In the middle of September, Texas Avenue closes to cars and fills with people. About five and a half thousand of them, by the usual count, which for a downtown of a few blocks is a crowd. There are food trucks and a stage and folklórico dancers in skirts the size of a small weather system, and mariachis, and a great many children with their faces painted, and somewhere toward the end of the night, if the night goes the way these nights go, somebody with a microphone stands up and shouts a list of names, and the crowd shouts back, and then everyone shouts ¡Viva México! three times, and there is noise. That is Grito Fest. It is the town's Mexican Independence Day, and it is held downtown, in the district the city calls the ACE District, on the street that was the main street of old Goose Creek before there was a Baytown to belong to.
The shout is older than the street by about a century.
Before dawn on the sixteenth of September in 1810, in a small town in the hills of Guanajuato called Dolores, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo rang the church bell and called the people to the square, and told them, in words nobody wrote down at the time and everybody has argued about since, that it was time to stop obeying the government in Spain. That was the Grito de Dolores. The cry of Dolores. It began a war that took eleven years and cost Hidalgo his life within the first one, and at the end of it, in 1821, Mexico was a country. Every year since, on the night of the fifteenth, the president of Mexico stands on a balcony over the great square in the capital and repeats it. The names of the heroes. The three vivas. A bell. Fireworks. In towns across Mexico the mayor does the same thing from the steps of the municipal building at the same hour, and in every town in Texas with enough people who remember, somebody does it too.
Here it is done on Texas Avenue, and here the shout lands on ground that has a second independence day.
Twenty-six years after Hidalgo rang the bell, on an April afternoon on the far side of the ship channel, about eighteen minutes of fighting on a prairie by the San Jacinto River took Texas out of Mexico. The battleground is a ferry ride from Baytown. The monument is visible from the bridge. The town marks that day too, on the Saturday nearest the twenty-first of April, with a celebration at the battleground and a lot of people in period dress and the smell of black powder. So this is a town with two anniversaries of freedom a year, five months apart, and they point in opposite directions. One is the day Mexico left Spain. The other is the day Texas left Mexico.
If you are looking for a contradiction there, you can find one. Most people here do not bother. About half the households in this town speak Spanish at home. A lot of the families on Texas Avenue in September have people who were in Texas before it was Texas, and people who came across as adults, and people who are not sure which of those they are because nobody wrote it down. There were Tejanos at San Jacinto, fighting on the Texan side, under a captain from San Antonio named Seguín. There were people whose grandparents celebrated the Grito in Guanajuato and whose grandchildren celebrate it on a closed street in Harris County. The history is not a straight line, and a town does not have to resolve it to have a party on it.
What I want to think about is the word that both days share. Independence.
It is a strong word, and in a place like this it means something slightly different than it does in a textbook, because this is a town that has spent a hundred years learning how little of anything is actually independent.
Consider the street the festival is on. The asphalt under the food trucks is made from the heaviest fraction of a barrel of crude, the part that will not boil off even under vacuum, the black residue left at the bottom of the column after everything lighter has gone up and out, and the barrel came through a refinery on the channel a few miles from where the stage is. The paint on the dancers' faces is mostly petrochemistry, the wax and the binder if not always the color. The plastic cups, the lights on the stage, the generator running the sound system, the tortilla press in the trailer, the gas under the comal, the fertilizer that grew the corn, the diesel in the truck that brought the corn, the polyester in the skirts. Take away what the channel makes and Grito Fest is a group of people standing on dirt in the dark. That is not a complaint about the festival. It is a description of every festival on the planet.
And the channel, in its turn, is not independent of anything either. Some of the crude comes by ship from countries whose flags most people could not draw. The natural gas comes by pipe from fields hundreds of miles away. The ethylene made here, a molecule of two carbons and four hydrogens, goes into a pipe to a plant that hooks those two-carbon units together end to end, thousands at a time, into the long chains called polyethylene, and the resin goes by rail to a plant in Ohio that makes a bottle that ends up on a shelf in Guanajuato. Every unit on the ship channel is the middle of a chain that starts somewhere it cannot see and ends somewhere it will never go. The plant is the least independent thing in the county. It is a knot in a net that covers the world.
So what did Hidalgo mean, and what did the men at San Jacinto mean, when they used that word? They did not mean going it alone. Nobody who has ever run a country or a refinery thinks anything goes it alone. They meant something narrower and better. They meant: we will decide. The chain still runs through here. The corn still comes from somewhere and the bottle still goes somewhere. But the people who live here will be the ones who say what happens on this ground. Freedom from the net was never on offer. What they claimed was to be a knot in it that ties itself.
That is a thing a refinery town understands in its body. Baytown is as dependent on the rest of the world as any place on Earth. It cannot eat what it makes. It cannot burn what it makes, not most of it; it sends it away. It lives on the ships coming in and the pipes going out. And within that dependence it has built a place that decides things for itself, a city with a council and a school board and a street it can close for a party. Both of those are true at once. The town depends on everything, and the town is its own.
A festival is how a town finds that out about itself. Baytown is a pile of people who came here from everywhere for the work, and once a year the pile stands in the street and shouts a list of names from a country most of them have never seen, and the shout is how the pile learns what it is. Nobody planned this to be a town where half the households speak Spanish. It happened the way such things happen: the work drew people, and the people drew people, and somebody's cousin knew a foreman. And now the refinery's town has a bell, in a sense, and a night when it rings it.
None of the parts know. The brass in the mariachi's trumpet does not know it was forged in a star, and the carbon in the asphalt does not know it was a sea creature, and the child with the flag painted on her cheek does not know that the little plastic flag on a stick in her other hand is made of the same molecule that will ripen the fruit in her lunch tomorrow. But the knowing happens anyway, in the only place it can happen, which is in a crowd of people looking at each other under lights and deciding, for one night, that they are one thing.
Late in the evening the stage goes dark and the food trucks start pulling their awnings in, and the crowd thins out down the side streets toward the parked cars. Texas Avenue is quiet again, littered, warm. A little way off, the channel is doing what it does at night, which is the same thing it does in the day, only lit. The flare is a small steady orange over the roofline. Somewhere a bell in a church in Guanajuato is silent until next year, and somewhere on the far side of the water the monument at San Jacinto is a pale line against a dark sky, and between them, on a closed street in a refinery town, a man in a folding chair finishes a plate of elote and does not get up for a while.