Searching For Simón Bolívar At Tulsa’s Plaza Of The Americas

During my most recent visit home to Tulsa, my partner and I were driving north on Denver Avenue downtown when something caught my eye as we cruised past—a small park on the west side of the street. Although it was already dark, something about the block seemed familiar, even though I was confident I had not set foot there anytime recently. “Oh wait, I know that place,” I exclaimed, pleased to be able to summon up a deeply archived memory. “My middle school Spanish class went there for this huge event with the president of Venezuela.”

My partner has become familiar with the oddities of Tulsa through over a decade of visits, and he was thus equally intrigued and unsurprised by this memory, unearthed many months before the politics of Venezuela—and its oil industry—would be thrust back into the international spotlight. Of course, we chuckled, a tiny neglected park downtown had hosted the president of Venezuela when I was in eighth grade. But in the next instant, with the hindsight of more than three decades, I quickly repositioned that spring day in the educational geography of my childhood. “Oh jeez, of course—Venezuela—that whole thing must have been something about oil.” 

The small patch of concrete that had caught my eye was the Plaza of the Americas, an odd corner of downtown Tulsa, which like the Center of the Universe you would not necessarily know was there unless someone told you. The grand name of the plaza is not commensurate with its current condition of urban anonymity, given a bit of new life recently thanks to an installation by Tulsa Artist Fellowship alum Richard Zimmerman. As Ellen Ray recently observed in her appraisal of the collection of green fiberglass trees that make up Assembly, the plaza is today almost the opposite of a destination, where folks waiting for the bus or without anywhere else to go can simply sit in peace: “a place that’s rarely noticed is also a good place to be left alone.”

But there was a moment when the eyes of not just Tulsa but much of the nation and the world were trained on the Plaza of the Americas: May 3, 1991, when a delegation from Venezuela, including its sitting president, presented a bust of South American liberator Simón Bolívar to Mayor Rodger Randle, who accepted the sculpture on behalf of the citizens of Tulsa, and in the process rededicated this small parcel of downtown as a symbol of hemispheric unity. Improbably, I along with my eighth grade Spanish teacher and a dozen classmates were present for this moment, a rare visit by a foreign head of state to our city.

Like many young people who are unwitting witnesses to history, I did not really understand the significance of the proceedings that day. But this unlikely event in an improbable corner of my hometown became top of mind as I awoke to the news in the early days of January that the United States had chosen to involve itself in the political life of Venezuela through the diplomatically and legally dubious capture of Nicolás Maduro.

As I have come to learn, the ceremony I attended on May 3, 1991 was indeed all about Tulsa’s ties to the petroleum industry, or rather the “energy” industry as I have been taught to euphemize it in polite company. But the event holds more complex significance as I reflect on it today, a relic of a more benevolent and orderly mode of politics and business and a reminder of how much the vibes of Chamber-of-Commerce capitalism have shifted in thirty years.

***

I transferred to Monte Cassino Middle School in seventh grade in part because my parents were eager for me to take Latin. Then during the summer the nun who taught Latin retired, never to be replaced. So I took other electives instead, including home economics, learning how to thread a sewing machine in a 1950s time capsule of a classroom tucked away on the topmost floor of the building, a space whose designers likely never imagined male students running their fingers over its smooth wooden consoles.

When eighth grade came around, I finally got my turn at a foreign language, enrolling in a beginner Spanish class where we learned a good deal of history and culture alongside drills on vocabulary and verb conjugation. I learned about King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Aztec origins of the eagle with a serpent atop a cactus that graces the Mexican flag, and the ancient Inca civilization at Machu Picchu. We of course all giggled when we were taught about a body of water called Titicaca, located at the highest elevation of any lake in the world in a country called Bolivia. And in the spring of 1991, for one week our classes had a special focus on the namesake of that country, Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of South America.

I don’t have any notes from my eighth grade Spanish classes, and I doubt that my teacher, long since retired, has retained any either. I can imagine the basic contours of our lessons on Bolívar. How he led the great rebellion that brought about the end of Spanish rule in half of South America. How he briefly united a broad confederation of states, spanning modern day Colombia, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. How he figuratively towered over the history of the Americas during his lifetime and after—and literally towered over hundreds if not thousands of public squares in the form of monuments and statues—the “George Washington of South America.”

And as we learned, the prodigious public footprint of Bolívar would now extend to our hometown, in the form of a bronze bust by Venezuelan sculptor Silvestre Chacón, a tangible symbol of international unity and shared values. Cast in an unremarkable realist idiom, the likeness of Bolívar was placed atop a large marble base, adorned with admiring words from the Marquis de Lafayette and an iconic quote from Bolívar himself, in which he distanced himself from the honorific of “Liberator” so often bestowed upon him, etched into Tulsa’s newest monument as follows:

I PREFER THE TITLE OF CITIZEN
TO THAT OF LIBERATOR, BECAUSE
WHILE THE LATTER HAS ITS
ORIGIN IN WAR, THE FORMER HAS
BEEN CREATED BY THE LAW
OF THE LAND.¹

***

I guess it’s no surprise that attending the Friday morning ceremony was deemed a pedagogical priority and special opportunity by my teacher and school. By Tulsa standards, this was a Big Deal. "We are part of the history of Tulsa and now Tulsa has become a part of Venezuela," President Carlos Andres Perez noted in his speech, as translated by an interpreter.² The following day he would receive an honorary degree and make a short speech at the commencement ceremony for the University of Tulsa, whose petroleum engineering programs had long cultivated ties with Venezuela. The sitting Speaker of the House Tom Foley came to town for the weekend, as well as a deep bench of consular officials from an array of Central and South American countries.

Looking back, I’m not sure what me and my classmates were supposed to learn by attending the ceremony at the Plaza of the Americas. Our level of language proficiency was certainly not high enough to make sense of any of the remarks delivered in Spanish, especially as we had never been exposed to the complexities of Caribbean accents. The overlapping and unevenly amplified voices of the president and his simultaneous translator would have made it hard even if we had been more fluent. 

The most distinct memory I have of that day was the flags, with the stars and stripes of the U.S. flying alongside the yellow, blue, and red of Venezuela. The flags were subsequently flown day and night at the plaza, and each time my family would pass through downtown they made the otherwise unremarkable park easy to spot, and the special day of international unity something to remember.

As I now understand today, that ceremony on May 3 was indeed on one level all about oil. A year earlier local oil company Citgo had been fully acquired by Petróleos de Venezuela (also known as PDVSA), the country’s nationalized oil conglomerate, which had previously held a fifty percent share of the company. Thus in a reversal of colonial dynamics, the Venezuelans were in town to make a diplomatic gesture to us as the new stewards of a significant slice of our petrochemical patrimony. While I’m no expert in oil or finance, I can assume that all this penciled out nicely for all the parties to the deal, with no regulatory resistance offered up by the business-friendly climate at the tail end of the Reagan-Bush era. 

And my classmates and I had no reason to object to the deal either. Who were we to object to being sprung from class on a sunny Friday to see the unveiling of a new bust of Simón Bolívar? A great liberator, indeed.

***

It’s unclear at what point the flags came down from the Plaza of the Americas. It was probably during the decade when I was away at college and later living abroad, or perhaps when I started my first full-time job three months before 9/11, as a development officer at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (Yes, that Kennedy Center.)

The bust of Bolívar outlasted the flags, however, although after repeated instances of vandalism, the sculpture was transferred in 2006 to Gilcrease Museum for stewardship, for a while located in its sculpture garden and its future home in the newly redesigned campus still to be determined. As I now understand, it was hardly coincidental that the removal of the bust and the symbolic sunsetting of the plaza as a site of diplomatic unity occurred during this time, proceeding in parallel with the deterioration of U.S.-Venezuela relations. 

And this includes the oil, of course. In the 2000s Venezuela began to take steps to nationalize its oil industry, with the administration of Hugo Chavez assuming almost total control of the industry by 2007. This caused repercussions for Citgo and its investors that are still being litigated two decades years later, and likely only getting more complicated in the wake of the current chaos. 

Unlike the Citgo-PDVSA deal of the early 1990s, there’s no penciling out any profitability for Venezuelan oil at the moment, despite what the Trump administration may claim. As observers including Paul Krugman have noted, Venezuela’s thick crude is extraordinarily expensive to extract and refine—not to mention a carbon dioxide-climate change disaster—making the country’s reserves a dubious prize given the current price of oil and the rate at which Antarctica is melting. And no oil company seems eager to risk any more capital investment in Venezuela given the instability that will no doubt continue for the years to come, as was made clear in an Oval Office meeting several weeks ago.

***

While it may be unclear when the flags literally came down from the plaza, I know as an Eagle Scout that after sunset you must lower a flag unless it can be properly lit overnight. And America’s leaders do not seem interested in shining any true light on our flag, much less uplifting the colors of one-time allies and business partners as Venezuela. 

Our national leaders also don’t seem to be interested in setting any good examples for young people. The trash-talking “FAFO” attitude of the Trump administration has made me weirdly nostalgic for the old school, chamber-of-commerce style of Republicanism that prevailed in my youth. I know on one level it was just as capitalistic, but at least it wasn’t something you felt compelled to shield your children’s eyes from. 

Even if that day in May 1991 was all about oil and money, there was talk of international unity and cooperation, with leaders speaking to one another with respect and dignity, with an aspirational hero of liberation at the center of the proceedings. Unlike much of our current political discourse, the ceremony at the plaza was something that we as children were literally taken from school to witness and learn from, even if we were clueless about the deal-making happening behind the scenes. These days it’s hard to imagine what aspect of our national politics today would merit an educational field trip, or if so, what positive lessons our children might take away from it, whether now or thirty years later. 

What I know now that I certainly did not know back in eighth grade is that with oil and Venezuela, it’s complicated, and my hometown has had a front-row seat to the show for most of my lifetime. And Tulsa’s bust of Bolívar and the erratic history of its former downtown home at the Plaza of the Americas bear witness to this messiness. I’d venture that many a Tulsa oil executive has driven by the Plaza of the Americas and thinks on that day in 1991 not with my nostalgic nonchalance but cold recrimination. It’s remarkable that our city fathers did not take steps to have the bust sent back, or symbolically tossed off the 11th Street bridge into the river. But should they take that action, I hope we can at least keep the marble base, although reflecting at present on its reference to “the law of the land,” it’s hard to decide whether it’s more appropriate to laugh or cry.