 They are, you know, getting out of there, you know, you know, a lot of the animals, you know, you know, they are, you know, getting out of there, you know, getting out of there, you know, Welcome and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events, and we are pleased to welcome you to a program with Eric Porter for his book, A Briefing for History of SFO, The Making of a Bay Area and an Airport. We're also very pleased to welcome our collaborators and friends at Publishing House, UC Press, and we'd like to welcome Kim Robinson, who is Deputy Director and Editor-in-Chief and her staff, so thank you for joining us. Now if you're new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in part of the city, as many of you know. We feature our general interest library, an international chess club, and ongoing author and literary programs, and on Friday, our cinema and film series, so please visit our website, milibrary.org, to see all the things we have to offer. And also if you are new, please take our free tour, which is on Wednesday at noon, and the librarians will take you around to show you our gorgeous building and introduce you to our library collection and everything that's under one roof. Also after the program tonight, Alyssa Stone, who is our Senior Director of Programming and Community Library, will be giving a tour and she's waving her hand in the back and please join her on a tour to give a little introduction to Mechanics Institute. Also following our program, we'll have Q&A with you, our audience, and then book sales and science with Eric Porter. And now to introduce our program. Starting with the very land that SFO was built on, a people's history of SFO sees the airport as a microcosm of the forces of work in the Bay Area, from its colonial history and early role in trade, mining, and agriculture, to the economic growth, social sanctuary, and environmental transformations of the 20th century. Certainly San Francisco is the city of dreams, of raw ambition, and perhaps flights of fancy. Eric Porter is our first time here, so we welcome you. Eric is a director of history and history of consciousness and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also affiliated with the music and Latin American and Latin American and Latinx studies departments. He previously taught in the American studies development at UC Santa Cruz, as well as University of New Mexico, University of Nevada, Reno as well. His research and teaching interests include black cultural and intellectual history, U.S. cultural histories, jazz and improvisation studies, urban studies, and comparative ethnic studies. Among his previous books include also from the University of California Press. What is this thing called jazz? African American musicians as artists, critics, and activists, which was winner of the American Book Award 2002. And also with photographer Louis Watts, New Orleans Suite, music and culture in transition. And we are so pleased to welcome you for the first time to the podium. Thank you, Laura, for that wonderful introduction. And I did do the tour myself earlier and I definitely recommend it. And thanks to everyone here at the Mechanical Institute for inviting me here and for giving me the... Making this event happen and giving me the opportunity to share my work. And thanks to all of you for being here, especially the folks from UC Press, but everyone else as well. For giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts about SFO and the area of history. So I'm going to begin with a brief overview of the beloved people's history of SFO. And I'll say a little bit about how they came to write it. And then I'll spend the rest of the time discussing and reading from some of its chapters to show how the history of this airport, located about a dozen miles south of here in San Mateo County, provides interesting perspectives on phenomena that have shaped life in the big area. And I should say from the outset that this isn't a typical book about airports, which tend to focus on aeronautical operations and technological innovations or engineering accomplishments. My book has some of that, but it's more in tune to the social and political history of the big area and how a select group of airport related phenomena maybe understood in relation to that broader context. So some of this book's project is to illuminate SFO's changing role as a catalyst for the development of the metropolitan area. But it also examines the airport as a infrastructural manifestation of various forms of accumulative power that had to find the region. I try to show how SFO both reflected and shaped what I refer to in the book as the Bay Area's colonial present as it came together at different moments of time. And along the way, and here's where people's history comes in, the book explores complex relationships that differently positioned people have had with one another and how they blinded, resisted, and otherwise negotiated powerful forces that had shaped their lives and shaped the region. And the book also tries to come in terms with SFO's role as a symbolic point of regional reference through which many different kinds of people have tried to imagine and live their individual and collective urban visions. So using the airport as a lens for understanding the history of a region may seem a bit odd. After all, we often experience airports as unremarkable places. Unremarkable sites that could be located almost anywhere. And there's certainly a good deal of writing about airports as non-places, as the anthropologist Mark Poje described them. Writing in which commentators have emphasized the uniformity of terminal spaces across the planet and the sameness of airport experiences, you know, often depicting those things as products of globalization, a kind of homogenizing circulation of architectural styles, cultural practices, and social behaviors. But it looks seem to me that airports in California are something very interesting about the places where they're located. You know, as transportation hubs, workplaces, ports of entry, high-end shopping malls, and other things, there are places where many different people from a region come together and not only travelers. And the interactions and activities of these people, the work they do at airports, the policies they enact there, how they represent their regions or cities through cuisine and public art, and even the protests that sometimes happen at airports are reflective of both global and local social political and cultural phenomena. Among other things, airports are places where we can witness some of the profound inequalities in shading local social relations. As well as where we can see people living out their aspirations as workers, business people, migrants, and travelers. So I saw some of this in my own family history, which is actually linked to SFO. My grandfather worked as a sky cap at SFO beginning in the 1940s. My father did the same thing during weekends and during summers while he was in high school and college. And it was my grandfather's job that brought the African American side of my family to the Bay Area as part of the second grade migration. It wasn't the best work, but it was good paying work. And that job, my grandfather used that job to secure a measure of geographic mobility and financial security for himself and for his family. And beyond that, I've learned lessons over the years from the scenes of service work at different airports that I encountered as a traveler. And these are scenes that can, you know, the scene of service work at airports, there's a scene that can tell us something about the composition of the work before, recent immigration patterns, and related phenomena in different regions. For example, the white people working the fast food counter at the Washington State SeaTac Airport in the 1990s said something about the declining fortunes and fat working class. In the area, some of the young professionals they served in transit drove up rents and home sale prices. A decade later, a white woman tossing trash at the feet of a veiled Somali custodial worker in Phoenix's Sky Harbor said something about Islamophobia, the changing dimensions of that type of blackness, and some of the challenges facing East African immigrants in the region post-911. And a decade after that, the multi-hued members of the jet-setting elite, expressing their disdain from Filipino security workers and SFLOs internationally, said something about complex race and class violence as well as global patterns of certainty. I would learn later that these security workers were significantly better paid than they had been a few decades earlier, reflected a local history of SEIU organizing and an array of living wage campaigns in San Francisco and surrounding areas. But the fact that the security workers' ranks no longer included green card holders spoke to the inability of local activists and politicians to change the new U.S. citizenship requirement for airport security workers that was dictated by the Aviation Transportation and Security Act, or ATSA, signed into law in the wake of the September 11th attacks. So all to say, airports are complexly networked infrastructures connected to filing places through air travel, design, and federal law, but also to the places where they are located by the roadways and commuting workers who travel on them, power grid, by labor contracts, by municipal and state regulations, by their impacts on the natural environment, and other phenomena. As such, they can be useful touchstones for thinking about some of the interconnected and powerful forces that have influenced the development of their regions over time and have shaped the lives of people who have lived in these places. So a little over a decade ago, with some of these lessons in mind, I thought, I decided, don't know, that I could finally write this long deferred book about the history of the big area by focusing on its largest airport. And as I started reading scholarly and popular writing about airports and air travel, I found some commentary on some of the questions about networked power, a human connection that I was interested in, but not specifically as related to SFO. So it seemed then that there was a story that needed to be told, and that's what I'm trying to do, a series of stories that tie aspects of SFO's history to that of the broader big area. So I'm going to turn now to how this plays out in the book by describing and reading from some of the chapters. And I'm going to start looking at it from the land and the water upon which the airport was built. So some of you may know SFO was originally established as Mills Field in 1927 on a patch of reclaimed Bayside Salt Marsh in San Mateo County. This land was first leased to and then sold to the city and county of San Francisco by the wealthy mill family. And since then, of course, the airport has expanded dramatically to cover a much wider stance of high lands, open water and dry land and built in San Francisco Bay. So SFO's own self-produced histories and a fair amount of the journalistic coverage of early airport activities began with the land as it existed in 1927 and these accounts tend to emphasize the engineering and planning triumphs necessary to allow this important infrastructure to rise out of the mud, so to speak. And I also decided to start with the land, but given my interest in how accumulations of settler-colonial and imperial relationships have shaped the Bay Area, I decided to take the story back earlier. And what I learned after doing that was just how complicated some of those relationships were, even on this relatively small piece of land. So in this book's first chapter, I talk about how the salt marsh, open water and the surrounding dry land were first transformed by the Ramaytush Sholoni people who formed millennia, hunted, fished, foraged and cultivated plants on and near the site. And then I go on to discuss how after the Sholoni were dispossessed and died in large numbers from European-born diseases and were taken to the Mission in San Francisco, how the future airport land and water were transformed by other relationships happening on it. As the Bay Area came, we moved from being part of the peripheries of Spain and Mexico to becoming a major population economic center in an increasingly powerful United States with imperial ambitions. So the future airport site was transformed, among other ways, in the 18th and 19th century by the San Francisco Mission and Presidio raising their cattle in the area. And then by the California, I'll say, Antonio Sanchez doing the same with his cattle after he purchased the land from the mission. And then by the Bill's family patriarch and wealthy banker Darius Ogden-Bills who after purchasing the land from the Sanchez family and establishing his estate there after which the city of Bilbre is named, he hired Chinese workers to Bill the Levy to reclaim the salt marsh next to the property. It was actually eventually absorbed into the property, including the portion that eventually became the airport. And he did this so he could graze his dairy caps on it because in addition he was fabulously wealthy. He was a banker who got rich financing in Sierra, gold and silver mining operations. He was also something of a gentleman's farmer. And then the airport site was further transformed by the runoff from these mining operations, salting the bay floor, and by oyster companies who established their beds in the shallow waters off of the mills estate. And by Chinese fishermen who ran a shrimping operation in those waters above the oyster beds after their displaced from other parts of the Bay because of discrimination. So let me read a little bit from the end of chapter one where I argue that the relationships among many different people on this colonized land in the 18th and 19th century helped us set the stage for some of the future airports and the Bay Area's social, political and economic developments. So in 1883, shortly after he moved to New York, various Ogden mills gifted the state of California a statue of Christopher Columbus kneeling at the feet of Queen Isabella of Spain while receiving her commitment to finance his initial pledges to the Americas. The statue sat in her capitals Matanda in Sacramento until it was removed in the summer of 2020 in the wake of nationwide protests and resverting his social racism. It was a fitting parting gift for mills given his role in extending the colonial processes initiated in the Americas when Columbus's voyage was. As mills' brother and banking partner, Edgar, put it at the dedication of the statue, California more than any other state in the American Union fulfills Columbus's visions of marvelous lands beyond the setting of the sun. Of the many people who up until 1883 had lived, worked, traveled on or otherwise shaped the land that became the mill's estate, the Romantic alone experienced Columbus's visions most directly and tragically. But the brutal encounter with Spanish colonizers was just the first of many entanglements that happened at that place. Soon, the locally situated and several colonial processes of grazing, shredding, oystering and recreating the defined land shaped as they also were by the imperialistic reach of mills and other transnational business practices would be superseded by others. These processes were still local, but they reached farther and more consistently beyond the setting sun as they drew Bay Area residents and others into ever-growing and farther reaching assemblages. The relationships that defined them were products of the denser integration of capital, governmental, military and social networks that were eventually facilitated and imagined through a new kind of infrastructure San Francisco's airport. So the next couple of chapters show how the development and the expansion of the airport from its opening in 1927 to its official designation at San Francisco International Airport in 1954 were shaped by 20th century versions of these networks. And one major theme of these chapters is how the early growth in SFO as a civilian infrastructure was tied to the militarism and played such a large role in the development of the Bay Area across the 20th century. The airport benefited from direct subsidies from the U.S. military as well as from other federal funding that was justified by the argument that civilian airports played an important civil defense and military troop in cargo and transport functions. And of course the air industry also benefited from aeronautical technologies that were originally developed for the military. And another theme in these chapters is how local boosters and municipal officials and airport officials also justified both the funding for airport construction and expansion on the grounds that they would fuel a growing Bay Area economy via trade across the globe and especially around the Pacific Rim and create jobs on the ground at and near the airport. But such benefits were not distributed equally evenly. So a fundamental lesson to explore here is how SFOs are seen as a barometer of as well as an engine for some of the social inequalities that were part and parcel of the Bay Area's growth as a metropolitan region. So I'm going to read a bit from the third chapter where I talk about such developments in the 1940s and 1950s. And this chapter focuses on in August 1954 festival at the airport where 500,000 people were sent in on the facility over three days to celebrate the dedication of the new terminal and the official designation of the new plane as an international airport. For some visitors it was a chance to take the first look inside an aircraft. 43 military and civilian planes were on display. Others spent significant time among the throngs of the new terminals state-of-the-art cocktail lounge. The festival also afforded visitors the opportunity to invest in regional pride and various visions of internationalism presented to them by airport officials, airlines, local business and community service groups, government officials, the military and entertainers. There were clowns and acrobats, wandering folk artists, U.S. Air Force Army, Coast Guard and Marine Bands, and beauty queens. Festival goers could also watch airline-sponsored films promoting travels to Hawaii, Mexico, Japan and other destinations, participate in drawings for prizes brought from Europe and TWA, join the crowd hoping to catch one of the packets of imported Irish shamrocks dropped from the Hiller helicopter hovering overhead, or expect a Pan Am Boeing 377 Stratocruiser which the airline used for flights to Honolulu and Oceanic and Asian destinations beyond. For your information, the Stratocruiser, which is a smaller aircraft in this photo, was a civilian version of the Stroud freighter military troop transport plane, which was itself an offshoot of a B-29 Super Fortress bomber which was used, among other things, to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The festival was also a performance of the gendered whiteness of the airport. As workplace, travel hub and economic engine, which made sense, given the demographics of California and Bay Area power and wealth at this moment. Written descriptions and photographs of the weekend festivities show uniformly white and male groups of elected officials, union leaders and airport officials presiding over the dedication and other events. Their wives were there too, but very much as lives offstage in their final route. The beauty queens on display also enhanced the whiteness and heteronormativity of the festival. The festival crowd was remarkably white too. Again, not so surprising, given that the Bay Area population was still over 90% white in 1950, despite recent migrations of African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans and others to work in the defense industry and other fields. But photographs of the event show a crowd even planted with that. The site-specific demographic seems in part a product of an asymmetrical distribution of spending power among the region's inhabitants. Civilian air travel in the United States was in 1954, despite its recent partial democratization, still largely the providence of reasonably well-off white consumers. The largely monochromatic crowd was also likely a reflection of what sociologist Wilson Reckard, writing several years later, called The Basic Racial Provincialism, that is social and residential segregation, but underlay the Bay Area's service cosmopolitanism during the post-war period. Moreover, given that the crowds likely included a high representation of people with an economic relationship to the airport, as well as their family members, the whiteness of the festival goers would stem from the systematic racial discrimination in the airport employment, in the local building trades, whose members worked on airport construction projects, and among local vendors and other businesses that provided services to the facility. It spoke as well to how massive post-war infrastructure projects in San Francisco and the Bay Area, more generally, as the historian Justin Jenkins of Stanford discusses in great detail, publicly funded by federal aid and low interest municipal bonds, primarily benefited by residents consumers and workers, even though current and future black and brown residents remain on the hook for pain with them, with their tax dollars and through the lack of investments and projects that would have benefited them more directly. Having said all that, people on in this chapter to talk about how the small number of people of color at the festival, like the black couple in this photo, anticipated a growing participation in airport-related phenomena by a wider range of people as airport work and air travel became somewhat more inclusive. So the following three chapters of the book shift the focus away from infrastructural developments and social elites, although they remain part of the story, in order to address how members of increasingly visible and vocal Bay Area constituencies engaged with the airport as workers, business people, neighbors and travelers. And all three of these chapters take their cues from protests that either happened at the airport or happened on the street or in board of supervisors city council meetings and places like that in response to airport-related phenomena. So one of these chapters looks at African-American labor and anti-discrimination struggles at the airport. Another tells the story of anti-jet noise activism in some of the communities surrounding SFO. And both of those chapters go from the 1950s into the 1980s. The third protest chapter addresses how people challenged U.S. immigration policies that were in the fourth at the airport ranging from those banning LGBTQ travelers, foreign LGBTQ travelers from entering the United States circa 1980 to President Trump's 2017, so-called Muslim ban. And one lesson that comes out of these chapters out of these airport-related struggles rather in the Bay Area is that they're often quite diverse in terms of a wide array of people and organizations and institutions that shape them. And another is that liberal and even progressive efforts to gain access and justice in a region known for its hospitality and cosmopolitanism and activism often had limits and sometimes reproduced inequalities in complicated and sometimes unexpected ways. So let me read an excerpt from the chapter focused on Black activism at SFO when this chapter starts some sort of protest. July morning in 1970 three Black sky camps Theodore Trailer John Hatch and Edward Anderson been treated here performed a what they call the friendly citizens arrest at the airport on United Airlines SFO operations manager Kenneth Wardle. The man escorted Wardle into a Volkswagen and drove him from SFO to San Francisco's Hall of Justice where they treated him to coffee and pastry while waiting for the courts to open. The action came several months into protests and legal action against the United SkyCats a local 3051 of the brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship ships that represented them. The issue was the announcement that the airline would terminate a contract with the Allied Aviation for the supply of SkyCat labor and hire its own SkyCats through its nationwide in-house employment system. As a result 23 of 35 Allied workers SkyCat being pretty united including Taylor Hatch and Anderson were released or transferred to other airlines. The SkyCats wanted Wardle charged with violating California Labor Code sections 970 and 973 requiring employers to inform potential employees about ongoing labor disputes for not educating the newly recruited SkyCats about the ongoing conflict. The SkyCats case was heard that afternoon by a judge who despite the circumstances of the arrest and the circus atmosphere in his courtroom took the matter seriously enough to transfer the case to a colleague before leaving for a vacation. So the issue of the SkyCats wanting the operations, the United Operations Manager charged for these labor code violations united on the SkyCats charged with kidnapping. But none of the charges stuck. So although the case against Wardle was ultimately thrown out most Allied SkyCats were not rehired by the United. This episode provides a useful entry point into the story of Black Labor and anti-discrimination activism and SFO. Particularly as the SkyCats struggled as unionized employees of a private contractor providing services to an airline at a municipal airport with the conditions under which they labor shaped by corporate restructuring and recent efforts to transform the racial logics of airport employment through activism and affirmative action programs in the light. All call attention to the ways that Black work at the airport was a complex web of possibility and exclusion. The SkyCats provided useful symbolic perspective as well. They engaged in servile labor that they generally earned to high wages from tips high wages from tips intended to hold on to their jobs tenaciously. They were often visible well connected members of Black communities in the Bay Area and elsewhere who secured geographic and social mobility of carrying white people's luggage and their racialized baggage that came with it. As a symbol of flexibility and accomplishment then the figure of the SkyCats gestures to an array of contradictions of Black work at SFO that shaped the history of activism at this site. Indeed, as I take the story into the 1980s following airline deregulation, weakening and organized labor and scaling back affirmative action programs and other factors the chapter shows that despite some successes these ethnic discrimination struggles were definitely defined in part by their limits. They succeeded in securing Black people's significant access to better paying work and business opportunities in the facility secured those things for some but many Black men and women at the airport remain consigned to low wage, low skilled work intermittent employment and sometimes they lost their jobs as well and that even situation remains the case today. In that sense these struggles reflect the largest story of Black labor and social movements in the Bay Area and for probably a late 20th century decline in the collective Black presence and status in the Bay Area that has followed among other things the industrialization urban development and gentrification mass incarceration and outmigration. Okay, so then the most final two chapters I focus on some of SFO's more recent operations and programming to address how some of its activities and mainly its public art and museum exhibits and its sustainability efforts speak to a different set of social, political and environmental phenomena that are currently shaken by the Bay Area which promise to continue to do so in the future and SFO's activities in these arenas provide insights into these phenomena and into such a phenomenon as part because they have very much SFO's activities have been very much shaped by the Bay Area's social and political climate and because in very self-conscious ways SFO officials have used these programs to brand the facility as one that is representative of and responsible to the local population. So I'm going to read a little from both chapters first from the one on the Airport Museum and Public Arts Program and just I'm going to offer a little bit more setup before I do that. So the Public Art Program was established in 1977 under the auspices of the Airport Commission and the San Francisco Arts Commission and the cultural exhibit began in 1980 and had been curated by what has come to be known as SFO Museum and these programs, the Arts and Museum programs have often emphasized the work of Bay Area of artists and also featured collections from a wide array of local cultural institutions and these are programs that have been widely praised by travelers even if you may have seen someone working in these cultural objects around the facility widely praised by travelers as well as by arts and museum professionals and one manifestation of that is the fact that in 1999 SFO Museum became the first airport museum to be credited by the American Alliance of Museums. So I'm interested in the political significance of these programs as they have developed and as reflected in some of the individual artworks and displays and one of the things I focus on in this chapter is how artworks and exhibits have both critiqued and as positioned in the airport reflected recent unequal social transformations so the section I'll read analyzes two permanent public artworks at the airport with which some of you may be familiar one is Su-Chen Han's Welcome which is a series of glass panels with the word welcome displayed in different languages that greets travelers as they pass through the customs and immigration area and then the other is one of the CI and Emanuel Manzovayas Sanctuario Sanctuary which sits in one of the departure gates in the international terminal and whose closely diverse cast of characters connecting with one another Alicia Montoya meant as portraying the multiracial bay area as a place of sanctuary I think it's important to note here that both Alicia and Montoya were important prominent figures in the mission district okay so building on a history of Bay Area on its activism Sanctuario Sanctuary and welcome counter contemporary patterns of displacement and exclusion we are after all situated in an important entry for many of the immigrants that have made the region more diverse SFM also brings together Bay Area residents as workers travelers and so on these works critique the Bay Area's ongoing project of producing a total array of subjects and incorporating them into and across the metropole unequally and in exclusionary ways at a moment when many Bay Area residents are more likely to connect professionally and personally via SFM virtually with those living in other global centers of finance and technology then to connect to the working class members of the region these are work's insistence data continuing central thriving presence in the face of some of the economic political and social forces that make them necessary to the region's operation but still socially and symbolically marginal within much as radical mission district art even with this political critique and community and accountability can make a gentrified San Francisco a study of pleasing and health to brand the city even some through our ill-sexuaries incorporate the brothers seamlessly into a space in which a mission of economic progress unfettered mobility cosmopolitanism and sophisticated consumers of dominates the success of such a study of integration was likely facilitated by an airport commission and arts commission steering committee's insistence that the pieces potentially emotionally disrupted elements be toned down and this is something that existed as some Montoya and Abyssa were working on this and this attempt by the committee to soften the pieces of radical edges even if not fully successful gestures more broadly to the ways that multicultural celebration has a time spent in the terrain upon which unable material distribution and outright displacement have been smoothed over and enacted in the Bay Area and elsewhere during the 1980s 1990s and beyond so Alicia and Montoya also intended for their piece to offer a vision of sanctuary for non-human creatures living in and passing through the Bay Area and this is reflected in the piece by a piece carved with shorebirds of the sides and at the top and also by the paintings of birds I'm not sure if you can kind of see them putting that up here in the back paintings of birds the pillars of the structure this thus offers a kind of critique of SOFO's harmful effects on the environment and this is something that I address in various places in the book in different ways but there are front and center in the final chapter where I discuss SOFO's recent sustainability programming and its efforts more generally to address climate change SOFO is seen from Bay Front Park SOFO's sustainability programs include things like recycling and wetlands and habitat restoration as mitigation for some is incursion into the Bay and boosting its reliance on renewable energy sources and SOFO in their publications have tied these environmentally focused programs to what it defines as a mission of social responsibility to its workers and to its neighbors and in some ways the sustainability programs are impressive as they try to evaluate the environmentally harmful effects of its operations but as you can imagine these efforts are also defined by their limits although SOFO was and we said this a couple of years back when I was finishing the research for this book on its way to becoming carbon neutral in terms of its on the ground operations you know that's just a drop in the bucket and think about how much fossil fuels burned by aircraft as they travel between SOFO and other airports and such additions of course are one factor in EC level rise that may soon threaten the facilities basic operations as it may soon threaten a lot of things around the Bay and this is something that SOFO is aware of has been talking about it and you know they've been planning to address this in the future by building a seawall around the facility so look at SOFO's sustainability programs there and lastly give me an opportunity to not only think about what's happening in the airport but also contemplate you know broader environmental effects of some of the colonial and imperial processes that not only shape the airport but shape the Bay Area more generally over the years and also you know talking about these things allows a book to come full circle so to speak by returning to the land and water upon which the airport was built okay so here's a bit from that chapter that distills some of the issues I've addressed there waterfront airports have played particular roles in their own potential devices given threats to them from rising sea levels by facilitating commercial aviations relatively small but still significant and growing contributions to fossil fuel consumption across the 20th and into the 21st century the fact that the effects of sea level rise promised to be even more pronounced at SOFO because it is sinking as a film upon which it was built compresses from the weight of its largely concrete and steel infrastructure speaks to the legacies of the specific set of relationships that transformed the site over the years climate change has been a story shaped most profoundly and for longer periods by wealthy nations and empires of corporations certain oil companies and the humus re complacency and denial of social elites SOFO's growth as a global hub is also representative of how decolonization modernization and growing levels of energy consumption in India China and other more recently industrialized countries have contributed to the acceleration of the climate crisis over the last several decades closer to home SOFO's growth has been facilitated by the partial democratization of air travel since the mid-20th century and the related function of the infrastructure as a site of consumption and labor for a growing number of residents in other words commercial aviation like other contributions to the growing climate crisis is an outgrowth of a long history of dispossession exploitation and profound and irrevocable changes to the earth as well as of more recent collective efforts by a wider range of people to live life SOFO's cannability programs generally and the airport's efforts to address climate change in particular made clear some of the planetary costs accrued as people and things have been sucked into the relationships that have defined the region were the foundational commitment to remain economically viable and operational but influenced by environmentalist thinking and more recently questions of social justice SOFO's efforts demonstrate the ways progressive politics have shaped the operations and rhetoric of the local limited industry over the past half century or so but when SOFO claims is an attempt to develop a more equitable ecology of humans and things in and around the airport speaks justice loudly of the limitations of the sustainability programs and as discussed in other chapters of the shortcomings of previous modes of social inclusion and environmental stewardship at the airport and in the region more generally so those are some of the examples from the book I know it's clear that when one looks at things like labor support in SOFO it's public arts and festivals and even the land upon which it is built life can be a valuable perspective on the Bay Area as a controversial deeply symbolic point of local reference regional reference SOFO is like other airports a kind of archive and the history that we can extract from this archive you know reading it as a source alongside other sources provides a useful lens for understanding a multiplicity of connection some of the multiplicity of connections that shape the Bay Area made the Bay Area over time and helps to see among other things how power has manifest in many of those connections so thanks for giving me the opportunity to show this work I'm happy to say more and answer questions we're going to now open up to the audience and I'm going to come around if you have a question raise your hand and I'll come to you can you say more about the evidence of the sinking situation I've never heard about that there have been some studies that have come out over the past several years maybe up to ten years by different scientists who have been measuring it and it's really significant and if I had been given this talk two years ago I could probably use the exact amount that it has been sinking each year but there's a couple of studies in the book imagine some kind of geographical survey they determined that it was sinking which makes sense given that a lot of the important knowledge was either built on this reclaimed salt marsh that was a fairly spongy land or a landfill that was poured into the bay and then gone away and put it over it's just been compacted so I look here this is my standard airport that I go to and I've seen a lot of movies over the years changes scenery is there like a meta-conversation about why we have two other airports in the same region New York comes to mind they have JFK, LaGuardia, New York but we also have three and it's awkwardly close I don't know well I wish I knew more about San Jose and its history so I mean at one point it wasn't clear which was going to be the major airport in the Bay Area San Francisco and actually after SOF was built as those fields in 1927 it ended up losing almost all of its business to Oakland about a year later because pilots tended to see it as less foggy it was safer to take off the land front and it was unclear for a while but then important officials and other people were able to convince folks that having the larger airport be closer and possibly to San Francisco made more sense SOF really grew much more rapidly than it opened over the 30s and set up complicated events especially during World War II and then open started I think just to catch up later after the populace the Bay Area some supermints spread across the Bay Area and more people were living there I mean there's probably someone who knows more about flight operations and volume I could say more about that similar thing I mean we may go back as far but in terms of the United Places a lot of travelers I think it's much more recent but it just has to do with So San Francisco has been on the global map before the airport was done and I believe that airports are something that puts a city on a global map in the 1850s we had the Gold Rush in San Francisco and also Stanford University was established in the 1850s so it was there as a part of it that the Asian community had a very big influence on the making of SFO and how it influenced the social dynamic and the social structure of the people who are working at the airport and around Is the question did the Asian population in the Bay have a I mean certainly as even more recent years I think the Asian, Asian American people have served in capacity as airport officials and part of the management teams and the like I think there is a long history of some Asian, Asian American workers in the early days working at the airport but not many I think I've seen evidence of some Chinese workers participating through SWPA employment programs helping to build runways of the like at the airport I think in terms of anything that seemed more prestigious there was a lot of discrimination both by the airlines and by other businesses at the airport so it wasn't until later that Asian Americans along with African American Latinos and others were able to break into a lot of the kinds of jobs you know a lot of airline jobs you know rather menial jobs custodial jobs things like that of course there's a very Filipino workers that are very visible in you know security workers at the airport for some decades I'm curious what percentage of the research that we did was to use with people connected to the airport versus academic and I always identified San Francisco airport as having the best museums in the big area but they seem to be run in almost mysterious manner I've been going out there I've had some interesting interactions with people there and since it's at their islands that it's kind of self contained and I don't think they communicate a lot with the public they don't let the public into openings I don't think they even have all kinds of these shows but it's a high quality operation doesn't matter if you have very few staff and a lot of volunteers did you encounter this and did it raise your concerns about things you can talk about as a reflection well first question I work with archives in various kinds of documents I thought about making it more of a project I would draw more from interviews but given the scope of things I was looking at it seemed like I was going to make it overwhelming trying to get this thing done in 10 more years to the project it really hits with that many people my understanding is that there has been some connection dialogue between people in the SF arts community people on the San Francisco Arts Commission and people otherwise connected to the arts scene when it comes to the development of the both public art program and the museum program a person who was originally in charge of the William McKinnon Museum program actually was an employee of the arts commission and I think maybe worked with the DM or one of the other arts institutions and one of the parts of the story is San Francisco the museum part of this actually was able to prosper in the wake of Proposition 13 as these different cultural institutions were experiencing budget cuts and standing back things that's one reason why the person who was working up there I think they were about to be laid off and then ended up going to the airport and the thing that I'm just going to remember a year but the exhibit kind of put the cultural program on the map was this glass exhibit sometime around 1980 I was traveling in one of the New York museums and was supposed to go to the DM or the Palace of the Legion of Honor and they ran the front Proposition 13 to the whole exhibit there the airport had all this money part because of the revenue generated by SFO operations but also because of this useful ordinance which says that a certain percentage a certain amount of money has to be in any new public building has to be dedicated to art to draw those funds and actually yeah, in terms of the other part of the question in terms of how they operate today vis-a-vis the public and the I really can't say much about that I mean obviously a lot of that stuff is behind the security gates so a lot of it is inaccessible but I do know from experience because I went with a friend of mine who was in law school I think he's mentioned you know and I collaborated on the wall in Sweden he had an exhibit of his actually not of his photographs but some of the photographs from the 40s and 50s on the film war that were implanted at the airport so he got passes to go behind you can do that if you make the arrangements at the SFO Museum you can get a pass and go behind the security gates after they check you out Hi, thank you for that talk and highly researched book I'm wondering so SFO as I understand it is surrounded by San Mateo County and I'm wondering if those counties have encountered conflict over the years for that and also has the airport always been run by the city and county I think it's a mix of things I know a lot about the flow of its history not really an airport historian so it's hard to ask the question of the percentage of airports that are privately operated versus municipally run but my understanding is that the city and county has run San Francisco has run from the very beginning and they have had at times a contentious relationship with different entities in San Mateo County you know, over taxation and over revenue local labor unions have been compromised whether in San Francisco unions or whether in San Mateo County unions are going to get access to certain kinds of jobs at the airport the questions around the effects of sea level rise and what SFO might do about the controversy over recent years and I've actually heard from city officials and more of the surrounding communities just to touch base a bit about the book and talk about the fact that they're really worried that if SFO goes along in terms of building a sea wall and trying to protect the facility it could be a real trouble for surrounding communities as this water that doesn't go forward to the airport gets displaced elsewhere I think this is an issue around the Bay Area this conversation about possibly collaborating with some kind of sea wall that would protect not only the airport but also other entities around there but they have to re-unfund and agree on the planning it's conceivable that SFO could go along it's interesting that so many of San Francisco aspects of the municipal infrastructure are in San Mateo County for the longer the jail and in the airport so I think these relationships really have at times been strange question here it's a really interesting sort of the way you situated the airport within the Bay Area and the changes in society I was wondering could you say something about whether you feel like the airport in some cases was sort of ahead of the changes in the Bay Area in society anti-kind or sort of dragged by larger changes how would you sort of assess that that's a good question I think a couple of examples come to mind and I think when it was when it came to promoting trade around the Pacific Rim I mean it's where it starts in the 19th century but it seems like sources are read a lot of the people people associated with the airport officials and also local political officials business leaders who were really pushing not only the airport to be built but for it to be developed we're very much conceptualizing SFOs and noted in the Pacific Rim and wanted very much kind of envisioned this broad regional network of moving people so in that way I saw some of the descriptions of what the airport might be and what it might do as heralding these conversations of SFOs, global cities SFOs, constituent of the Pacific Rim that happen sometime later one thing that in which you're lying behind was doing something about discrimination and employment the airlines and certain aspects of SFOs operations in the 1960s were dragging their feet when it came to it wasn't the only place but it was a visible place where it was a place that was slow to integrate and I mean to the point where you know so slow that in the late 50s and early 60s a lot of civil rights activists didn't think it was worth trying to do much there and it wasn't until things were opening up in the air industry elsewhere people were seeing that stories of the premise and eventually some of the folks who were involved in the Indians were able to start to make some inroads at the important the broader civil rights communities okay this is a place that we can actually do something else we should be focusing on Eric had a question regarding also workforce and labor has AI and technology affected the labor force which as we've seen in other industries have become a social issue for the workforce in terms of labor protests issues that will come come up as in the past I imagine it is and it will be more and more of an issue in the future I can't really I just don't know anything about how that is the focus of concern at the airport right now I assumed that just in terms of managing flows of goods and people and aircraft AI will do more that's going to displace people certainly services have become more digitalized so we see that but also could be more efficient so it's too sized we have one last question and then we're going to have you have your books and the in conversation and have your books signed with Eric last question I understand that over the years Diane Feinstein was a very huge supporter of SFO all along and as a result it's going to be renamed in her honor so that's pretty amazing I just learned that when I came here tonight so I can't say anything about the decision thank you thank you