“The Pacific Circuit”A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City
Macmillan Publishers
Published March 18, 2025
For many years, Seventh Street in West Oakland existed as a way for me to go from one place to another. Traffic roars over uneven pavement contained by wide lanes. Weeds encroach upon empty buildings and vacant lots. However, according to “The Pacific Circuit,” as I learned in Oakland journalist Alexis Madrigal's new book, Seventh Street was once a hotbed of jazz, blues, and Black culture—now largely erased by layers of industry, infrastructure, and systemic neglect.
Madrigal’s nine-year effort has culminated in a work that is part urban excavation, part love letter, and part diagnostic tool. Oakland is not a simple backdrop for container ships and commerce; It is the epicenter of intersecting forces that have reshaped the modern economy, technology, globalization, and race. He writes through the lens of one of America’s most pivotal and often overlooked cities.
He weaves the story in and around Seventh Street. What was once a vibrant corridor bustling with streetcars and supper clubs is now marked by vacant lots and the shadow of elevated BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) tracks. It's not a unique story to the area—the bones of Russell City lie under the Russell City Energy Center in Hayward. But instead of lamenting what was lost, Madrigal asks a more complicated question: Why?
His answer leads readers through a complex web of policy and power—redlining maps from the 1930s, industrial zoning decisions, and transportation projects that cleaved through the heart of Black West Oakland. Central to this narrative is Margaret Gordon, a community activist whose environmental justice work becomes a conduit for understanding how city planning decisions translate to real-world harm: asthma rates, poisoned air, and disinvestment. Through her eyes we’re shown the positive community building aspects of organizations such as the Black Panthers.
Madrigal’s coverage extends far beyond Seventh Street, following the flow of goods arriving from Asia into the Port of Oakland, the critical gateway feeding American consumerism. He links the transformation of the port to Silicon Valley’s rise, whose products, designed in suburban tech campuses, arrive through industrial corridors like those in West Oakland. This steeply costs to the communities living next to them, and the predominantly Asian and Latinx women hired to make these items. We learn about the unfair, unjust and unabashedly shady lending practices targeted at the residents of West Oakland, and how when the banks were bailed out, the neighborhood was left bleeding in their wake.
“Racist structures shaped every single one of these conditions. Blight was a way of measuring what had been done to the people of a place. Black areas were dense because there were many new black residents in the Bay but few neighborhoods in which these newcomers were able to live,” Madrigal says of redlining and the treatment of black neighborhoods. “Decades of exclusion from unions and discrimination held black wages down so most could only afford lower rents. Black people could not access capital at the same levels as white people if at all...Residents don't ask to live next door to factories or to be hit by cars or for the police to arrest their children,” he continues.
In laying bare these economic systems, Madrigal introduces a new framework for understanding what he calls “the Pacific Circuit”: the global system that connects trade policy, labor markets, land use, and racial justice. The book jumps abruptly from subject to subject in a rapid tumble. Confusing until you realize that Madrigal has deftly illuminated a web of history, credit, globalization and customer desire that has created the familiar landscape that we know of as Oakland today. It’s ambitious in scope. Though the leaps from personal stories to macroeconomic forces can be at times fatiguing, we come to see they are part of its argument: that these domains are inseparable.
Readers do not get to spend too much time grieving what Oakland used to be. Instead, it's an urgent exploration of how place, policy, and people shape one another across generations. Madrigal’s interviews and archival research focus on real life experience, especially in neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of both neglect and “renewal.”
“The Pacific Circuit” reframes the way we understand how global systems impact local communities. Written and researched by someone who loves Oakland and it's residents dearly, Madrigal's work manages to bring some very uncomfortable truths to light. It's a cautionary tale of all we sacrifice as a community to receive the goods of an unjust global economy.
