Oakland, California, is often treated as a city on the margins, best known for its struggles with poverty and gun violence, as well as for its history of radical Black activism. But a new book, The Pacific Circuit, argues that Oakland should be viewed as one of the centers of global change in the past century, serving both as a key node in the new global economy built around trans-Pacific trade, and as one of the “sacrifice zones” this economy requires.

Far from being an outlier, US journalist Alexis Madrigal argues, Oakland is in fact an early adopter of the technological and economic changes now tearing through cities across the US, and around the world. Oakland has long been the canary in Silicon Valley’s coalmine of disruption, the book suggests. But its residents don’t suffer passively: they organize and learn how to fight back.

Through the life story of Margaret Gordon, a 78-year-old Black environmental justice activist in West Oakland, Madrigal charts the personal repercussions of major technological and economic developments of the 20th and early 21st centuries, from real estate redlining, to container shipping, to mortgage-backed securities and the 2008 financial crisis.

We spoke with Madrigal, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the co-host of KQED Forum, a Bay Area radio show, this week. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You live in Oakland, and you’ve been working on this book for nearly a decade. What are the questions you started with?

When people come to Oakland, you see all the containers, and you see all the trucks and cranes and ships, and then, as you move into the city, you see there’s this neighborhood attached to the port, and you see it is clearly struggling with environmental and other problems. What is the relationship between these two things? What does being a port city do to the rest of the city? I ended up going all over the place to track down the answers.

Your book focuses on what was once the majority-Black neighborhood of West Oakland, and particularly on Seventh Street. Situate us: what does that look like?

Seventh Street used to be this thriving commercial Black corridor in the 1930s and 40s. In the 50s, “urban renewal” was done to it, which meant a lot of bulldozing, for a massive post office facility. An overhead train was run through the center of the street, and the commercial corridor kind of collapsed.

Today, Seventh Street is quite a wide, empty street that runs from downtown Oakland out to the port. There are very few thriving businesses there, and many things are in disrepair, and all around there are still community builders, and people trying to make this neighborhood good.

Margaret Gordon, one of the central figures of the book, is one of those local residents fighting to make the neighborhood a safer place. She’s one of the founders of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, and was honored by the Obama White House as a “champion of change” for her work to improve West Oakland’s air quality. Gordon called this book “a family affair” because of how closely the two of you worked together. How did her life become the main thread of the story?

It’s because Ms Margaret knows everybody – that’s the alternate title of the book. Everyone from Lisa Jackson, the vice-president of environment, policy and social initiatives at Apple, to people on the street. She and her life represent a really crucial movement and change in the Bay Area, which was lots of Black people migrating here during WWII. She was born in war housing here in 1946.

There’s a standard history of Oakland, starting with the arrival of the city’s Black population as part of the Great Migration from southern states, followed by “urban renewal” in the 1950s that bulldozed and dislocated Black communities, the crack epidemic and the war on drugs, and then gentrification and more displacement. In writing The Pacific Circuit, what are you trying to add to this narrative?

There’s a very deep and important urban history about the policies that structured Oakland and many other cities: segregation and redlining. I wanted to connect that with the big economic changes that were occurring over the same period, including containerization – the development of container shipping, and a network of shipping connecting Asian manufacturers and American consumers. Oakland is the first big container port in the western United States, connecting to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

There’s a second component to building these new transportation networks: you need all of the information technology to control these supply chains – you need the products of Silicon Valley.

And, as the third component, you need this sacrificial environmental landscape through which to scale global trade. What that means on the ground: you need hundreds of coastal acres on which to put containers, and you need a neighborhood that’s marginalized enough that you can run thousands of diesel trucks through it every single day, polluting the air and creating all this noise pollution. I wanted people to know that Silicon Valley and the growth of global shipping are directly connected to the problems people are having in West Oakland.

In researching this book, you found that Oakland’s Black radical thinkers, including Huey P Newton and other Black Panther party leaders, were very attuned to the importance of Oakland becoming a global port city, and the implications of what we might now call “globalization”. How did Newton make sense of this?

In the early 1970s, Huey Newton is looking down at the port of Oakland from his penthouse apartment, and he writes this essay, The Technology Question. He saw that the development of global supply chains was incredibly powerful and difficult to stop, and that it had really important ethical and political implications. Newton and the Panthers were hoping to build “revolutionary intercommunalism”, where sub-national units in different nations, people who found themselves in the same relation to the American imperial power, would join up together. And the first node would be the city of Oakland.

You learned that the Black Panther party leaders actually had this plan at the time to gain power in Oakland, and to strategically use Oakland’s port as part of the global battle for Black liberation. Do you think a lot about that alternate history?

They didn’t ever win the city government. And it might not have worked. But there was a possibility of having an enduring base of power. What happened instead is the slow deflation of the 1970s, and then the boom of the crack era.

You’ve described this book as attempting to be a shadow history of the working people of Silicon Valley. What do you mean by that?

There’s a lot of different ways to tell Silicon Valley’s story, and I think a lot has been left out. There’s an enormous labor force that’s put into place to do the assembly and eventually manufacture the electronics that make Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley. And that is absolutely inseparable from Asian manufacturing, and the women who work in those countries. When this work happens in California, many of the people working in those factories are also immigrant women. You have these two groups of women, across the ocean from each other, who are basically the equivalent of the auto workers in Detroit. These are the people who built Silicon Valley – all these workers, largely Asian women. And they’ve been completely written out of the story.

Your book chronicles the many ways that technological innovation can devastate people and communities. But it also contains an unexpected number of victories, including several wins for the west coast longshoremen who used to unload ships by hand.

One of the core premises of the book is that this system of Pacific shipping has these choke points, and the No 1 is the port. In 1934, there’s a massive strike in San Francisco by the longshoremen, and it’s essentially a total win. They get a hiring hall, and all of these changes to the consistency and the quality of the work that they do. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is able to unionize as a racially integrated, leftwing union across the ports of the west coast. I have found that group to be totally fascinating, both because they did allow the forces of modernization to the waterfront, and they have maintained pretty substantial strength as a union throughout, though much smaller than they were in their heyday.

What does the ILWU do in the face of the rise of container shipping, which drastically reduced the number of human workers needed to load and unload cargo?

ILWU leader Harry Bridges does a deal, and, as they put it, “they get a share of the machine”. For each ton that was shipped, some money was put into the union, and they agree to shrink the union over time. It remains a very controversial decision.

You write a lot about the vanished world of the dockworkers, what their jobs and their lives were like before containerization essentially ended this way of work. Looking back, how do you evaluate it?

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to these guys. Many of them are still alive. The job used to be brutal, physically demanding, and it left you broken. On the other side, you had friends, it was human – it was fun, in a lot of ways, not every day, but often. And there was this unbroken connection to the culture of the longshoremen: the bullshitting, drinking, hanging-out culture of the dockworkers. Now that dockworking is heavily mechanized, I don’t think most people would call it fun anymore, but it is also less damaging to your body, much safer, in most ways.

What are some of the other unexpected wins that Oakland residents have made as they struggle against some pretty big systemic problems?

The latest fight has been over a coal export terminal in the port of Oakland, that was going to take coal from Utah and ship it to Asia. Activists in Oakland, including Margaret Gordon, put together the No Coal in Oakland campaign, and they’ve managed to keep the export terminal from getting put in. Along with the work of other local activists who have also held the line on coal exports at other ports, that means that coal is still in the ground in Utah.

You write in the book that you’re worried that the logistical supply-chain systems that have long governed global shipping are increasingly coming home – and that on-demand ordering threatens to replace the city itself as a way of organizing commerce. How concerned are you that cities themselves might become an outmoded technology?

I think the Bay Area is already kind of living in that future in a lot of ways. It’s not the “doom loop”, which has these particular features related to the pandemic. This is more like one of those tidal forces: every business is getting a little harder to run. Oakland just got voted the best restaurant city in America, and I know a lot of restaurateurs in Oakland, and they can barely keep the doors open. People don’t come in. They order from a ghost kitchen. It’s so hard to get people to be out and living city life. I am genuinely troubled by it.

We have imagined that the pandemic was something we would come back from. What if, instead of a blip, it was a pulling forward?

That is a grim view.

On the other hand, this is something that’s more under control of individual people and communities than so many other problems with our world. This is something that people can choose – but they have to choose the city over a narrow individualistic idea of convenience. Over the long term, not having restaurants that can stay open, not having bookstores, not having coffee shops is very inconvenient, even if at any moment it might be more convenient to order delivery.