Happening More Often over Time.” Houston Chronicle, 14 Sept. 2023, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/article/triple-digit-temperatures-100-degree-days-18359771.php.
Way, Heather; Judd, Abbey; Willis, Ottilia. “Ousted: The City of San Antonio’s Displacement of Residents Through Code Enforcement Actions.” The University of Texas at Austin Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic, 2021, https://law.utexas.edu/ wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2021/11/2021-ECDC-CodeEnforcement-SA-Report.pdf.
Comments