A lot of critical theory, urban theory, architecture, sociology, even political organizing starts with identifying the thing that's broken. Houston is easy to critique.
- Car dependency
- Urban sprawl
- Heat
- Capitalism
- Privatized space
- Long commutes
- Gentrification
- Individualism
That's the easy version of the story. The harder, truer one is what happens underneath it.
The sidewalks disappear without warning. A trap house sits beside a McMansion like it's nothing. The distances — and the traffic that comes with them (hello FIFA) — become absurd. You can try to outsmart this city, plan around it, map it out in advance. Then you walk three blocks in July and realize ain't shit figured out.
And still, even in a city engineered for isolation — millions of people, neighborhoods cut off from each other, everything built around the assumption that you'll drive past your neighbors rather than meet them — people still find each other. Deliberately. There's a hidden infrastructure running beneath the visible one, and it's not made of roads or zoning maps. It's made of people. ₊‧₊˚⊹
There's a hidden infrastructure running beneath the visible one
Historically, Black survival in America has almost always depended on these hidden networks. Not the government. Not institutions. Not infrastructure in the official sense. The auntie network. The church network. The neighbor network. The cousin network. The barbershop, the beauty salon, the booster, the corner boys, ol' girl who knows a person who knows a person. When formal systems fail, informal ones adapt. These invisible infrastructures don't care about your status — they care about your existence.
We romanticize resilience, especially in the South, especially in Black communities, especially among working-class people. We celebrate "strong" as if it means doing it alone. But the strongest people I've met in Houston aren't the most independent ones. They're the people who've figured out how to build community despite a city that's constantly pulling them apart.
I've been sitting with that, because I think somewhere along the way I confused independence with never letting people matter too much. The truth is, it never actually protected me. It just made the people I care about believe I needed them less than I actually do.
So I keep asking: where do strangers become neighbors? The church. The bus stop. The museum. The book club. And underneath that question, a bigger one — why haven't we given up on each other yet? Is it something innate in us? Awareness? Coincidence? Or just a quiet, stubborn resistance to the isolation the city was built to produce? ⭑.ᐟ
Place teaches us to understand people through function. When I got to Houston, I was stripped of every role I'd ever held. I wasn't the club president, the fellow, the student, any of it — I was just a girl from Durham who got off a plane and was trying to figure out how to get to work. What remains when usefulness is removed? Who are we when our roles disappear, especially after a lifetime of earning your place?
Who are you when you're just you?
I've been thinking about this through film lately. The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love found me at the right moment — a story about two people from completely different socioeconomic worlds who discover, in spite of everything the structure around them insists, that they aren't so different. That the distance between them is manufactured. The ending undid me. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was simple — two people choosing each other across a divide that was never supposed to be bridged. Which is exactly what I keep watching happen here. In Houston. On the bus. At the museum. In the parking lot of a grocery store where somebody's auntie feeds you information you didn't know you needed. ꩜｡
