In September 1921, a Category 1 hurricane crashed into the Gulf Coast, pushing nearly three feet of rain all the way into Central and South Texas over just a few days. The San Antonio River swelled above its banks, submerging the city’s urban core and causing millions of dollars in damage. And on San Antonio’s West Side, where a majority of the city’s Mexican-American population lived, creeks and other small waterways were transformed into rushing walls of water that swept poorly constructed houses off their foundations. At least 224 people died in San Antonio, and most of them Mexican-American.
Despite the disproportionate damage to the city’s West Side, most of the recovery money was funneled to the city’s wealthiest corners. West Side residents were more or less left to fend for themselves as they recovered from the storm and looked to protect themselves against future storms. This disparity is the focus of Char Miller’s new book, West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement. Miller, a former history professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, chronicles how both before and after the storm, city leaders made a series of decisions that created the disparity in damage and death. The book shines when Miller expertly explains how the “natural” disasters that afflict Texas and other states aren’t really all that natural. The disaster unfolds when a natural phenomenon collides with the homes and streets we’ve built and maintained in precarious places: along the banks of a river, or on top of a shifting plate boundary. Events such as the 1921 flood often deepen the undercurrents of racism and classism where they hit. Who gets help? Who is left behind? We learn that those decisions are left entirely to human judgement.
Miller shows how these currents played out in 1921 by relying on long overlooked first-hand accounts, records, and reports from the West Side to fill in gaps in the existing narrative of the flood. The 1921 storm was the city’s deadliest disaster, and it finally convinced San Antonio officials and taxpayers that disaster prevention—new dams and expensive engineering projects—was worth the cost. The city secured bonds to undertake the projects, but the reader is left to wonder just how well the city’s infrastructure will fare as climate change increases the frequency and viciousness of storms. In a book that scrupulously details how human systems have exacerbated natural disasters, it’s a glaring omission: Climate change is perhaps the most apt example of the phenomenon.
