The “Pacific Circuit” author and host of KQED’s Forum is preoccupied with inequity in Oakland. And he’s about to launch a community space that he hopes will become a beacon of resilience.
by Ashley McBride Aug. 20, 2025 (Oaklandside.com)
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Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City is a sweeping history of how the Port of Oakland has impacted West Oakland, its residents, and the city as a whole.
Madrigal centers the story around Ms. Margaret Gordon, co-founder of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Her family came to the Bay Area during the Great Migration of the 20th century, when millions of Black Americans left the Jim Crow South for the job opportunities and class mobility of the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West. While they found less oppressive conditions than the ones they left, Black people still faced racism, segregation, redlining, and displacement in their new homes, including in Oakland.
Madrigal documents fights by the the woman known by the community as Ms. Margaret to make sure that the predominantly Black residents of West Oakland are not left out of the spoils brought by trade moving through Oakland’s port.
“One of my central questions in the book was why money could flow through West Oakland in the form of cargo from the port or government dollars or even the drug trade, but it didn’t seem to stick in the area,” Madrigal writes. “Who is making the money that could go to help people in West Oakland?”
Madrigal is best known as a host of KQED’s Forum. He and his wife Sarah Rich are planning to launch Local Economy, a community and event space in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, in October. They already have a lengthy slate of events lined up, including author talks, a cookbook club, board game nights, and art workshops.
The Oaklandside recently sat down with Madrigal outside the Local Economy space to talk about The Pacific Circuit, Oakland’s racial and political dynamics, and the rise of technology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with Local Economy. What need do you hope the space will fill?
Oakland has a ton of really creative people doing super interesting things, and that is one of the great things about it. I do a whole bunch of different kinds of events, and it feels like there’s some missing anchor points, and, I don’t know, ligaments running in between the different kinds of creative communities here. A big chunk of it was just trying to figure out how we could bring a sense of easy community, and also a space for a whole bunch of the people doing interesting stuff in Oakland to come together in the same place. A lot of people, particularly in this era of history, feel like there’s so much chaos happening at the national level, they feel isolation because of all of our devices, so we wanted to provide an antidote to those things and a beacon of community and resilience.
How are you going to sustain it?
One of the things I’ve noticed in reporting out The Pacific Circuit was that it’s really hard to make a business work if you’re making a coffee for $2 and selling it for $3. The leasing of these spaces is expensive. Everything is just incredibly expensive. So we wanted to build a model that worked with people directly supporting the community space.
In the old days you could have a cafe, you could have a bookstore, it would create this third space and people would be able to take advantage of that, and you’d support the space just by doing transactions. Because of Forum and other things, I talk to a lot of small business owners, and it’s really hard to do that, especially if you want to be able to program things that might only be for 10 people. How do you do that? Or you want to be able to bring art workshops that aren’t going to be super expensive for people. So the method we came up with is to have these monthly membership dues, which is in some ways new for this type of space, but also isn’t at all.
Think about the Italian social clubs of Temescal. There used to be so many different kinds of membership organizations that existed in cities, and a lot of them have gone away over time. But what is still really working in cities are all of these gyms, trainers, and yoga studios and the like. I started to think about, well, why is that? And some of it is, they have the monthly revenue. They have people who are sustaining the space. And so that’s where the model is coming from.
What are you hoping that “The Pacific Circuit” adds to the discourse about Oakland’s history?
I think it depends on the community. There’s a lot of different communities in Oakland. I think my hope is that if you’re someone whose family came to West Oakland in the 20th century, that it feels to you like the stories you heard from the people around you, the stories that were passed down to you or that you witnessed with your own eyes have been set down in a way that’s recognizable to you and that you feel adequately represents the hopes of people as well as the structural and racist difficulties that they encountered when they came.
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I hope that for people who don’t have that lived experience or that ancestry, that it gets those people to understand the issues at play. So when they’re riding by on the BART train and they’re seeing these empty lots in West Oakland, that they understand that those were institutional choices that were made to try and crowd people out of that neighborhood for basically, explicitly racist reasons; that allowing those neighborhoods to be polluted is why there are a bunch of empty lots; allowing them to continue to be dumped in is why there’s a bunch of trash on the street; and that people don’t see the sort of urban dysfunction of West Oakland coming from individual residents or the failures of the community, but our political and social failures that have extracted from West Oakland for decades to the enrichment of the rest of the Bay Area, through the Port of Oakland, through BART, and through all the highways.
I hope that people see that interrelationship between the partial destruction of West Oakland and the enrichment of other people outside of the neighborhood.
Were there any moments in researching the book that challenged your assumptions about how we got here?
I ride BART most days, and I like the BART system as a modern resident of Oakland. If you read BART official histories, they talk about the way that they acquired land. It seems like they have an idea themselves that they did it in an honorable way. And I think it was a little challenging to me to think that there were real downsides to building that system. I kept thinking to myself, why didn’t they just not put it on Seventh Street? Why not keep the commercial corridor alive of Black Oakland? Or why not underground it like they did in Berkeley, as pushed for by residents and activists? But of course, that’s not what they did. They did build it right down Seventh Street. I think that was one piece.
Maybe it’s clear from the book that I find globalization interesting. I think it’s not a bad thing that we have people from all over the world in the Bay Area. And one reason that we have all those people is that we’ve built all these commercial ties to Latin America and especially to Asia. Learning to balance the acute and specific impacts on West Oakland versus the sort of regional and national compelling things about globalization is another thing.
The third surprising thing for me was that I had known the Black Panthers from reading a bunch of books about them. Different historians have focused on different aspects of the Panthers’ legacy. You have people who focused a lot on the relationship with the police. You have people who focused a lot on the internationalist orientation, political orientation of the Panthers. You have people who focus on women and the Panthers and the specific Southern components of the Panthers’ thinking. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to look at the Panthers.
I did not realize until I started doing the research for the book how how much they had nailed that the Port of Oakland had become a center of global commerce, and therefore was a very interesting part of Oakland’s economic base that the Panthers could, in fact, access, if they’d been able to democratically take over the city. To me, it was just fascinating that in particular, Huey Newton’s analysis of globalization was just decades ahead of other later thinkers. And in part, that’s just because they were right here. They were thinking about transistors and semiconductors. They were thinking about supply chains and containerization, and they were thinking about the ways that that changed the material basis of life for people in Oakland. And to me, that was fascinating on its face.
With all of the advancements we’re seeing now with artificial intelligence and large language models, what are the conversations you think we should be having as a society right now about the downstream effects of those technologies on local communities?
This is going to be a little bit of a roundabout answer, maybe, but what I would say is, large language models and these generative AI models work because we’ve encoded so much of our world into our language. Not just in the words, but the way that we string them together, the way that we use them. That is the basis. A large language model has no concept of three-dimensional reality. They just know how people have talked about three-dimensional reality. There’s tons of worries on the internet about, “Well, how are we going to know things are real? How are we going to know things aren’t real?”
There’s a reason we call it ground truthing, like going out into the world, meeting your neighbors, touching the brick — these things are not AI-generated. And though digital layers are painted over the top of our communities, there is no AI hallucination about this table or this coffee. One possibly positive spin is that as the broader world becomes ever more AI-generated and hallucinatory, people will take refuge in the local places around them, because they can trust that. I think to the extent that we can build institutions locally, it’s really important that those institutions become the conduits for people into their city’s social and political life.
On the technology itself, a hugely important thing is, if we take the growth of these data centers, a really good analog for that growth is the growth of our Port network. These things take massive amounts of land. They inflict huge local costs on people, like what Elon Musk is doing down in Memphis. There are environmental justice organizers down there who are basically saying the exact same kinds of things that people like Ms. Margaret have been saying in West Oakland about the Port of Oakland for decades. And I think it’s important that those voices aren’t lost.
I think there’s AI people, in particular, who are like, “No, we’re building global super intelligence, why are we worried about some diesel emissions going into some people’s lungs?” And I think getting them to understand that these are real people in Memphis whose lives are being affected by this. It’s a long haul, because there’s a set of people who are not subject to those impacts and who feel like they’re doing the broader work of civilization. And I think some of my work is devoted to making sure that people internalize that and can’t ignore the literal human beings on the other end of some of these systemic creations.
Many of the conflicts in the book are the same fights we’re continuing to have today. At one point you wrote about the longshoremen’s strike of 1934, saying, “the police were not a neutral force, but an arm of the business community.” Later you write about another fight between the unions and the executives at the port, and the executives said if they had problems, they’d just go visit the Tribune, meaning the newspapers were also an arm of the business community. Do you see parallels today?
I’ve been like a card carrying member of the media for a very long time, but I also came into this field from the outside. It was the early blogging days and there was a sense that the mainstream media wasn’t, in fact, a neutral thing. I didn’t come up through journalism school being taught that newspapers were objective. That was not my sense of what newspapers did. And this book was fascinating that way, because you really can see the Oakland Tribune, specifically, was controlled by the most powerful Republican family in California. They had one member of the family as the publisher of the Tribune, and the other who was the senate majority Leader, a Republican.
You had a city that was becoming increasingly Black, and you had no political representation for Black people in Oakland. You had a police force that was overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, white during the 1950s even though police abuses had been documented of people in the Black community going back to the early 20th century.
I think a certain segment of our population remembers that time as the glory days. Like the port director in the old days did. He talks about just literally going to see the publisher of the Tribune and hashing things out with him in an oral history that’s in the Bancroft Library archives. His successor talks about, in that same oral history, how it used to be that people trusted the people who ran the city institutions. And he said that as a really good thing, where at the same time we know that the same city actors encircled West Oakland with freeways, drove BART down the main commercial thoroughfare, and attached the place to this massive stream of diesel trucks and, at that time, wildly polluting ships. They either had blinders on or didn’t care.
I think that greater conflict is, how do you get leaders of the city and business leaders to acknowledge the struggles of everyday people? Clearly it remains. There’s such a difference between people who own homes and see property values going up as essentially being good for them on a material basis, and people who are renters who know that property values going up is bad for them, and trying to have people come to some sort of understanding when their material realities are so different is tough.
You write about how many battles over urban change are really over whether development predicated on driving up property values works for everyone, and whether people at the bottom are really well served by that. Have you seen situations where that conversation plays out differently?
There have been some things in my time in Oakland that I feel like have really pressed upon that really precisely. Up at the Oakland Museum of California, Brandi Summers, who used to be a Berkeley geography professor, and Moms 4 Housing have an exhibit. There’s a piece of the exhibit on Black spaces and people remaining. I think Moms 4 Housing did an incredibly good job highlighting that moral drama. This was a group of homeless mothers who occupied a house that was owned by one of the big private equity firms that’s been buying up single family homes. I think that’s one of those political actions that really forced people to grapple with this. That’s a monster political intervention that I think had repercussions all over the world.
I think every gentrification fight is a little bit about this. The underlying power source in those fights is the sense of, “What does gentrification do for me?” I hope the book provides some sense of this. In the book, Phil Tagami, a big developer here in town, is sort of Ms. Margaret’s nemesis. I think most people who’ve grown up in the United States see development as something cities are supposed to do. That real estate development is how a city grows. It’s a sign of vitality and dynamism. And so I think one of the tricks of the book was to get you to be on the side of someone who doesn’t necessarily think that.
I also found similarities between the reporting in your book and things happening on my beat covering the challenges of an urban school district. You write about the term “blight” and how it’s not a neutral term. Oakland Unified has empty land and buildings that have become blighted. Ralph Bunche Academy, a school in West Oakland, no less, is being demolished right now because the campus had been abandoned.
I think one of the things that really drove me in this book was to ask the question of, Why would the city do this to itself? Why would it demolish all these homes in West Oakland? Why would it crush this commercial district on Seventh Street? What I came to on that was, there’s a whole intellectual history of how people thought about cities that went into that. But the specific thing was how blight was calculated.
This comes up in Oakland schools. It comes up in San Francisco schools. Oakland has a set of assets. Now you’ve got these school buildings. How do you determine which of these places should close? You could just not have a quantitative system. You could just say, “We’re going to close these, but not those.” In the laws that were passed to do redevelopment, it said you have to have a plan. And most cities interpreted that as, we’re going to have a quantitative process. We’re going to assign some scoring system or run an algorithm, and it’s going to say these are the places that are blighted, these are the ones that are not.
One thing that I really notice in so many of these community processes is that the game is basically fought over that equation, over those scoring systems. And a lot of the time, that means that the people who are in power, who don’t really want the community input, but already have an idea of what they’d like to have happen, would like that to be as opaque as possible. They’d like that to be more or less something that they can control without outside input.
One of the big things that I think about tactically for activists that comes out of this book is that that’s where you want to have the input. If you can get your scoring system put in place — if you can intervene upstream of that, that can have a huge impact.
That reminds me a lot of school closures. I interviewed a Stanford professor several months ago, Francis Pearman, who’s done research on school closures in Black communities and how they accelerate gentrification, and he looked at, Why is it always the Black schools that get closed? He also talks about the metrics that districts use — often it’s the underenrolled schools, or the schools with low achievement scores. And on its face, those might seem neutral, but a history of segregation and inequality has led to the lowest-enrolled or the lowest-achieving schools being the Black schools. And in Oakland, that’s something that people who are against school closures really challenge.
Schools are always such a third rail, but here’s my here’s my real thought on this, and it’s true across so many different things: Unless we can take into account the specific histories of Black communities and their relationship to the white power structures that were in place for all these long decades, you just can’t make it make sense. You can’t hand out structural scores to people that give some people all the low cards and then say the quantitative system is that everyone with the low cards now loses everything.
One of the really crucial things not just for a place like Oakland, but for the nation as a whole, is to think about what are the arguments and what are the histories that can build a multiracial coalition for reparations? There’s a set of white Americans who I think say yes to reparations, and there’s a much larger side who say no, but then there’s all these other people, right? Because the reality of reparations in California is that it would be a lot of Latinos and a lot of Asian people who would essentially be providing reparations, even though many of those people have their own histories of exclusions of various kinds, interventions in their home countries, and relationships to the U.S. state that are very complicated.
This wasn’t a surprise to me, but the book really drilled it into my soul that Black people’s situation in the United States is unique. Their histories are specific, and it’s one reason why I think we see at the national level every kind of legal, political, and social attack on being able to take into account the realities of the Black American situation. If you can’t take that into account, you can’t make good policy in America, and that’s just the end of the story. In some ideal world, would it be great if you could have totally race neutral policies that would actually do what they were intended to do? But you can’t.
A term you borrowed in your book that I found really compelling was “administrative evil.” It was coined by social scientists to describe “systems that submerged dehumanizing, terrible policies inside an envelope of technical rationality.” That seems so prevalent in our politics today. How do we get past this?
There is a lot of talk about this abundance agenda in Democratic politics, certainly, and anyone left of center. And I think the abundance politics position is like, we need to build more for everyone, and part of that will mean restricting local groups from controlling citywide policies. The Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson world would be like, Well, we’ve democratically elected these city leaders. These city leaders should therefore be able to make decisions on behalf of the city without the veto of small community groups. I get that argument.
This book details in quite exhausting detail how many different community processes have been put in place by cities in which community members have invested thousands of hours into doing these various things for the city — sometimes because it’s legislatively required, sometimes because the city wants to look like they’re doing a good thing, or the developer wants to like it’s doing a good thing. But ultimately, the community groups who want to build things and do things are given no power, given no capital, given no help. So all we’ve left community groups with is veto power.
I think there is an alternative that might allow us to get more things built, but it would have to give community groups the power and the resources to get more stuff done. And it may be that the solutions that community groups come up with are not what people who are implementing from the top down would come up with for those communities. And I think that’s true for rural places dealing with big renewable energy projects and power lines. And I think it’s true for urban places, too.
As much as Oakland is a poster child for gentrification, it’s also a poster child for both the failure of gentrification and the failure of anti-gentrification politics, too. Like there was an era of anti-gentrification politics where it was literally, like, you can’t pave the streets, can’t put in trees, no government services. That is a losing proposition, because it ends up hurting lots of people to have terrible roads. Everyone hates it, it drives down trust in government overall, it makes people not want to support the city in general, and it makes people feel unsafe.
We’ve got to come up with ways of being able to improve our cities for the people who currently live in them, and I hope in the medium term, that does mean things like social housing. The propaganda that was run against public housing in this country and then the failure to fully fund the voucher system that exists really is a crime. We need to remember that cities are built by everyone in the city, and not just the people who own property in them. We owe it to the people doing the work of building the city — which is everyone — to stabilize their lives, even in the face of economic pressure. It can’t just be that the answer is they should move somewhere else that’s cheaper. That’s not an answer.
Anyone who knows anything about the culture and creative life of Oakland knows that the vast majority of what makes this place worth living in is driven by people who are renting. Artists aren’t buying a house. Musicians are not buying a house. They’re hanging on and making their art. We need that. If you don’t want that, you can go live in a million places in this country that don’t have the vibrant, creative, and artistic life we have here.
Lastly, what are your favorite books about Oakland that help explain why things are the way they are?
I think the best academic book is American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. If you want the one-volume history, I think Hella Town is great. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland by Donna Murch is fantastic. Andrew Alden’s Deep Oakland, which is about the geology of Oakland. That book is incredibly good, so well-written, and fills in some of the interesting gaps about how the city got to be and why it is the way that it is.
Two other books that are about this crucial period of time: Chris Rhomberg’s No There There, about mid-century Oakland labor politics. And if people really want to understand what Black people moving to the Bay Area encountered, read the book Wartime Shipyard by Katherine Archibald. It’s really important for people to understand how cities reacted to new Black migrants into the city because they were not welcomed with open arms. So much of what happened with urban renewal was about trying to get people to move back to the South. People really have to understand that when they’re thinking about what happened to West Oakland, Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City, and all these places. It wasn’t like people got there, escaped Jim Crow and all the white people of Oakland and Berkeley were like, “Oh, welcome, finally, a place of respite for you and all of your ancestors.” No, that’s not what happened. And I think people do want to remember it that way sometimes.
ASHLEY MCBRIDE
Ashley McBride writes about education equity for The Oaklandside. Her work covers Oakland’s public district and charter schools. Before joining The Oaklandside in 2020, Ashley was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News and the San Francisco Chronicle as a Hearst Journalism Fellow. In 2024, Ashley received the California School Board Association’s Golden Quill Award, which recognizes fair, accurate, and insightful reporting on public schools. Ashley earned her master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University and holds a certificate in education finance from Georgetown University.More by Ashley McBride
