Viva Kelly: Latino Class Struggle and Mobility in "Military City"

My work is based on the oral histories of Latino civil service workers in the San Antonio Air Logistics Center (SA-ALC), at the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. For much of the post-World War II era, Kelly Air Force base was the largest employer in San Antonio, and the largest employer of Latinos in South Texas, employing nearly 30,000 military and civilian workers at its peak. In my archival research and interviews, I am exploring multiple dimensions of Kelly’s history: as an institution that sustained a vibrant Latino middle class, as an institution charged with discrimination and environmental racism, and as a part of foundation for the San Antonio’s identity as “military city”.  For Latinos, Kelly was a place where you could earn 25% more than the average salary earned by Latinos in the city as a whole, so a job at the base was seen as a ticket to middle class prosperity. During these same years, however, Latino workers at Kelly repeatedly charged the institution with racial discrimination. In the years after the 2001 closure of the base, another dark legacy emerged as well, in the form of toxic chemicals seeping into the soil and groundwater of surrounding neighborhoods, which were also predominantly Latino. Hundreds of cancer-stricken families living around Kelly marked crosses on their lawns, and for the last 20 years community organizations have charged the Air Force with decades of neglect. I am interviewing former workers, their family members, city leaders and community activists, to trace the complex legacy of the base, and its significance for other studies of military and civilian workers in the Cold War era.