Corpus Christi, 1965-2005

Abstract

This article recounts four decades of efforts to reenergize the economy of Corpus Christi, a regional city and ocean resort along the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1920 and 1970, the advent in quick succession of a deep-water port, petrochemicals and related industries, and large military bases caused Corpus Christi to burgeon from 10,000 to 285,000 people, a pattern indicative of factors driving urbanization and economic development across Texas and the Southwest. Starting in the 1960s, planning and economic studies expressed anxiety that Corpus Christi was stagnating and that its customary economic pillars held limited future promise. Civic and commercial leaders sought new fields of activity, including, tentatively, a reorientation towards Mexico and Latin America, hitherto regarded as a source of cheap labor rather than of commercial opportunity. Through the early 2000s, such efforts yielded frustrating results. The lackluster growth that Corpus Christi did experience resulted mainly from the spillover effects of the Sunbelt-style prosperity of Texas's metropolitan cities and from the slow, but steady, expansion of customary activities, especially the port, tourism, and retail and professional services to the South Texas hinterland. The essay suggests that secondary cities such as Corpus Christi have only limited ability to free themselves from dependence on their existing urban networks and to redirect large patterns of commerce and finance to their benefit. U rban scholars agree that population size alone does not provide an adequate measure for distinguishing between metropolises and cities with secondary or regional status. This distinction also implies a level of control or initiative. In the central place model of urban hierarchies, metropolitan power extends over a region, with secondary cities functioning as satellites of the commercial or political capital. In the network model of urban connections, metropolises have flexibility in shaping long-distance patterns of commerce and exchange, while secondary or regional cities operate within environments established